This book offers new international perspectives on captivity in wartime during the twentieth century. It explores how global institutions and practices with regard to captives mattered, how they evolved and most importantly, how they influenced the treatment of captives. From the beginning of the twentieth century, international organisations, neutral nations and other actors with no direct involvement in the respective wars often had to fill in to support civilian as well as military captives and to supervise their treatment. This edited volume puts these actors, rather than the captives themselves, at the centre in order to assess comparatively their contributions to wartime captivity. Taking a global approach, it shows that transnational bodies - whether non-governmental organisations, neutral states or individuals - played an essential role in dealing with captives in wartime. Chapters cover both the largest wars, such as the two World Wars, but also lesser-known conflicts, to highlight how captives were placed at the centre of transnational negotiations.

Concern about the 'decline of community', and the theme of 'community spirit', are internationally widespread in the modern world. The English past has featured many representations of declining community, expressed by those who lamented its loss in quite different periods and in diverse genres. This book analyses how community spirit and the passing of community have been described in the past - whether for good or ill - with an eye to modern issues, such as the so-called 'loneliness epidemic' or the social consequences of alternative structures of community. It does this through examination of authors such as Thomas Hardy, James Wentworth Day, Adrian Bell and H.E. Bates, by appraising detective fiction writers, analysing parish magazines, considering the letter writing of the parish poor in the 18th and 19th centuries, and through the depictions of realist landscape painters such as George Morland. K. D. M. Snell addresses modern social concerns, showing how many current preoccupations had earlier precedents. In presenting past representations of declining communities, and the way these affected individuals of very different political persuasions, the book draws out lessons and examples from the past about what community has meant hitherto, setting into context modern predicaments and judgements about 'spirits of community' today.

For six decades, John Knoepfle has been writing poems, and he's still going strong. Knoepfle writes love poems, among the best we have, of the joys, loneliness, danger and the infinite transformations of marriage. He writes narrative poems, surreal, sardonic and magical about astronauts on the moon or an angry farmer and a prophetic owl. He recovers the stories of folks who never made it into the history books. Always he has a respect for the spoken word and lays his lines out on the page so that you too can hear it. And a spiritual force runs through his books like the slow and powerful rivers of the Midwest he inhabits. Both moving and humorous, Knoepfle's autobiography shows us how by hard work and lucky accident he came to be the poet he is.

The Cold War remains one of the twentieth century's defining events, possessing broad political, social, and material implications that continue to have impact. In this book, Todd Hanson presents nine case studies of archaeological investigations conducted at famous-and some not so famous-historic American Cold War sites, including Bikini Atoll, the Nevada Test Site, and the Cuban sites of the Soviet Missile Crisis. By examining nuclear weapons test sites, missile silos, submarine bases, fallout shelters, and more, Hanson illustrates how archaeology can help strip away myths, secrets, and political rhetoric to better inform our understanding of the conflict's formative role in the making of the contemporary American landscape. Addressing modern ramifications of the Cold War, Hanson also looks at the preservation of atomic heritage sites, the atomic tourism phenomenon, and the struggles of atomic veterans.

The main subjects of analysis in the present book are the stages of initiation in the grand scheme of Theosophical evolution. These initiatory steps are connected to an idea of evolutionary self-development by means of a set of virtues that are relative to the individual's position on the path of evolution. The central thesis is that these stages were translated from the "Hindu" tradition to the "Theosophical" tradition through multifaceted "hybridization processes" in which several Indian members of the Theosophical Society partook. Starting with Annie Besant's early Theosophy, the stages of initiation are traced through Blavatsky's work to Manilal Dvivedi and T. Subba Row, both Indian members of the Theosophical Society, and then on to the Sanatana Dharma Text Books. In 1898, the English Theosophist Annie Besant and the Indian Theosophist Bhagavan Das together founded the Central Hindu College, Benares, which became the nucleus around which the Benares Hindu University was instituted in 1915. In this context the Sanatana Dharma Text Books were published. Muhlematter shows that the stages of initiation were the blueprint for Annie Besant's pedagogy, which she implemented in the Central Hindu College in Benares. In doing so, he succeeds in making intelligible how "esoteric" knowledge was transferred to public institutions and how a broader public could be reached as a result. The dissertation has been awarded the ESSWE PhD Thesis prize 2022 by the European Society for the Study of Western Esotericism.

