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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > Second World War
The mass of available data about World War II has never been as
large as it is now, yet it has become increasingly complicated to
interpret it in a meaningful way. Packed with cleverly designed
graphics, charts and diagrams, World War II: Infographics offers a
new approach by telling the story of the conflict visually.
Encompassing the conflict from its roots to its aftermath, more
than 50 themes are treated in great detail, ranging from the rise
of the Far Right in pre-war Europe and mass mobilization, to
evolving military tactics and technology and the financial and
human cost of the conflict. Throughout, the shifting balance of
power between the Axis and the Allies and the global nature of the
war and its devastation are made strikingly clear.
This is beautifully slipcased presented collector' s edition of the
best selling title, The Lost World of Bletchley Park, a
comprehensive illustrated history of this remarkable place, from
its prewar heyday as a country estate, its wartime requisition and
how it became the place where modern computing was invented and the
German Enigma code was cracked, to its post-war dereliction and
then rescue towards the end of the twentieth century as a museum.
Removable memorabilia includes: 1938 recruiting memo with a big
tick against Turing' s name Churchill' s ' Action this day' letter
giving code breakers extra resources Handwritten Turing memos Top
Secret Engima decryptions, about the sinking of the Bismark, German
High Command' s assessment of D-Day threat and the message
announcing Hitler' s suicide A wealth of everyday items such as
call-up papers, security notices and propoganda posters Newly
redesigned interiors with 25% new content, high end slipcase
package featuring removable facsimile documents, this is an
essential purchase for everyone interested and wanting to
experience the place where code-breaking helped to win the war.
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.
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.
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