A dashing young orator during the Great Hunger of the 1840s, Thomas Francis Meagher led a failed uprising against British rule, for which he was banished to a Tasmanian prison colony for life. But two years later he was "back from the dead" and in New York, instantly the most famous Irishman in America. Meagher's rebirth included his leading the newly formed Irish Brigade in many of the fiercest battles of the Civil War. Afterward, he tried to build a new Ireland in the wild west of Montana - a quixotic adventure that ended in the great mystery of his disappearance, which Egan resolves convincingly at last.

A Matter of Life and Death is a collection of new work on the Falklands Conflict by leading authorities in the field, British and Argentine. The themes of the volume are defence and diplomacy, and the problematic relationship between the two. The authors investigate all aspects of the conflict from the relevance of Falklands/Malvinas past, through the diplomatic and military crisis of 1982, to the shifts in public opinion in both countries. Contributors include Peter Beck, Peter Calvert, Alex Danchev, Lawrence Freedman, Virginia Gamba-Stonehouse, Guillermo Makin and Paul Rogers.

The essays in this volume examine United States-East Asian relations in the framework of global history, incorporating fresh insights that have been offered by scholars on such topics as globalization, human rights, historical memory, and trans-cultural relations.

This book offers a fresh account of the Anzac myth and the bittersweet emotional experience of Gallipoli tourists. Challenging the straightforward view of the Anzac obsession as a kind of nationalistic military Halloween, it shows how transnational developments in tourism and commemoration have created the conditions for a complex, dissonant emotional experience of sadness, humility, anger, pride and empathy among Anzac tourists. Drawing on the in-depth testimonies of travellers from Australia and New Zealand, McKay shines a new and more complex light on the history and cultural politics of the Anzac myth. As well as making a ground breaking, empirically-based intervention into the culture wars, this book offers new insights into the global memory boom and transnational developments in backpacker tourism, sports tourism and "dark" or "dissonant" tourism.

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Why have the struggles of the African Diaspora so resonated with South Pacific people? How have Maori, Pasifika and Pakeha activists incorporated the ideologies of the African diaspora into their struggle against colonial rule and racism, and their pursuit of social justice? This book challenges predominant understandings of the historical linkages that make up the (post-)colonial world. The author goes beyond both the domination of the Atlantic viewpoint, and the correctives now being offered by South Pacific and Indian Ocean studies, to look at how the Atlantic ecumene is refracted in and has influenced the Pacific ecumene. The book is empirically rich, using extensive interviews, participation and archival work and focusing on the politics of Black Power and the Rastafari faith. It is also theoretically sophisticated, offering an innovative hermeneutical critique of post-colonial and subaltern studies. The Black Pacific is essential reading for students and scholars of Politics, International Relations, History and Anthropology interested in anti-colonial struggles, anti-racism and the quests for equality, justice, freedom and self-determination.

While inquiries into early encounters between East Asia and the West have traditionally focused on successful interactions, this collection inquires into the many forms of failure, experienced on all sides, in the period before 1850. Countering a tendency in scholarship to overlook unsuccessful encounters, it starts from the assumption that failures can prove highly illuminating and provide valuable insights into both the specific shapes and limitations of East Asian and Western imaginations of the Other, as well as of the nature of East-West interaction. Interdisciplinary in outlook, this collection brings together the perspectives of sinology, Japanese and Korean studies, historical studies, literary studies, art history, religious studies, and performance studies. The subjects discussed are manifold and range from missionary accounts, travel reports, letters and trade documents to fictional texts as well as material objects (such as tea, chinaware, or nautical instruments) exchanged between East and West. In order to avoid a Eurocentric perspective, the collection balances approaches from the fields of English literature, Spanish studies, Neo-Latin studies, and art history with those of sinology, Japanese studies, and Korean studies. It includes an introduction mapping out the field of failures in early modern encounters between East Asia and Europe, as well as a theoretically minded essay on the lessons of failure and the ethics of cross-cultural understanding.

Murphy was one of a very small number of volunteer pilots who, with their flight crews, started bombing at low altitudes in B-17 flying fortresses in the Southwest Pacific. The aircraft were flown at a 200-foot altitude and at 250 miles per hour at night. One-thousand pound bombs, equipped with four-to-five second fuses, were dropped from the B-17s. On March 3, 1943, the Japanese made a desperate move to re-supply their forces on New Guinea. Twenty-two cargo, transport, and war ships proceeded toward New Guinea using bad weather for cover. They were found in the Bismarck Sea. The Allied Air Forces--using skip bombing--sank all twenty-two Japanese ships. Murphy was credited with sinking nine Japanese ships during his year of combat, including one in the Bismarck Sea battle. Skip bombing became a tactic that helped the U.S. win the war in the South Pacific.

