The claim by the Ministry of Defence in 2001 that 'the experience of numerous small wars has provided the British Army with a unique insight into this demanding form of conflict' unravelled spectacularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. One important reason for that, David French suggests, was because contemporary British counter-insurgency doctrine was based upon a serious misreading of the past.
Until now, many observers believed that during the wars of decolonisation in the two decades after 1945, the British had discovered how western liberal notions of right and wrong could be made compatible with the imperatives of waging war amongst the people, that force could be used effectively but with care, and that a more just and prosperous society could emerge from these struggles. By using only the minimum necessary force, and doing so with the utmost discrimination, the British were able to win by securing the 'hearts and minds' of the people. But this was a serious distortion of actual British practice on the ground. David French's main contention is that the British hid their use of naked force behind a carefully constructed veneer of legality. In reality, they commonly used wholesale coercion, including cordon and search operations, mass detention without trial, forcible population resettlement, and the creation of free-fire zones to intimidate and lock-down the civilian population. The British waged their counter-insurgency campaigns by being nasty, not nice, to the people.
The British Way in Counter-Insurgency is a seminal reassessment of the historical foundation of British counter doctrine and practice.

The Overlord Effect is a historically based leadership review that combines the accounts of Veterans of the Normandy Campaign of World War II and presents a conversation about their experiences with the leadership theories that have become part of today"s conversation on the subject in the military, academics, and business. The Normandy Invasion was one of the most complex and successful military campaigns in history. The preparation for this event took years of preparation and training. It required leaders at every level to demonstrate exemplary leadership in a compressed space and time that called for decisions to be made in an instant, for leaders to act with courage and character, and for both followers and leaders to accomplish any mission regardless of the personal cost. The Overlord Effect takes the snapshots of the critical experiences of leaders at every level of the Allied Invasion Force and reviews their actions and places them into understandable, thought provoking insights that will help leaders in any discipline respond better to challenges. The work also presents Dr. Pierce's theory on Emergent Leadership During Crisis(ELDC), and discusses ways that the leaders and professionals of today can use it to help themselves understand their own leadership experience, as well as to develop future leaders in the workplace.

The history of travel has long been constructed and described almost exclusively as a history of "European", male mobility, without, however, explicitly making the gender and whiteness of the travellers a topic. The anthology takes this as an occasion to focus on journeys to Europe that gave "non-Europeans" the opportunity to glance at "Europe" and to draw a picture of it by themselves. So far, little attention has been paid to the questions with which attributes these travellers endowed "Europe" and its people, which similarities and differences they observed and which idea(s) of "Europe" they produced. The focus is once again on "Europe", but not as the starting point for conquests or journeys. From a postcolonial and gender historical view, the anthology's contributions rather juxtapose (self-)representations of "Europe" with perspectives that move in a field of tension between agreement, contradiction and oscillation.

Before the First World War there existed an intellectual turmoil in Britain as great as any in Germany, France or Russia, as the debates over Nietzsche and eugenics in the context of early modernism reveal. With the rise of fascism after 1918, these debates became more ideologically driven, with science and vitalist philosophy being hailed in some quarters as saviours from bourgeois decadence, vituperated in others as heralding the onset of barbarism. Breeding Superman looks at several of the leading Nietzscheans and eugenicists, and challenges the long-cherished belief that British intellectuals were fundamentally uninterested in race. The result is a study of radical ideas which are conventionally written out of histories of the politics and culture of the period.

It could be said that the Joe Hill murder trial rates as one of the most important trials in Utah's history. Hill, a prolific Labor Union songwriter, was accused of murdering a Salt Lake City shopkeeper and his son during a robbery in 1914. In Pie in the Sky, author and trial lawyer Kenneth Lougee analyzes this case and explains the errors that were committed during the trial, which resulted in Hill's guilty verdict and subsequent execution. Interested in more than Hill's guilt or innocence, Lougee provides a thorough discussion of the case-including Hill's background with the Industrial Workers of the World, the political and religious climate in Utah at the time, the particulars of the trial, and the failings of the legal process. In this analysis, Lougee focuses on those involved in the trial, most especially the lawyers, which he describes in the text as the worst pieces of lawyering of all time. Pie in the Sky presents a breakdown of this case from a lawyer's perspective and shows why this trial is still a matter of interest in the twenty-first century.

