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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > Second World War
Mere decades after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the promise of
European democracy seems to be out of joint. What has become of the
once-shared memory of victory over fascism? Historical revisionism
and nationalist propaganda in the post-Yugoslav context have tried
to eradicate the legacy of partisan and socialist struggles, while
Yugonostalgia commodifies the partisan/socialist past. It is
against these dominant 'archives' that this book launches the
partisan counter-archive, highlighting the symbolic power of
artistic works that echo and envision partisan legacy and rupture.
It comprises a body of works that emerged either during the
people's liberation struggle or in later socialist periods, tracing
a counter-archival surplus and revolutionary remainder that invents
alternative protocols of remembrance and commemoration. The book
covers rich (counter-)archival material - from partisan poems,
graphic works and photography, to monuments and films - and ends by
describing the recent revisionist un-doing of the partisan past. It
contributes to the Yugoslav politico-aesthetical "history of the
oppressed" as an alternative journey to the partisan past that
retrieves revolutionary resources from the past for the present.
The Donauschwaben, a mostly unknown ethnic group of Germans,
migrated to Yugoslavia in the late 1700s. Endless boundary
conflicts varyingly defined their land as Hungary, Yugoslavia, or
Serbia. During World War II their ethnicity unfairly marked them as
Nazi sympathizers despite their noncombatant status. They found
themselves on the wrong side of every border as a wave of
anti-German resentment legitimized their persecution and
eradication.
"TAKEN: A Lament for a Lost Ethnicity" relates the intimate
memoirs of Joseph Schaeffer, an ethnic Donauschwaben. Joseph's
childhood is stolen the day the Russians march into town. He is
captured and taken from his land and family to a slave labor camp
of endless suffering and years of imprisonment. Hope is restored
after a courageous escape and eventual immigration to the United
States. This enduring tale of survival eventually reunites the
Schaeffer family and life begins anew.
""TAKEN" is a testament to one man's tenacity and courage and
an affirmation of hope and life in a world full of despair and
death. The plight of refugees in post-war central Europe is an
important, yet neglected story. Joseph Schaeffer's life and
memories bring poignancy and immediacy to that story. Kathryn
Schaeffer Pabst ably crafts the memoir and deserves our
appreciation for bringing her father's story of survival to
us."-Eugene Edward Beiriger, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History,
DePaul University
This book offers the first in-depth intellectual and cultural
history of British subversive propaganda during the Second World
War. Focussing on the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), it tells
the story of British efforts to undermine German morale and promote
resistance against Nazi hegemony. Staffed by civil servants,
journalists, academics and anti-fascist European exiles, PWE
oversaw the BBC European Service alongside more than forty unique
clandestine radio stations; they maintained a prolific outpouring
of subversive leaflets and other printed propaganda; and they
trained secret agents in psychological warfare. British policy
during the occupation of Germany stemmed in part from the wartime
insights and experiences of these propagandists. Rather than
analyse military strategy or tactics, British Subversive Propaganda
during the Second World War draws on a wealth of archival material
from collections in Germany and Britain to develop a critical
genealogy of British ideas about Germany and National Socialism.
British propagandists invoked discourses around history, morality,
psychology, sexuality and religion in order to conceive of an
audience susceptible to morale subversion. Revealing much about the
contours of mid-century European thought and the origins of our own
heavily propagandised world, this book provides unique insights for
anyone researching British history, the Second World War, or the
fight against fascism.
For six decades, John Knoepfle has been writing poems, and he's
still going strong. Knoepfle writes love poems, among the best we
have, of the joys, loneliness, danger and the infinite
transformations of marriage. He writes narrative poems, surreal,
sardonic and magical about astronauts on the moon or an angry
farmer and a prophetic owl. He recovers the stories of folks who
never made it into the history books. Always he has a respect for
the spoken word and lays his lines out on the page so that you too
can hear it. And a spiritual force runs through his books like the
slow and powerful rivers of the Midwest he inhabits. Both moving
and humorous, Knoepfle's autobiography shows us how by hard work
and lucky accident he came to be the poet he is.
View the Table of Contents. Read the Preface.
"Laboras Home Front is an outstanding contribution. Balanced and
fair-minded, Kerstenas richly documented account puts the AFL at
the center of wartime labor relations and domestic history
generally. . . . Kersten also sheds new light on the key role of
the AFL in the emergence of social democratic liberalism during the
era of World War II."
--Robert H. Zieger, University of Florida
"Labor's Home Front is the work of a careful and thorough
historian. Kersten establishes the centrality of the often
neglected American Federation of Labor to the story of labor's
uphill efforts during World War II to breathe life into the lofty
ideals embodied in the Four Freedoms. He skillfully weaves his case
studies--on gender, race, union rivalries, safety, the open shop,
and postwar planning--into a narrative fully attentive to the
evolution of the Federation's ideology and politics, poignantly
conveying the spirit of sacrifice and suffering without
romanticizing his subjects. This is a genuinely important
book."
--Eric Arnesen, author of "Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad
Workers and the Struggle for Equality"
One of the oldest, strongest, and largest labor organizations in
the U.S., the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had 4 million
members in over 20,000 union locals during World War II. The AFL
played a key role in wartime production and was a major actor in
the contentious relationship between the state, organized labor,
and the working class in the 1940s. The war years are pivotal in
the history of American labor, but books on the AFL's experiences
are scant, with far more on the radical Congress of Industrial
Unions(CIO).