Focusing on the city of Armidale during the period 1830 to 1930, this book investigates the relationship between the development of capitalism in a particular region (New England, Australia) and the expression of ideology within architectural style. The author analyzes how style encodes meaning and how it relates to the social contexts and relationships within capitalism, which in turn are related to the construction of ideology over time.

Jonathan Osorio investigates the effects of Western law on the national identity of Native Hawaiians in this impressive political history of the Kingdom of Hawai'i from the onset of constitutional government in 1840 to the Bayonet Constitution of 1887, which effectively placed political power in the kingdom in the hands of white businessmen. Making extensive use of legislative texts, contemporary newspapers, and important works by Hawaiian historians and others, Osorio plots the course of events that transformed Hawai'i from a traditional subsistence economy to a modern nation, taking into account the many individuals nearly forgotten by history who wrestled with each new political and social change. A final poignant chapter links past events with the struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty today.

The Things We Value takes as its subject the creativity and cultural heritage of Solomon Islands, focusing on the kinds of objects produced and valued by local communities across this diverse country in the south-west Pacific. Combining historical and interpretive analyses with personal memories and extensive illustrations, the contributors examine such distinctive forms as red feather-money, shell valuables, body ornaments, war canoes, ancestral stones and wood carvings. Their essays discuss the materials, designs, manufacture, properties and meanings of artefacts from across the country. Solomon Islanders value these things variously as currency, heirlooms and commodities, for their beauty, power and sanctity, and as bearers of the historical identities and relationships which sustain them in a rapidly changing world. The volume brings together indigenous experts and leading international scholars as authors of the most geographically comprehensive anthology of Solomon Islands ethnography yet published. It engages with historical and contemporary issues from a range of perspectives, anthropological and archaeological, communal and personal, and makes a major new contribution to Pacific Islands studies.

Almost one-quarter of the world's languages are (or were) spoken in the Pacific, making it linguistically the most complex region in the world. Although numerous technical books on groups of Pacific or Australian languages have been published, and descriptions of individual languages are available, until now there has been no single book that attempts a wide regional coverage for a general audience. Pacific Languages introduces readers to the grammatical features of Oceanic, Papuan, and Australian languages as well as to the semantic structures of these languages. For readers without a formal linguistic background, a brief introduction to descriptive linguistics is provided. In addition to describing the structure of Pacific languages, this volume places them in their historical and geographical context, discusses the linguistic evidence for the settlement of the Pacific, and speculates on the reason for the region's many languages. It devotes considerable attention to the effects of contact between speakers of different languages and to the development of pidgin and creole languages in the Pacific. Throughout, technical language is kept to a minimum without oversimplifying the concepts or the issues involved. A glossary of technical terms, maps, and diagrams help identify a language geographically or genetically; reading lists and a language index guide the researcher interested in a particular language or group to other sources of information. Here at last is a clear and straightforward overview of Pacific languages for linguists and anyone interested in the history of sociology of the Pacific.

Koburger argues that the many battles that constituted the campaign for the Solomons were the key to victory in the Pacific for the U.S. Navy--not the battle of the Coral Sea or the Battle of Midway. Segments of the campaign--Guadalcanal, New Georgia, and Bougainville--have been written about extensively. But never before has the entire campaign been put together so lucidly and interpreted so well. The descriptions of the naval battles make for compelling reading. Even in World War II, Koburger argues, the important naval struggles took place in the narrow seas.

An immigrant's tale of an untamed country
Alexander Gibson, my father, was a young Englishman who with his brother settled in Australia in the 1920s. The brothers each married one of the Solomon sisters just prior to the Great Depression. The Taciturn Man begins just after the Second World War when Alexander took up a rough bush sheep-grazing block in isolation among the tall trees of New England (New South Wales).
I was born in 1937, and so I was just three years old when my father went to war, and age eight when he returned. Fortunately, by then I was old enough to absorb much of the material for this collection which I hope you will now enjoy.
Praise for "The Taciturn Man"
"A delightful memoir with all the emotions of life itself-seriousness, humor, joy and sadness and more. The author's observations of people and lively writing style make it a great bedside book to be savored, rather than hurried through."
--Deborah K. Frontiera, author of Fighting CPS: Guilty Until Proven Innocent of Child Protective Services Charges
"The Taciturn Man is a trip through Australia's countryside that feels like a nostalgic summer breeze as Gibson's personal narrative reveals its beauty, culture, and history through his own experiences and unique voice."
--Susan Violante, author of "Innocent War: Behind an Immigrant's Past"
About the Author
Geoffrey Gibson grew up in rural Australia in the 1940s, earned his keep as a jackeroo (farmhand), had a brief stint in the Army, followed by thirty years as a suburban real estate agent in Sydney. He has dabbled in politics, and in retirement now spends his time writing, surfing and mucking about with friends on the state's South coast.
From the World Voices Series www.ModernHistoryPress.com
Available in hardcover, paperback, and eBook Editions
BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography: Personal Memoirs
LCO005000 Literary Collections: Australian & Oceanian
HIS004510 History: Australia & New Zealand - Australia