"I lived the same life as everyone else, the life of ordinary people, the masses." Sitting in a prison cell in the autumn of 1944, Hans Fallada sums up his life under the National Socialist dictatorship, the time of "inward emigration." Under conditions of close confinement, in constant fear of discovery, he writes himself free from the nightmare of the Nazi years. His frank and sometimes provocative memoirs were thought for many years to have been lost. They are published here for the first time.

The confessional mode did not come naturally to Fallada the writer of fiction, but in the mental and emotional distress of 1944, self-reflection became a survival strategy. In the "house of the dead" he exacts his political revenge on paper. "I know that I am crazy. I'm risking not only my own life, I'm also risking the lives of many of the people I am writing about," he notes, driven by the compulsion to write. And write he does: about spying and denunciation, about the threat to his livelihood and his literary work, about the fate of many friends and contemporaries such as Ernst Rowohlt and Emil Jannings. To conceal his intentions and to save paper, he uses abbreviations. His notes, constantly exposed to the gaze of the prison warders, become a kind of secret code. He finally succeeds in smuggling the manuscript out of the prison, although it remained unpublished for half a century.

These revealing memoirs by one of the best-known German writers of the 20th century will be of great interest to all readers of modern literature.

During World War II, Allied casualty rates in the air were high. Of the roughly 125,000 who served as aircrew with Bomber Command, 59,423 were killed or missing and presumed killed-a fatality rate of 45.5%. With odds like that, it would be no surprise if there were as few atheists in cockpits as there were in foxholes; and indeed, many airmen faced their dangerous missions with beliefs and rituals ranging from the traditional to the outlandish. Military historian S. P. MacKenzie considers this phenomenon in Flying against Fate, a pioneering study of the important role that superstition played in combat flier morale among the Allies in World War II. Mining a wealth of documents as well as a trove of published and unpublished memoirs and diaries, MacKenzie examines the myriad forms combat fliers' suspicions assumed, from jinxes to premonitions. Most commonly, airmen carried amulets or talismans-lucky boots or a stuffed toy; a coin whose year numbers added up to thirteen; counterintuitively, a boomerang. Some performed rituals or avoided other acts, e.g., having a photo taken before a flight. Whatever seemed to work was worth sticking with, and a heightened risk often meant an upsurge in superstitious thought and behavior. MacKenzie delves into behavior analysis studies to help explain the psychology behind much of the behavior he documents-not slighting the large cohort of crew members and commanders who demurred. He also looks into the ways in which superstitious behavior was tolerated or even encouraged by those in command who saw it as a means of buttressing morale. The first in-depth exploration of just how varied and deeply felt superstitious beliefs were to tens of thousands of combat fliers, Flying against Fate expands our understanding of a major aspect of the psychology of war in the air and of World War II.

This book tells the story of 1960-a tumultuous, transitional year that unleashed the forces that eventually reshaped the American nation and the entire planet, to the joy of millions and the sorrow of millions more. In 1960, attitudes were changing; barriers were falling. It was a transitional year, during which the world as we know it today was beginning to take shape. While other books have focused on the presidential contest between Kennedy and Nixon, A New World to Be Won: John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and the Tumultuous Year of 1960 illuminates the emerging forces that would transform the nation and the world during the 1960s, putting the election in the broader context of American history-and world history as well. While the author does devote a large portion of this book to the 1960 presidential campaign, he also highlights four pivotal trends that changed life for decades to come: unprecedented scientific breakthroughs, ranging from the Xerox copier to new spacecraft for manned flight; fragmentation of the international power structure, notably the schism between the Soviet Union and China; the pursuit of freedom, both through the civil rights movement at home and the drive for independence in Africa; and the elevation of pleasure and self-expression in American culture, largely as a result of federal approval of the birth-control pill and the increasing popularity of illegal drugs. Photographs of key newsmakers and important events throughout the year A bibliography with a detailed listing of more than 400 sources, including oral histories, government publications, memoirs, and journals A comprehensive index by name and subject Footnotes for the full manuscript

