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Books > History > World history > From 1900
Much has been written about the decline of the United Kingdom. The
Two Unions looks instead at the lengthy survival of the Union,
examining the institutions, structures, and individuals that have
contributed to its longevity. In order to understand its survival,
the author, one of the foremost historians of modern Ireland and of
the British-Irish relationship, sustains a comparison between the
Irish and Scots Unions, their respective origins and subsequent
development. He provides a detailed examination of the two
interlinked Unionist movements in Scotland and Ireland. Alvin
Jackson illuminates not only the history and varied health of the
United Kingdom over the past 300 years, but also its present
condition and prospects.
From the late eighteenth century, Germans increasingly
identified the fate of their nation with that of their woodlands. A
variety of groups soon mobilized the 'German forest' as a national
symbol, though often in ways that suited their own social,
economic, and political interests. The German Forest is the first
book-length history of the development and contestation of the
concept of 'German' woodlands.
Jeffrey K. Wilson challenges the dominant interpretation that
German connections to nature were based in agrarian romanticism
rather than efforts at modernization. He explores a variety of
conflicts over the symbol -- from demands on landowners for public
access to woodlands, to state attempts to integrate ethnic Slavs
into German culture through forestry, and radical nationalist
visions of woodlands as a model for the German 'race'. Through
impressive primary and archival research, Wilson demonstrates that
in addition to uniting Germans, the forest as a national symbol
could also serve as a vehicle for protest and strife.
Securing the World Economy explains how efforts to support global
capitalism became a core objective of the League of Nations. Based
on new research drawn together from archives on three continents,
it explores how the world's first ever inter-governmental
organization sought to understand and shape the powerful forces
that influenced the global economy, and the prospects for peace. It
traces how the League was drawn into economics and finance by the
exigencies of the slump and hyperinflation after the First World
War, when it provided essential financial support to Austria,
Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria, and Estonia and, thereby, established
the founding principles of financial intervention, international
oversight, and the twentieth-century notion of international
'development'. But it is the impact of the Great Depression after
1929 that lies at the heart of this history. Patricia Clavin traces
how the League of Nations sought to combat economic nationalism and
promote economic and monetary co-operation in a variety of,
sometimes contradictory, ways. Many of the economists, bureaucrats,
and policy-advisors who worked for it played a seminal role in the
history of international relations and social science, and their
efforts did not end with the outbreak of the Second World War. In
1940 the League established an economic mission in the United
States, where it contributed to the creation of organizations for
the post-war world - the United Nations Organization, the IMF, the
World Bank, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization - as well as
to plans for European reconstruction and co-operation. It is a
history that resonates deeply with challenges that face the
Twenty-First Century world.
United States Army Center of Military History publication, CMH Pub
12-3-1. 2nd edition.Photographs selected and text written by
Kenneth E. Hunter. Mary Ann Bacon, editor. This book deals with the
European Theater of Operations, covering the period from build up
in Britain through V-E Day.
In a remote village, high in the snow-capped mountains of southern
Poland, during the worst winter of World War II, a beautiful polish
woman presiding over the village peasants, a brute of a partisan
leader, and an outlaw priest with a mysterious past, are hiding a
ragtag band of Jewish children escaped from an accidental death
train wreck. During a Bible lesson, the priest, who is actually a
Jewish doctor disguised as a man of the cloth, tells the children
the Old Testament story of Elisha. "God sent His special 'War
Angels' to protect the children of Israel from the attacking Syrian
army" he said. The children ask the priest to pray with them for
'War Angels', like in the Bible story, to protect them from the
relentless Nazi madman searching for their capture. Miraculously,
an American B-17 bomber carrying a tough crew of battered flyers
from a deep penetration raid over Germany, crash lands directly
next to the village. The children and villagers renew their faith
in God, believing the Americans to be; the answer to prayer,
and...'The War Angels'. In the end, most realized, only the hand of
God could have brought all these people, and seemingly unrelated
threads of circumstance into that perilously precise moment in
time. Together, through their heroic faith, they persevere against
the onslaught of evil Satanic forces
Broadcasting was born just as the British empire reached its
greatest territorial extent, and matured while that empire began to
unravel. Radio and television offered contemporaries the beguiling
prospect that new technologies of mass communication might
compensate for British imperial decline. In Broadcasting Empire,
Simon J. Potter shows how, from the 1920s, the BBC used
broadcasting to unite audiences at home with the British settler
diaspora in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. High
culture, royal ceremonial, sport, and even comedy were harnessed to
this end, particularly on the BBC Empire Service, the predecessor
of today's World Service. Belatedly, during the 1950s, the BBC also
began to consider the role of broadcasting in Africa and Asia, as a
means to encourage 'development' and to combat resistance to
continued colonial rule. However, during the 1960s, as
decolonization entered its final, accelerated phase, the BBC staged
its own imperial retreat.