Andrew E. Kersten closes this gap with Labor's Home Front,
challenging us to reconsider the AFL and its influence on
twentieth-century history. Kersten details the union's
contributions to wartime labor relations, its opposition to the
open shop movement, divided support for fair employment and equity
for women and African American workers, its constant battles with
the CIO, and its significant efforts to reshape American society,
economics, and politics after the war. Throughout, Kersten frames
his narrative with an original, central theme: that despite its
conservative nature, the AFL was dramatically transformed during
World War II, becoming a more powerful progressive force that
pushed for liberal change.
The War for Legitimacy in Politics and Culture 1936-1946 presents
the first investigation of how the phenomenon of political
legitimacy operated within Europe's political cultures during the
period of the Second World War. Amidst the upheavals of that
turbulent period in Europe's twentieth-century history, a wide
variety of contenders for power emerged, each of which claimed to
possess the right to rule.Exploring political discourse, state
propaganda, and high and low culture, the book argues that
legitimacy lay not with rulers, and still less in the barrel of a
gun, but in the values behind differing approaches to "good"
government. An important contribution to the study of the political
culture of wartime Europe, this volume will be essential reading
for both political scientists and twentieth-century historians.
"Al Ataque" is an excellent book that describes the preparation a
bomb group goes through before being deployed overseas as well as
the problems of shipping some five thousand men and supplies along
with some eighty B-24 aircraft from a stateside base to a foreign
country. The book then details the establishment of Torretta Field
that was used by the 461st for the duration of the war in Europe.
The 461st Bomb Group flew two hundred and twenty-three combat
missions between April 1944 and April 1945. Each of these is
described in the book. Personal experiences of veterans who were
actually part of the 461st are included.
For five horrifying years in Vilna, the Vilna ghetto, and
concentration camps in Estonia, Herman Kruk recorded his own
experiences as well as the life and death of the Jewish community
of the city symbolically called "The Jerusalem of Lithuania." This
unique chronicle includes many recovered pages of Kruk's diaries
and provides a powerful eyewitness account of the annihilation of
the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe. This volume includes the
Yiddish edition of Kruk's diaries, published in 1961 and translated
here for the first time, as well as many widely scattered pages of
the chronicles, collected here for the first time and meticulously
deciphered, translated, and annotated. Kruk describes vividly the
collapse of Poland in September, 1939, life as a refugee in Vilna,
the manhunt that destroyed most of Vilna Jewry in the summer of
1941, the creation of a ghetto and the persecution and self-rule of
the remnants of the "Jerusalem of Lithuania," the internment of the
last survivors in concentration camps in Estonia, and their brutal
deaths. Kruk scribbled his final diary entry on September 17, 1944,
managing to bury the small, loose pages of his manuscript just
hours before he and other camp inmates were shot to death and their
bodies burnt on a pyre. Kruk's writings illuminate the tragedy of
the Vilna Jews and their courageous efforts to maintain an
ideological, social, and cultural life even as their world was
being destroyed. To read Kruk's day-by-day account of the unfolding
of the Holocaust is to discern the possibilities for human courage
and perseverance even in the face of profound fear. Co-published
with the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research
"The Oryx Holocaust Sourcebook" provides a comprehensive
selection of high quality resources in the field of Holocaust
studies. The "Sourcebook's" 17 chapters cover general reference
works; narrative histories; monographs in the social sciences;
fiction, drama, and poetry; books for children and young adults;
periodicals; primary sources; electronic resources in various
formats; audiovisual materials; photographs; music; film and video;
educational and teaching materials; and information on
organizations, museums, and memorials. In addition, each chapter
begins with a concise overview essay. The book also includes a
preface, and index, and an appendix listing general distributors
and vendors of Holocaust materials.
Drawn from a wide array of scholarly disciplines ranging across
the humanities and social sciences, the items included in each
chapter were selected using the following criteria: (1) current
availability for use or purchase; (2) availability in English,
unless a non-English item was too significant to exclude; (3)
scholarly legitimacy, meaning it is recognized as a work of
authentic scholarship that contributes to advancement of knowledge
in the field; (4) relationship to topical categories for study of
the Holocaust as noted in the Curriculum Guidelines of the
Association of Holocaust Organizations, as listed in major
bibliographic works, and as used as topics in the contents of
Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the leading journal in the field;
and, (5) in the case of online resources (Internet sites),
adherence to standards of scholarly documentation established by
learned societies or recognized by reputable scholarly
institutions, as well as the display of accurate and credible
content about the Holocaust drawn from reputable scholarship.
A topical presentation of firsthand accounts from some of the
thousands of army and navy nurses who served both stateside and
overseas during World War II, this book tells the stories of the
brave women who used any and all resources to save as many lives as
possible. Although military nurses could have made more money as
civilians, thousands chose to leave the warmth and security of home
to care for the young men who went off to war. They were not saints
but vibrant women whose performance changed the face of both
military and civilian nursing. Jackson's account follows both army
and navy nurses from the time they joined the military, through
their active service, to their lives today.
The jobs done by military nurses were valuable and varied. Some
worked in clean stateside hospitals. Some found themselves nursing
in tents or bombed-out buildings. Others entered hospitals so
recently occupied by Axis forces that Nazi propaganda still covered
the walls. While often treating ordinary accidents and illnesses,
they were responsible for men with wounds so disfiguring that it
took all of their willpower to maintain the hopeful attitude that
the men so desperately required. From the humorous account of a
nurse in her forties, who joined the war effort despite the smirks
of those much younger, to the sorrow shared when men and women were
separated and became prisoners of war, these are the stories of
women who lived under extraordinary circumstances in an amazing
time, women who, even today, bear emotional scars along with their
lasting pride.
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