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Books > History > World history > From 1900
World War II is one of the first conflicts to be extensively
recorded in detail by both combatants and journalists, and many
iconic photos of the fighting and battlefields have been passed
down to us today. But how do these battlefields look now, following
the extensive rebuilding of the postwar era? Featuring 75
battlefield sites divided by wartime theatre, World War II
Battlefields allows the reader to explore well-known battle
locations today and compare them to images captured during the
height of the conflict. Examine the huge concrete bunker at Fort
Eben Emael, Belgium, captured by German glider troops in May 1940
and still intact today; see the beaches at Tarawa atoll, a scene of
fierce fighting between the US Marines and the Japanese defenders
in 1943; or the streets of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, the
centre of a bloody battle between the II SS Panzer Korps and the
Red Army; explore the Norman village of Villers-Bocage, where a few
German Tiger tanks halted the advance of the British 7th Armoured
Division a week after the D-Day landings; see the twin-medieval
towers of the bridge at Remagen on the Rhine river, made famous in
photos and movies; see the dozens of Japanese ships sunk in Truk
Lagoon following comprehensive American air attacks, and today a
popular dive site; and examine Monte Cassino monastery in Italy,
destroyed by Allied aerial bombing and since completely rebuilt as
a place of pilgrimage.
This book explores the diverse ways in which Holocaust
representations have influenced and structured how other genocides
are understood and represented in the West. Rebecca Jinks focuses
in particular on the canonical 20th century cases of genocide:
Armenia, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda. Using literature, film,
photography, and memorialisation, she demonstrates that we can only
understand the Holocaust's status as a 'benchmark' for other
genocides if we look at the deeper, structural resonances which
subtly shape many representations of genocide. Representing
Genocide pursues five thematic areas in turn: how genocides are
recognised as such by western publics; the representation of the
origins and perpetrators of genocide; how western witnesses
represent genocide; representations of the aftermath of genocide;
and western responses to genocide. Throughout, the book
distinguishes between 'mainstream' and other, more nuanced and
engaged, representations of genocide. It shows how these mainstream
representations - the majority - largely replicate the
representational framework of the Holocaust, including the way in
which mainstream Holocaust representations resist recognising the
rationality, instrumentality and normality of genocide, preferring
instead to present it as an aberrant, exceptional event in human
society. By contrast, the more engaged representations - often, but
not always, originating from those who experienced genocide - tend
to revolve around precisely genocide's ordinariness, and the
structures and situations common to human society which contribute
to and become involved in the violence.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, field artillery was a
small, separate, unsupported branch of the U.S. Army. By the end of
World War I, it had become the 'King of Battle,' a critical
component of American military might. Million-Dollar Barrage tracks
this transformation. Offering a detailed account of how American
artillery crews trained, changed, adapted, and fought between 1907
and 1923, Justin G. Prince tells the story of the development of
modern American field artillery - a tale stretching from the period
when field artillery became an independent organization to when it
became an equal branch of the U.S. Army. The field artillery
entered the Great War as a relatively new branch. It separated from
the Coast Artillery in 1907 and established a dedicated training
school, the School of Fire at Fort Sill, in 1911. Prince describes
the challenges this presented as issues of doctrine, technology,
weapons development, and combat training intersected with the
problems of a peacetime army with no good industrial base. His
account, which draws on a wealth of sources, ranges from debates
about U.S. artillery practices relative to those of Europe, to
discussions of the training, equipping, and performance of the
field artillery branch during the war. Prince follows the field
artillery from its plunge into combat in April 1917 as an
unprepared organization to its emergence that November as an
effective fighting force, with the Meuse-Argonne Offensive proving
the pivotal point in the branch's fortunes. Million-Dollar Barrage
provides an unprecedented analysis of the ascendance of field
artillery as a key factor in the nation's military dominance.
Based on original sources, this important book on the Holocaust
explores regional variations in civilians' attitudes and behavior
toward the Jewish population in Romania and the occupied Soviet
Union. Gentiles' willingness to assist Jews was greater in lands
that had been under Soviet administration during the inter-war
period, while gentiles' willingness to harm Jews occurred more in
lands that had been under Romanian administration during the same
period. While acknowledging the disasters of Communist rule in the
1920s and 1930s, this work shows the effectiveness of Soviet
nationalities policy in the official suppression of antisemitism.
This book offers a corrective to the widespread consensus that
homogenizes gentile responses throughout Eastern Europe, instead
demonstrating that what states did in the interwar period mattered;
relations between social groups were not fixed and destined to
repeat themselves, but rather fluid and susceptible to change over
time.
WINNER OF THE 2017 MARTIN A. KLEIN PRIZE In his in-depth and
compelling study of perhaps the most famous of Portuguese colonial
massacres, Mustafah Dhada explores why the massacre took place,
what Wiriyamu was like prior to the massacre, how events unfolded,
how we came to know about it and what the impact of the massacre
was, particularly for the Portuguese empire. Spanning the period
from 1964 to 2013 and complete with a foreword from Peter Pringle,
this chronologically arranged book covers the liberation war in
Mozambique and uses fieldwork, interviews and archival sources to
place the massacre firmly in its historical context. The Portuguese
Massacre of Wiriyamu in Colonial Mozambique, 1964-2013 is an
important text for anyone interested in the 20th-century history of
Africa, European colonialism and the modern history of war.