This is the first full-length, scholarly study to examine both the
home and overseas aspects of the BBC's imperial mission. Drawing on
new archival evidence, it demonstrates how the BBC's domestic and
imperial roles, while seemingly distinct, in fact exerted a
powerful influence over one another. Broadcasting Empire makes an
important contribution to our understanding of the transnational
history of broadcasting, emphasising geopolitical rivalries and
tensions between British and American attempts to exert influence
on the world's radio and television systems.
The United States has a troubling history of violence regarding
race. This book explores the emotionally charged conditions and
factors that incited the eruption of race riots in America between
the Progressive Era and World War II. While racially motivated riot
violence certainly existed in the United States both before and
after the Progressive Era through World War II, a thorough account
of race riots during this particular time span has never been
published. All Hell Broke Loose fills a long-neglected gap in the
literature by addressing a dark and embarrassing time in our
country's history-one that warrants continued study in light of how
race relations continue to play an enormous role in the social
fabric of our nation. Author Ann V. Collins identifies and
evaluates the existing conditions and contributing factors that
sparked the race riots during the period spanning the Progressive
Era to World War II throughout America. Through the lens of
specific riots, Collins provides an overarching analysis of how
cultural factors and economic change intersected with political
influences to shape human actions-on both individual and group
levels. A comprehensive chronology of race riots between the
Progressive Era and World War II A bibliography of race riot
research materials An index highlighting important concepts,
people, and events
What did war look like in the cultural imagination of 1914? Why did
men in Scotland sign up to fight in unprecedented numbers? What
were the martial myths shaping Scottish identity from the aftermath
of Bannockburn to the close of the nineteenth century, and what did
the Scottish soldiers of the First World War think they were
fighting for? Scotland and the First World War: Myth, Memory and
the Legacy of Bannockburn is a collection of new interdisciplinary
essays interrogating the trans-historical myths of nation,
belonging and martial identity that shaped Scotland's encounter
with the First World War. In a series of thematically linked
essays, experts from the fields of literature, history and cultural
studies examine how Scotland remembers war, and how remembering war
has shaped Scotland.
In recent years there has been much interest in collective memory
and commemoration. It is often assumed that when nations celebrate
a historic day, they put aside the divisions of the present to
recall the past in a spirit of unity. As Billig and Marinho show,
this does not apply to the Portuguese parliament's annual
celebration of 25 April 1974, the day when the dictatorship,
established by Salazar and continued by Caetano, was finally
overthrown. Most speakers at the ceremony say little about the
actual events of the day itself; and in their speeches they
continue with the partisan politics of the present as combatively
as ever. To understand this, the authors examine in detail how the
members of parliament do politics within the ceremony of
remembrance; how they engage in remembering and forgetting the
great day; how they use the low rhetoric of manipulation and
point-scoring, as well as high-minded political rhetoric. The book
stresses that the members of the audience contribute to the meaning
of the ceremony by their partisan displays of approval and
disapproval. Throughout, the authors demonstrate that, to uncover
the deeper meanings of political rhetoric, it is necessary to take
note of significant absences. The Politics and Rhetoric of
Commemoration illustrates how an in-depth case-study can be
invaluable for understanding wider processes. The authors are not
content just to uncover unnoticed features of the Portuguese
celebration. They use the particular example to provide original
insights about the rhetoric of celebrating and the politics of
remembering, as well as throwing new light onto the nature of party
political discourse.