To mark the end of the war in Europe the flag was hoisted in front of the School, and on 8 May and 9 May 1945 there was a holiday to celebrate VE Day. On 10 May there was a short ceremony at Morning Assembly to celebrate the Allied victory. This book is not only about those 463 ex-pupils and staff who were in the Armed Forces, forty-one of whom were killed in the War, or about those who were wounded, or those who were prisoners of war in German, Italian or Japanese hands. It is also about the life of the school in the years 1939 - 1945 and the 998 pupils who were there at the time, forty-one of whom were at Prince Henry's for the length of the war. It is dedicated to everybody associated with Prince Henry's Grammar School before and during the Second World War. Lest we forget.

Who are we? Where did we come from and where are we going? What is the meaning of life and death? Can we abolish death and live forever? These "big" questions of human nature and human destiny have boggled humanity's best minds for centuries. But they assumed a particular urgency and saliency in 1920s Russia, just as the country was emerging from nearly a decade of continuous warfare, political turmoil, persistent famine, and deadly epidemics, generating an enormous variety of fantastic social, scientific, and literary experiments that sought to answer these "perpetual" existential questions. This book investigates the interplay between actual (scientific) and fictional (literary) experiments that manipulated sex gonads in animals and humans, searched for "rays of life" froze and thawed butterflies and bats, kept alive severed dog heads, and produced various tissue extracts (hormones), all fostering a powerful image of "science that conquers death." Revolutionary Experiments explores the intersection between social and scientific revolutions, documenting the rapid growth of science's funding, institutions, personnel, public resonance, and cultural authority in the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It examines why and how biomedical sciences came to occupy such a prominent place in the stories of numerous litterateurs and in the culture and society of post-revolutionary Russia more generally. Nikolai Krementsov argues that the collective, though not necessarily coordinated, efforts of scientists, their Bolshevik patrons, and their literary fans/critics effectively transformed specialized knowledge generated by experimental biomedical research into an influential cultural resource that facilitated the establishment of large specialized institutions, inspired numerous science-fiction stories, displaced religious beliefs, and gave the millennia-old dream of immortality new forms and new meanings in Bolshevik Russia.

Mexican Americans are the fastest growing immigrant population in the U.S. and will continue to be significant contributors to the diverse social fabric of the country. This book examines the Mexican American cultural traditions, families, demographics, political participation, and societal impact. Despite their economic, social, and political struggles in this country, Mexican Americans have always believed in the American Dream. Yet they have retained many of their own cultural traditions while adapting to life in the North, These persistent ties are thoughtfully examined in chapters on the contemporary relations between Mexico and the United States, including the recurrent border problems.

Providing historical background and tracing the journey made by generations of Mexican immigrants, this book emphasizes the post-1965 period of immigration reforms. Material from oral histories, autobiographies, and historical studies allow the reader to see how Mexican immigrants struggle in their everyday lives to achieve the American Dream, both today and tomorrow.

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond explores the complex and diverse reverberations of the Second World War after 1945. It focuses on the legacies that National Socialist violence and genocide perpetrated in Europe continue to have in German-speaking countries and communities, as well as among those directly affected by occupation, terror and mass murder. Furthermore it explores how those legacies are in turn shaped by the present. The volume also considers conflicting, unexpected and often dissonant interpretations and representations of these events, made by those who were the witnesses, victims and perpetrators at the time and also by different communities in the generations that followed. The contributions, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, enrich our understanding of the complexity of the ways in which a disturbing past continues to disrupt the present and how the past is in turn disturbed and instrumentalized by a later present.

This is a major new history of the British army during the Great War written by three leading military historians. Ian Beckett, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly survey operations on the Western Front and throughout the rest of the world as well as the army's social history, pre-war and wartime planning and strategy, the maintenance of discipline and morale and the lasting legacy of the First World War on the army's development. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of the army between 1914 and 1918, engaging with key debates around the adequacy of British generalship and whether or not there was a significant 'learning curve' in terms of the development of operational art during the course of the war. Their findings show how, despite limitations of initiative and innovation amongst the high command, the British army did succeed in developing the effective combined arms warfare necessary for victory in 1918.