Born in 1853, Jared Flagg was the black sheep of an illustrious New York family. His father, Jared Bradley Flagg, was a noted portraitist and Episcopalian minister who served as Rector of Grace Church, in Brooklyn Heights. His older brothers were prominent, Paris-trained artists in their own right. A younger brother became a famous architect, while another went on to found a major Wall Street brokerage. One of his younger sisters married publisher Charles Scribner, II; another was a member of the famed "400" Manhattan socialites. Jared, Jr., on the other hand, took to the seamier side of American life, instigating any number of illegal schemes, ranging from leasing furnished flats to facilitate prostitution, to finding chorus line and modeling jobs for pretty but talentless young women, to a phony investment scheme that paid 52% a year, to the sale of worthless bonds backed by heavily mortgaged real estate. Frequently penalized for his criminal and unethical activities by the time of his death in 1926, Jared Flagg barreled his way through Gilded and Jazz Age America, offering a fascinating and heretofore unknown view of how a rising empire evolved at a crucial through crucial eras in its history.

Europe's Utopias of Peace explores attempts to create a lasting European peace in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars and the two world wars. The book charts the 250 year cycle of violent European conflicts followed by new utopian formulations for peace. The utopian illusion was that future was predictable and rules could prescribe behaviour in conflicts to come. Bo Strath examines the reiterative bicentenary cycle since 1815, where each new postwar period built on a design for a project for European unification. He sets out the key historical events and the continuous struggle with nationalism, linking them to legal, political and economic thought. Biographical sketches of the most prominent thinkers and actors provide the human element to this narrative. Europe's Utopias of Peace presents a new perspective on the ideological, legal, economic and intellectual conditions that shaped Europe since the 19th century and presents this in a global context. It challenges the conventional narrative on Europe's past as a progressive enlightenment heritage, highlighting the ambiguities of the legacies that pervade the institutional structures of contemporary Europe. Its long-term historical perspective will be invaluable for students of contemporary Europe or modern European history.

The First World War did not end in November 1918. In Russia and Eastern Europe it finished up to a year earlier, and both there and elsewhere in Europe it triggered conflicts that lasted down to 1923. Paramilitary formations were prominent in this continuation of the war. They had some features of formal military organizations, but were used in opposition to the regular military as an instrument of revolution or as an adjunct or substitute for military forces when these were unable by themselves to put down a revolution (whether class or national). Paramilitary violence thus arose in different contexts. It was an important aspect of the violence unleashed by class revolution in Russia. It structured the counter-revolution in central and Eastern Europe, including Finland and Italy, which reacted against a mythic version of Bolshevik class violence in the name of order and authority. It also shaped the struggles over borders and ethnicity in the new states that replaced the multi-national empires of Russia, Austria-Hungary and Ottoman Turkey. It was prominent on all sides in the wars for Irish independence. In many cases, paramilitary violence was charged with political significance and acquired a long-lasting symbolism and influence.
War in Peace explores the differences and similarities between these various kinds of paramilitary violence within one volume for the first time. It thereby contributes to our understanding of the difficult transitions from war to peace. It also helps to re-situate the Great War in a longer-term context and to explain its enduring impact.

This book investigates the demobilization and post-war readjustment of Red Army veterans in Leningrad and its environs after the Great Patriotic War. Over 300,000 soldiers were stood down in this war-ravaged region between July 1945 and 1948. They found the transition to civilian life more challenging than many could ever have imagined. For civilian Leningraders, reintegrating the rapid influx of former soldiers represented an enormous political, economic, social and cultural challenge. In this book, Robert Dale reveals how these former soldiers became civilians in a society devastated and traumatized by total warfare. Dale discusses how, and how successfully, veterans became ordinary citizens. Based on extensive original research in local and national archives, oral history interviews and the examination of various newspaper collections, Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad peels back the myths woven around demobilization, to reveal a darker history repressed by society and concealed from historiography. While propaganda celebrated this disarmament as a smooth process which reunited veterans with their families, reintegrated them into the workforce and facilitated upward social mobility, the reality was rarely straightforward. Many veterans were caught up in the scramble for work, housing, healthcare and state hand-outs. Others drifted to the social margins, criminality or became the victims of post-war political repression. Demobilized Veterans in Late Stalinist Leningrad tells the story of both the failure of local representatives to support returning Soviet soldiers, and the remarkable resilience and creativity of veterans in solving the problems created by their return to society. It is a vital study for all scholars and students of post-war Soviet history and the impact of war in the modern era.