Colonial Genocide has been seen increasingly as a stepping-stone to the European genocides of the twentieth century, yet it remains an under-researched phenomenon. This volume reconstructs instances of Australian genocide and for the first time places them in a global context. Beginning with the arrival of the British in 1788 and extending to the 1960s, the authors identify the moments of radicalization and the escalation of British violence and ethnic engineering aimed at the Indigenous populations, while carefully distinguishing between local massacres, cultural genocide, and genocide itself. These essays reflect a growing concern with the nature of settler society in Australia and in particular with the fate of the tens of thousands of children who were forcibly taken away from their Aboriginal families by state agencies. Long considered a relatively peaceful settlement, Australian society contained many of the pathologies that led to the exterminatory and eugenic policies of twentieth century Europe.

The British cultural history of the Gallipoli campaign has been overlooked until now - this is a significant book as it offers the first real opportunity for this important campaign to be included in undergraduate courses on WWI. The commemoration of war is a particularly vibrant area of study - Anzac Day, commemorating the landings that began the Gallipoli campaign, is central to Australian national consciousness and this book examines why. A crucial argument in the cultural history of the First World War was sparked by Paul Fussell's contention that the war signified a profound cultural rupture; in widening the debate from the Western Front, this book supports the counter argument that romantic modes of expression retained resonance and utility. In Australia, the renewal of the story of Gallipoli by historians and film-makers (notably Peter Weir's 1981 film starring Mel Gibson) has profoundly altered the national sense of identity and society's perceptions of the armed forces; the authors explains how the writing of this particular event has developed and achieved this central position. An essential volume for those interested in British military and Australian history, postcolonialism and nation building, from academics and students through to the general reader. -- .

The experience of immigration to Australia from Scotland is outlined here, from daily life and occupation, to interactions with the indigenous inhabitants. Despite their significant presence, Scots have often been invisible in histories of Australian migration. This book illuminates the many experiences of the Scots in Australia, from the first colonists in the late-eighteenth century until the hopeful arrivals of the interwar years. It explores how and why they migrated to Australia, and their lives as convicts, colonists, farmers, families, workers, and weavers of culture and identity. It also investigatestheir encounters with the Australian continent, whether in its cities or on the land, and their relationship with its first peoples; and their connections to one another and with their own collective identities, looking at diversity and tension within the Scottish diaspora in Australia. It is also a book about the challenges of finding a place for oneself in a new land, and the difficulties of creating a sense of belonging in a settler colonial society. Dr Benjamin Wilkie is a Lecturer in Australian Studies and Early Career Development Fellow at Deakin University, Australia.

An exploration of the little-known yet historically important emigration of British army officers to the Australian colonies in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. The book looks at the significant impact they made at a time of great colonial expansion, particularly in new south Wales with its transition from a convict colony to a free society.

Preserving much rare and disintegrating information, this comprehensive chronology and fact book provides day-to-day records covering a third of the Pacific war for the first time. Recounts events in the North Pacific between August 1943 and September 1945, revealing the activities of the Allies, including the Soviet Union and the Japanese. It identifies the location and activities of the various units, their landings, and battles. Short biographies make participants "come alive." Appendices provide a glossary, and give key information about prisoners of war, American internees, Army Air Forces, U.S. Navy, Japanese North Pacific Forces forces, Soviet Forces, U.S. units and bases, and American and Japanese personnel. This account shows how events in the North Pacific had an impact in the South and Central theater of the war. The record shows how Admiral Chester Nimitz's offensive actions before major operations, his bombings and bombardments and false radio broadcasts helped bring about later victories and how his destruction of the Japanese fishing fleet set out to shorten the war. A bibliography, index, maps, charts, and photographs further enrich this little-known history for all interested in understanding this now forgotten conflict.

Fiji by the year 1900 after a generation as a British Crown Colony was a multi-racial nation with a combined indentured and free Indian component, which was about to expand on a large scale, and contest political predominance with indigenous Fijians and a small but dominant European minority among other ethnic groups. Drawn from primary sources, and packed with original quotations and statistics, "Fiji and the Franchise" illuminates the history of the struggle that followed. This book introduces modern readers to life in the Fiji islands from 1900 to 1937, when the ultimate question for its inhabitants was how political representation should be achieved, and on what basis. "Fiji and the Franchise" was Dr. Ali's eminently readable and well-grounded Australian National University doctoral thesis. It was presented in 1973 but still remained unpublished when he suddenly became ill on a visit to India and, as bravely as he had always lived, passed away in 2005. Now, Dr. Ali's work lives on as a tribute to and record of this amazing island nation.