An essential new reference work for students and general readers
interested in the history, dynamics, and influence of
evangelicalism in recent American history, politics, and culture.
What makes evangelical or "born-again" Christians different from
those who identify themselves more simply as "Christian"? What
percentage of Americans believe in the Rapture? How are
evangelicalism and Baptism similar? What is the influence of
evangelical religions on U.S. politics? Readers of Evangelical
America: An Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Religious Culture
will learn the answers to these questions and many more through
this single-volume work's coverage of the many dimensions of and
diversity within evangelicalism and through its documentation of
the specific contributions evangelicals have made in American
society and culture. It also illustrates the Evangelical movement's
influence internationally in key issues such as human rights,
environmentalism, and gender and sexuality. Provides readers with
an understanding of contemporary American evangelicalism's history,
key individuals, organizations, and beliefs through detailed
coverage of more than 180 topics Documents the diversity of the
Evangelical movement under a common core umbrella of doctrinal
beliefs Displays the breadth of American evangelical interaction in
social and cultural issues and in debates in recent American
history
The history of noncombatant immunity is well established. What is
less understood is how militaries have rationalized violating this
immunity. This book traces the development of how militaries have
rationalized the killing of the innocent from the thirteenth
century onward. In the process, this historiography shows how we
have arrived at the ascendant convention that assumes militaries
should not intentionally kill the innocent. Furthermore, it shows
how moral arguments about the permissibility of killing the
innocent are largely adaptations to material changes in how wars
are fought, whether through technological innovations or changes in
institutional structures.
Henry Green: Class, Style, and the Everyday offers a critical prism
through which Green's fiction-from his earliest published short
stories, as an Eton schoolboy, through to his last dialogic novels
of the 1950s-can be seen as a coherent, subtle, and humorous
critique of the tension between class, style, and realism in the
first half of the twentieth century. The study extends on-going
critical recognition that Green's work is central to the
development of the novel from the twenties to the fifties, acting
as a vital bridge between late modernist, inter-war, post-war, and
postmodernist fiction. The overarching contention is that the
shifting and destabilizing nature of Green's oeuvre sets up a
predicament similar to that confronted by theorists of the
everyday. Consequently, each chapter acknowledges the indeterminacy
of the writing, whether it be: the non-singular functioning (or
malfunctioning) of the name; the open-ended, purposefully ambiguous
nature of its symbols; the shifting, cinematic nature of Green's
prose style; the sensitive, but resolutely unsentimental depictions
of the working-classes and the aristocracy in the inter-war period;
the impact of war and its inconsistent irruptions into daily life;
or the ways in which moments or events are rapidly subsumed back
into the flux of the everyday, their impact left uncertain. Critics
have, historically, offered up singular readings of Green's work,
or focused on the poetic or recreative qualities of certain works,
particularly those of the 1940s. Green's writing is, undoubtedly,
poetic and extraordinary, but this book also pays attention to the
cliched, meta-textual, and uneventful aspects of his fiction.
Our memory of Sixties New Left radicals often evokes marches in the
streets, battles with the police, or urban bombings. However, the
New Left was a multi-faceted movement, with diverse tendencies. One
of these tendencies promoted electoral as the way to change
America. In every city that was a center of New Left activism, this
"Electoral New Left" entered the political arena. A surprisingly
large number of these New Left radicals were elected to office:
City Council, Mayor, State Senate, even the U.S. Senate. Once in
office, they persisted and prevailed. Cities and places we think of
today as eternally liberal-Berkeley, Madison, Ann Arbor, even the
state of Vermont-were, deeply conservative and deeply Republican
before the triumphs of the local Electoral New Left. These
"Radicals in Power," however, brought about a lasting political
realignment in their locales, and embodied the vision of a better
future that was at the heart of all New Left activism. However, the
accomplishments of the Electoral New Left, even its very existence,
are almost completely unexplored. Historians of the social and
political movements of the Sixties have focused on anti-Vietnam War
protest movements, or on the Revolutionary New Left. Radicals in
Power corrects that oversight and, in doing so, rewrites the
history of the Sixties and the New Left. Based on interviews with
the elected New Left radicals in each of their cities, Davin
details the birth and evolution of a local and regional progressive
politics that has, heretofore, been overlooked.