"The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900-1945" redefines a new European history of eugenics by exploring the ideological transmission of eugenics internationally and its application locally in Central Europe. Using over 120 primary sources translated from various European languages into English for the first time, in addition to the key contributions of leading scholars in the field from around Europe, this book examines the main organisations, individuals and policies that shaped eugenics in Austria, Poland, former Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic and Slovakia), former Yugoslavia (now Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia), Hungary and Romania. It pioneers the study of ethnic minorities and eugenics, exploring the ways in which ethnic minorities interacted with international eugenics discourses to advance their own aims and ambitions, whilst providing a comparative analysis of the emergence and development of eugenics in Central Europe more generally.Complete with 20 illustrations, a glossary of terms and a comprehensive bibliography, "The History of East-Central European Eugenics, 1900-1945" is a pivotal reference work for students, researchers and academics interested in Central Europe and the history of science in the twentieth century.

The Gay Girl in Damascus Hoax explores the vulnerability of educated and politically engaged Westerners to Progressive Orientalism, a form of Orientalism embedded within otherwise egalitarian and anti-imperialist Western thought. Early in the Arab Spring, the Gay Girl in Damascus blog appeared. Its author claimed to be Amina Arraf, a Syrian American lesbian Muslim woman living in Damascus. After the blog's went viral in April 2011, Western journalists electronically interviewed Amina, magnifying the blog's claim that the Syrian uprising was an ethnically and religiously pluralist movement anchored in an expansive sense of social solidarity. However, after a post announced that the secret police had kidnapped Amina, journalists and activists belatedly realized that Amina did not exists and Thomas "Tom" MacMaster, a forty-year-old straight white American man and peace activist living and studying medieval history in Scotland was the blog's true author. MacMaster's hoax succeeded by melding his and his audience's shared political and cultural beliefs into a falsified version of the Syrian Revolution that validated their views of themselves as anti-racist and anti-imperialist progressives by erasing real Syrians.

French North America in the Shadows of Conquest is an interdisciplinary, postcolonial, and continental history of Francophone North America across the long twentieth century, revealing hidden histories that so deeply shaped the course of North America. Modern French North America was born from the process of coming to terms with the idea of conquest after the fall of New France. The memory of conquest still haunts those 20 million Francophones who call North America home. The book re-examines the contours of North American history by emphasizing alliances between Acadians, Cajuns, and Quebecois and French Canadians in their attempt to present a unified challenge against the threat of assimilation, linguistic extinction, and Anglophone hegemony. It explores cultural trauma narratives and the social networks Francophones constructed and shows how North American history looks radically different from their perspective. This book presents a missing chapter in the annals of linguistic and ethnic differences on a continent defined, in part, by its histories of dispossession. It will be of interest to scholars and students of American and Canadian history, particularly those interested in French North America, as well as ethnic and cultural studies, comparative history, the American South, and migration.

The Politics of Expertise offers a challenging new interpretation of politics in contemporary Britain, through an examination of non-governmental organisations. Using specific case studies of the homelessness, environment, and international aid and development sectors, it demonstrates how politics and political activism has changed over the last half century. NGOs have contributed enormously to a professionalization and a privatization of politics, emerging as a new form of expert knowledge and political participation. They have been led by a new breed of non-party politician, working in collaboration and in competition with government. Skilful navigators of the modern technocratic state, they have brought expertise to expertise and, in so doing, have changed the nature of grassroots activism. As affluent citizens have felt marginalised by the increasingly complex nature of many policy solutions, they have made the rational calculation to support NGOs, the professionalism and resources of which make them better able to tackle complex problems. Yet in doing so, support rather than participation becomes the more appropriate way to describe the relationship of the public to NGOs. As voter turnout has declined, membership and trust in NGOs has increased. But NGOs are very different types of organisations from the classic democratic institutions of political parties and the labour movement. They maintain different and varied relationships with the publics they seek to represent. Attracting mass support has provided them with the resources and the legitimacy to speak to power on a bewildering range of issues, yet perhaps the ultimate victors in this new form of politics are the NGOs themselves.