|
|
Books > History > World history > From 1900
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
In this bold reevaluation of a decisive moment in American history,
Michael Hiltzik dispels decades of accumulated myths and
misconceptions about the New Deal to capture with clarity and
immediacy its origins, its legacy, and its genius.
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.
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.
Vicente Lombardo Toledano was the founder of numerous labour union
organisations in Mexico and Latin America between the 1920s to the
1960s. He was not only an organiser but also a broker between the
unions, the government, and business leaders, able to disentangle
difficult conflicts. He cooperated closely with the governments of
Mexico and other Latin American nations and worked with the
representatives of the Soviet Union when he considered it useful.
As a result he was alternately seen as a government stooge or a
communist, even though he was never a member of the party or of the
Mexican government administration. Daniela Spenser's is the first
biography of Lombardo Toledano based on his extensive private
papers, on primary sources from European, Mexican and American
archives, and on personal interviews. Her even-keeled portrayal of
the man counters previous hagiographies and/or vilifications.
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.
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.
November 1917. The American troops were poorly trained, deficient
in military equipment and doctrine, not remotely ready for armed
conflict on a large scale-and they'd arrived on the Western front
to help the French push back the Germans. The story of what
happened next-the American Expeditionary Force's trial by fire on
the brutal battlefields of France-is told in full for the first
time in Thunder and Flames. Where history has given us some
perspective on the individual battles of the period-at Cantigny,
Chateau Thierry, Belleau Wood, the Marne River, Soissons, and
little-known Fismette-they appear here as part of a larger series
of interconnected operations, all conducted by Americans new to the
lethal killing fields of World War I and guided by the
battle-tested French. Following the AEF from their initial landing
to their emergence as an independent army in late September 1918,
this book presents a complex picture of how, learning warfare on
the fly, sometimes with devastating consequences, the American
force played a critical role in blunting and then rolling back the
German army's drive toward Paris. The picture that emerges is at
once sweeping in scope and rich in detail, with firsthand testimony
conjuring the real mud and blood of the combat that Edward Lengel
so vividly describes. Official reports and documents provide the
strategic and historical context for these ground-level accounts,
from the perspective of the Germans as well as the Americans and
French. Battle by battle, Thunder and Flames reveals the cost of
the inadequacies in U.S. training, equipment, logistics,
intelligence, and command, along with the rifts in the
Franco-American military marriage. But it also shows how, by trial
and error, through luck and ingenuity, the AEF swiftly became the
independent fighting force of General John "Blackjack" Pershing's
long-held dream-its divisions ultimately among the most
combat-effective military forces to see the war through.
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.
Catalan-language publishers were under constant threat during the
dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975). Both the Catalan
language and the introduction of foreign ideas were banned by the
regime, preoccupied as it was with creating a "one, great and free
Spain." Books against Tyranny examines the period through its
censorship laws and censors' accounts by means of intertextuality,
an approach that aims to shed light on the evolution of Francoism's
ideological thought. The documents examined here includes firsthand
witness accounts, correspondence, memoirs, censorship files,
newspapers, original interviews, and unpublished material housed in
various Spanish archives. As such, the book opens up the field and
serves as an informative tool for scholars of Franco's Spain,
Catalan social movements, or censorship more generally.
This collection of essays demonstrates how chronic state failure
and the inability of the international community to provide a
solution to the conflict in Somalia has had transnational
repercussions. Following the failed humanitarian mission in
1992-93, most countries refrained from any direct involvement in
Somalia, but this changed in the 2000s with the growth of piracy
and links to international terrorist organizations. The
deterritorialization of the conflict quickly became apparent as it
became transnational in nature. In part because of it lacked a
government and was unable to work with the international community,
Somalia came to be seen as a "testing-ground" by many international
actors. Globalizing Somalia demonstrates how China, Japan, and the
EU, among others, have all used the conflict in Somalia to project
power, test the bounds of the national constitution, and test their
own military capabilities. Contributed by international scholars
and experts, the work examines the impact of globalization on the
internal and external dynamics of the conflict, arguing that it is
no longer geographically contained. By bringing together the many
actors and issues involved, the book fills a gap in the literature
as one of the most complete works on the conflict in Somalia to
date. It will be an essential text to any student interested in
Somalia and the horn of Africa, as well as in terrorism, and
conflict processes.
The conquest of the air-and beyond
This interesting book, which includes photographs and diagrams,
describes the early years of man's attempts to gain mastery of the
air. It chronicles the first, rudimentary attempts at flight in
balloons to their ultimate development including their use during
the Great War. Next came the age of the dirigible including, of
course, the mighty Zeppelin. Allied dirigibles of the First World
War are also considered. Most significant, however, was the
development of powered, heavier than air, winged, machines and in
this account they are described from their genesis with the Wright
brothers to their use in the first great conflict which led to the
creation of the air forces of the world. German and Allied aircraft
are discussed, together with their various uses, applications and
the deeds of the intrepid young men who flew them. There are not
many accounts of the early days of aviation in peace and war so any
addition to their number is welcome. This book was written before
the potential of the aircraft had been fully realised and is an
interesting perspective on how the first pilots, aircraft
designers, manufacturers and visionaries saw them and their future
in the opening decades of the twentieth century. An essential
addition to any library of early aviation, this book is
recommended.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each
title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our
hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their
spines and fabric head and tail bands.
|
You may like...
323 Days
John Harris
Hardcover
R660
Discovery Miles 6 600
The Pink House
Catherine Alliott
Paperback
R395
R365
Discovery Miles 3 650
|