Touts is a historical account of the troubled formation of a colonial labor market in the Gulf of Guinea and a major contribution to the historiography of indentured labor, which has relatively few reference points in Africa. The setting is West Africa's largest island, Fernando Po or Bioko in today's Equatorial Guinea, 100 kilometers off the coast of Nigeria. The Spanish ruled this often-ignored island from the mid-nineteenth century until 1968. A booming plantation economy led to the arrival of several hundred thousand West African, principally Nigerian, contract workers on steamships and canoes. In Touts, Enrique Martino traces the confusing transition from slavery to other labor regimes, paying particular attention to the labor brokers and their financial, logistical, and clandestine techniques for bringing workers to the island. Martino combines multi-sited archival research with the concept of touts as "lumpen-brokers" to offer a detailed study of how commercial labor relations could develop, shift and collapse through the recruiters' own techniques, such as large wage advances and elaborate deceptions. The result is a pathbreaking reconnection of labor mobility, contract law, informal credit structures and exchange practices in African history.

The so-called Phony War from September 1939 to May 1940 occupies a peculiar yet distinct place in popular memory. All the sensations of war, except the fighting, were present; yet, instead of massed air attacks and great land battles, very little happened. The British government was said to be complacent, and the people downright bored. Then, France fell to German attack, and the small British army was evacuated (minus its equipment) from Dunkirk. Reaction to this major strategic catastrophe was naturally to blame the men deemed guilty for bringing the nation to the verge of humiliating defeat. In sharp contrast to previous studies, Smart argues that there was more to the phony war than governmental complacency, that the period was more than a foolish or frivolous ante-chamber to a later more heroic phase.

The extent to which the "guilty men" verdict on the first nine months of Britain's Second World War has stuck remains surprising. The notion that the phony war was a necessary, indeed over-determined, prelude to catastrophe has become cemented over time. Examining the workings of the Anglo-French leadership during this period, Smart picks this thesis apart and argues that disaster was not necessarily, still less inevitably, just around the corner. He concludes that Anglo-French decision-making during this time was basically sound, that the soldiers were well equipped and in good-heart, and that there was no malaise eating away at the entente. This study offers a challenging reappraisal of the phony war from a British perspective.

"Holocaust Remembrance Between the National and the Transnational" provides a key study of the remembrance of the Jewish Catastrophe and the Nazi-era past in the world arena. It uses a range of primary documentation from the restitution conferences, speeches and presentations made at the Stockholm International Forum of 2000 (SIF 2000), a global event and an attempt to mark a defining moment in the inter-cultural construction of the political and institutional memory of the Holocaust in the USA, Europe and Israel. Containing oral history interviews with British delegates to the conference and contemporary press reports, this book explores the inter-relationships between global and national Holocaust remembrances.The causes, consequences and 'cosmopolitan' intellectual context for understanding the SIF 2000 are discussed in great detail. Larissa Allwork examines this seminal moment in efforts to globally promote the important, if ever controversial, topics of Holocaust remembrance, worldwide Genocide prevention and the commemoration of the Nazi past. Providing a balanced assessment of the Stockholm Project, this book is an important study for those interested in the remembrance of the Holocaust and the Third Reich, as well as the recent global direction in memory studies.""

In the face of an outpouring of research on Holocaust history, Holocaust Angst takes an innovative approach. It explores how Germans perceived and reacted to how Americans publicly commemorated the Holocaust. It argues that a network of mostly conservative West German officials and their associates in private organizations and foundations, with Chancellor Kohl located at its center, perceived themselves as the "victims" of the afterlife of the Holocaust in America. They were concerned that public manifestations of Holocaust memory, such as museums, monuments, and movies, could severely damage the Federal Republic's reputation and even cause Americans to question the Federal Republic's status as an ally. From their perspective, American Holocaust memorial culture constituted a stumbling block for (West) German-American relations since the late 1970s. Providing the first comprehensive, archival study of German efforts to cope with the Nazi past vis-a-vis the United States up to the 1990s, this book uncovers the fears of German officials - some of whom were former Nazis or World War II veterans - about the impact of Holocaust memory on the reputation of the Federal Republic and reveals their at times negative perceptions of American Jews. Focusing on a variety of fields of interaction, ranging from the diplomatic to the scholarly and public spheres, the book unearths the complicated and often contradictory process of managing the legacies of genocide on an international stage. West German decision makers realized that American Holocaust memory was not an "anti-German plot" by American Jews and acknowledged that they could not significantly change American Holocaust discourse. In the end, German confrontation with American Holocaust memory contributed to a more open engagement on the part of the West German government with this memory and eventually rendered it a "positive resource" for German self-representation abroad. Holocaust Angst offers new perspectives on postwar Germany's place in the world system as well as the Holocaust culture in the United States and the role of transnational organizations.