To serve the British nation in World War II, the BBC charged itself with mobilizing popular music in support of Britain's war effort. Radio music, British broadcasters and administrators argued, could maintain civilian and military morale, increase industrial production, and even promote a sense of Anglo-American cooperation. Because of their widespread popularity, dance music and popular song were seen as ideal for these tasks; along with jazz, with its American associations and small but youthful audience, these genres suddenly gained new legitimacy at the traditionally more conservative BBC.
In Victory through Harmony, author Christina Baade both tells the fascinating story of the BBC's musical participation in wartime events and explores how popular music and jazz broadcasting helped redefine notions of war, gender, race, class, and nationality in wartime Britain. Baade looks in particular at the BBC's pioneering Listener Research Department, which tracked the tastes of select demographic groups including servicemen stationed overseas and young female factory workers in order to further the goal of entertaining, cheering, and even calming the public during wartime. The book also tells how the wartime BBC programmed popular music to an unprecedented degree with the goal of building national unity and morale, promoting new roles for women, virile representations of masculinity, Anglo-American friendship, and pride in a common British culture. In the process, though, the BBC came into uneasy contact with threats of Americanization, sentimentality, and the creativity of non-white "others," which prompted it to regulate and even censor popular music and performers.
Rather than provide the soundtrack for a unified "People's War," Baade argues, the BBC's broadcasting efforts exposed the divergent ideologies, tastes, and perspectives of the nation. This illuminating book will interest all readers in popular music, jazz, and radio, as well as British cultural history and gender studies.

In Twelver Shi'a Islam, the wait for the return of the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad ibn al-Hasan al-Mahdi, at the end of time, overshadowed the value of actively seeking martyrdom. However, what is the place of martyrdom in Twelver Shi'ism today? This book shows that the Islamic revolution in Iran resulted in the marriage of Shi'i messianism and extreme political activism, changing the mindset of the Shi'a worldwide. Suddenly, each drop of martyrs' blood brought the return of al-Mahdi one step closer, and the Islamic Republic of Iran supposedly became the prelude to the foretold world revolution of al-Mahdi. Adel Hashemi traces the unexplored area of Shi'i discourse on martyrdom from the 1979 revolution-when the Islamic Republic's leaders cultivated the culture of martyrdom to topple the Shah's regime-to the dramatic shift in the understanding of martyrdom today. Also included are the reaction to the Syrian crisis, the region's war with ISIS and other Salafi groups, and the renewed commitment to the defense of shrines. This book shows the striking shifts in the meaning of martyrdom in Shi'ism, revealing the real relevance of the concept to the present-day Muslim world.

Priscilla: The Hidden Life of an Englishwoman in Wartime France by Nicholas Shakespeare is a transcendent work of narrative nonfiction in the vein of The Hare with Amber Eyes.

When Nicholas Shakespeare stumbled across a trunk full of his late aunt's personal belongings, he was unaware of where this discovery would take him and what he would learn about her hidden past. The glamorous, mysterious figure he remembered from his childhood was very different from the morally ambiguous young woman who emerged from the trove of love letters, journals and photographs, surrounded by suitors and living the precarious existence of a British citizen in a country controlled by the enemy during World War II.

As a young boy, Shakespeare had always believed that his aunt was a member of the Resistance and had been tortured by the Germans. The truth turned out to be far more complicated.

Piecing together fragments of his aunt's remarkable and tragic story, Priscilla is at once a stunning story of detection, a loving portrait of a flawed woman trying to survive in terrible times, and a spellbinding slice of history.

On August 8, 1942, 302 people arrived by train at Vocation, Wyoming, to become the first Japanese American residents of what the U.S. government called the Relocation Center at Heart Mountain. In the following weeks and months, they would be joined by some 10,000 of the more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, incarcerated as "domestic enemy aliens" during World War II. Heart Mountain became a town with workplaces, social groups, and political alliances-in short, networks. These networks are the focus of Saara Kekki's Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain. Interconnections between people are the foundation of human societies. Exploring the creation of networks at Heart Mountain, as well as movement to and from the camp between 1942 and 1945, this book offers an unusually detailed look at the formation of a society within the incarcerated community, specifically the manifestation of power, agency, and resistance. Kekki constructs a dynamic network model of all of Heart Mountain's residents and their interconnections-family, political, employment, social, and geospatial networks-using historical "big data" drawn from the War Relocation Authority and narrative sources, including the camp newspaper Heart Mountain Sentinel. For all the inmates, life inevitably went on: people married, had children, worked, and engaged in politics. Because of the duration of the incarceration, many became institutionalized and unwilling to leave the camps when the time came. Yet most individuals, Kekki finds, took charge of their own destinies despite the injustice and looked forward to the day when Heart Mountain was behind them. Especially timely in its implications for debates over immigration and assimilation, Japanese Americans at Heart Mountain presents a remarkable opportunity to reconstruct a community created under duress within the larger American society, and to gain new insight into an American experience largely lost to official history.