Rosemary Wakeman's original survey text comprehensively explores
modern European urban history from 1815 to the present day. It
provides a journey to cities and towns across the continent, in
search of the patterns of development that have shaped the urban
landscape as indelibly European. The focus is on the built
environment, the social and cultural transformations that mark the
patterns of continuity and change, and the transition to modern
urban society. Including over 60 images that serve to illuminate
the analysis, the book examines whether there is a European city,
and if so, what are its characteristics? Wakeman offers an
interdisciplinary approach that incorporates concepts from cultural
and postcolonial studies, as well as urban geography, and provides
full coverage of urban society not only in western Europe, but also
in eastern and southern Europe, using various cities and city types
to inform the discussion. The book provides detailed coverage of
the often-neglected urbanization post-1945 which allows us to more
clearly understand the modernizing arc Europe has followed over the
last two centuries.
Crime, Regulation and Control during the Blitz looks at the social
effect of bombing on urban centres like Liverpool, Coventry and
London, critically examining how the wartime authorities struggled
to regulate and control crime and offending during the Blitz.
Focusing predominantly on Liverpool, it investigates how the
authorities and citizens anticipated the aerial war, and how the
State and local authorities proposed to contain and protect a
population made unruly, potentially deviant and drawn into a new
landscape of criminal regulation. Drawing on a range of
contemporary sources, the book throws into relief today's
experiences of war and terror, the response in crime and deviancy,
and the experience and practices of preparedness in anticipation of
terrible threats. The authors reveal how everyday activities became
criminalised through wartime regulations and explore how other
forms of crime such as looting, theft and drunkenness took on a new
and frightening aspect. Crime, Regulation and Control during the
Blitz offers a critical contribution to how we understand crime,
security, and regulation in both the past and the present.
This book discusses WWI-era music in a historical context,
explaining music's importance at home and abroad during WWI as well
as examining what music was being sung, played, and danced to
during the years prior to America's involvement in the Great War.
Why was music so important to soldiers abroad during World War I?
What role did music-ranging from classical to theater music, rags,
and early jazz-play on the American homefront? Music of the First
World War explores the tremendous importance of music during the
years of the Great War-when communication technologies were
extremely limited and music often took the place of connecting
directly with loved ones or reminiscing via recorded images. The
book's chapters cover music's contribution to the war effort; the
variety of war-related songs, popular hits, and top recording
artists of the war years; the music of Broadway shows and other
theater productions; and important composers and lyricists. The
author also explores the development of the fledgling recording
industry at this time. Provides an excellent resource for students
investigating music during the First World War as well as for
adults interested in WWI-era history or music of the pre-twenties
Documents the variety of reasons songs were sung by soldiers in
wartime-to cheer themselves up, boost courage, poke fun at or
stimulate hatred of their enemies, or express grievances or protest
against the war or against authority Covers stage music of the WWI
era, including music hall (British), vaudeville, revues, operettas,
and musicals
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The Swans of Ypres
(Hardcover)
Jeff Hatwell, Elspeth Langford; Illustrated by Catherine Gordon
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R697
Discovery Miles 6 970
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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South Africa is the most industrialized power in Africa. It was
rated the continent's largest economy in 2016 and is the only
African member of the G20. It is also the only strategic partner of
the EU in Africa. Yet despite being so strategically and
economically significant, there is little scholarship that focuses
on South Africa as a regional hegemon. This book provides the first
comprehensive assessment of South Africa's post-Apartheid foreign
policy. Over its 23 chapters - -and with contributions from
established Africa, Western, Asian and American scholars, as well
as diplomats and analysts - the book examines the current pattern
of the country's foreign relations in impressive detail. The
geographic and thematic coverage is extensive, including chapters
on: the domestic imperatives of South Africa's foreign policy;
peace-making; defence and security; bilateral relations in
Southern, Central, West, Eastern and North Africa; bilateral
relations with the US, China, Britain, France and Japan; the
country's key external multilateral relations with the UN; the
BRICS economic grouping; the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group
(ACP); as well as the EU and the World Trade Organization (WTO). An
essential resource for researchers, the book will be relevant to
the fields of area studies, foreign policy, history, international
relations, international law, security studies, political economy
and development studies.
"Cultural Responses to Occupation in Japan" examines how the
performing arts, and the performing body specifically, have shaped
and been shaped by the political and historical conditions
experienced in Japan during the Cold War and post-Cold War periods.
This study of original and secondary materials from the fields of
theatre, dance, performance art, film and poetry probes the
interrelationship that exists between the body and the
nation-state. Important artistic works, such as Ankoku Butoh (dance
of darkness) and its subsequent re-interpretation by a leading
political performance company Gekidan Kaitaisha (theatre of
deconstruction), are analysed using ethnographic, historical and
theoretical modes. This approach reveals the nuanced and prolonged
effects of military, cultural and political occupation in Japan
over a duration of dramatic change."Cultural Responses to
Occupation in Japan" explores issues of discrimination,
marginality, trauma, memory and the mediation of history in a
ground-breaking work that will be of great significance to anyone
interested in the symbiosis of culture and conflict.""
The Cold War began almost immediately after the end of World War II
and the defeat of the Nazis in Europe. As images of the Nazis'
atrocities became part of American culture's common store, the evil
of their old enemy, beyond the Nazis as a wartime opponent, became
increasingly important. As America tried to describe the danger
represented by the spread of Communism, it fell back on
descriptions of Nazism to make the threat plain through comparison.
At the heart of the tensions of that era lay the inconsistency of
using one kind of evil to describe another. The book addresses this
tension in regards to McCarthyism, campaigns to educate the public
about Communism, attempts to raise support for wars in Asia, and
the rhetoric of civil rights. Each of these political arenas is
examined through their use of Nazi analogies in popular, political,
and literary culture. The Nazi Card is an invaluable look at the
way comparisons to Nazis are used in American culture, the history
of those comparisons, and the repercussions of establishing a
political definition of evil.
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