Lara Douds examines the practical functioning and internal
political culture of the early Soviet government cabinet, the
Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), under Lenin. This study
elucidates the process by which Sovnarkom's governmental
decision-making authority was transferred to Communist Party bodies
in the early years of Soviet power and traces the day-to-day
operation of the supreme state organ. The book argues that
Sovnarkom was the principal executive body of the early Soviet
government until the Politburo gradually usurped this role during
the Civil War. Using a range of archival source material, Lara
Douds re-interprets early Soviet political history as a period
where fledging 'Soviet' rather than simply 'Communist Party' power
was attempted, but ultimately failed when pressures of Civil War
and socio-economic dislocation encouraged the centralising and
authoritarian rather than democratic strand of Bolshevism to
predominate. Inside Lenin's Government explores the basic mechanics
of governance by looking at the frequency of meetings, types of
business discussed, processes of decision-making and the
administrative backdrop, as well as the key personalities of
Sovnarkom. It then considers the reasons behind the shift in
executive power from state to party in this period, which resulted
in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky commented in 1923,
'leadership by the party gives way to administration by its
organs'.
During the 1930s, much of the world was in severe economic and
political crisis. This upheaval ushered in new ways of thinking
about social and political systems. In some cases, these new ideas
transformed states and empires alike. Particularly in Europe, these
transformations are well-chronicled in scholarship. In academic
writings on India, however, Muslim political and legal thought has
gone relatively unnoticed during this eventful decade. This book
fills this gap by mapping the evolution of Muslim political and
legal thought from roughly 1927 to 1940. By looking at landmark
court cases in tandem with the political and legal ideas of
Muhammad Iqbal and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan's founding
fathers, this book highlights the more concealed ways in which
Indian Muslims began to acquire a political outlook with distinctly
separatist aspirations. What makes this period worthy of a separate
study is that the legal antagonism between religious communities in
the 1930s foreshadowed political conflicts that arose in the run-up
to independence in 1947. The presented cases and thinkers reflect
the possibilities and limitations of Muslim political thought in
colonial India.
In Eleanor Smith's Hull House Songs: The Music of Protest and Hope
in Jane Addams's Chicago, the authors republish Hull House Songs
(1916), together with critical commentary. Hull-House Songs
contains five politically engaged compositions written by the
Hull-House music educator, Eleanor Smith. The commentary that
accompanies the folio includes an examination of Smith's poetic
sources and musical influences; a study of Jane Addams's aesthetic
theories; and a complete history of the arts at Hull-House. Through
this focus upon aesthetic and cultural programs at Hull-House, the
authors identify the external, and internalized, forces of
domination (class position, racial identity, patriarchal
disenfranchisement) that limited the work of the Hull-House women,
while also recovering the sometimes hidden emancipatory
possibilities of their legacy. With an afterword by Jocelyn
Zelasko.
This is the story of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries, the most
notorious police forces in the history of the British Isles. During
the Irish War of Independence (1920-1), the British government
recruited thousands of ex-soldiers to serve as constables in the
Royal Irish Constabulary, the Black and Tans, while also raising a
paramilitary raiding force of ex-officers - the Auxiliary Division.
From the summer of 1920 to the summer of 1921, these forces became
the focus of bitter controversy. As the struggle for Irish
independence intensified, the police responded to ambushes and
assassinations by the guerrillas with reprisals and extrajudicial
killings. Prisoners and suspects were abused and shot, the homes
and shops of their families and supporters were burned, and the
British government was accused of imposing a reign of terror on
Ireland.
Based on extensive archival research, this is the first serious
study of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries and the part they
played in the Irish War of Independence. Dr Leeson examines the
organization and recruitment of the British police, the social
origins of police recruits, and the conditions in which they lived
and worked, along with their conduct and misconduct once they
joined the force, and their experiences and states of mind. For the
first time, it tells the story of the Irish conflict from the
police perspective, while casting new light on the British
government's responsibility for reprisals, the problems of using
police to combat insurgents, and the causes of atrocities in
revolutionary wars.
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