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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > Second World War
Illustrated with detailed artworks of Japanese aircraft and their
markings, Japanese Aircraft of World War II is a detailed guide to
all the aircraft deployed by the Japanese military from the Second
Sino-Japanese War to the surrender in the Pacific in August 1945.
Organised alphabetically by manufacturer, this book includes every
type of aircraft, from fighters to seaplanes, bombers,
reconnaissance aircraft, torpedo bombers and carrier aircraft. All
the best-known types are featured, such as the Mitsubishi G4M
'Betty', Nakajima B6N2 Tenzan, Aichi B7A2 Ryusei torpedo bomber and
the world- famous Mitsubishi A6M 'Zero' fighter. The entries are
accompanied by exhaustive captions and specifications. The guide is
illustrated with profile artworks, three-views, and special cutaway
artworks of the more famous aircraft in service, such as the Aichi
D3A1 'Val', Mitsubishi A6M2 Reisen, and Nakajima Ki.27 'Nate'.
Illustrated with more than 120 artworks, Japanese Aircraft of World
War II is an essential reference guide for modellers and
enthusiasts with an interest in military aircraft of World War II.
Prospect Top 50 Thinker of 2021 British Academy Book Prize Finalist
PROSE Award Finalist "Provocative, elegantly written." -Fara
Dabhoiwala, New York Review of Books "Demonstrates how a broad
rethinking of political issues becomes possible when Western ideals
and practices are examined from the vantage point of Asia and
Africa." -Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of Books In case after
case around the globe-from Israel to Sudan-the colonial state and
the nation-state have been constructed through the politicization
of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally
manufactured minority. The model emerged in America, where genocide
and internment on reservations created a permanent native minority.
In Europe, this template would be used both by the Nazis and the
Allies. Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting
this process. Mahmood Mamdani points to inherent limitations in the
legal solution attempted at Nuremberg. Political violence demands
political solutions: not criminal justice but a rethinking of the
political community to include victims and perpetrators, bystanders
and beneficiaries. Making the radical argument that the
nation-state was born of colonialism, he calls on us to delink the
nation from the state so as to ensure equal political rights for
all who live within its boundaries. "A deeply learned account of
the origins of our modern world...Mamdani rejects the current focus
on human rights as the means to bring justice to the victims of
this colonial and postcolonial bloodshed. Instead, he calls for a
new kind of political imagination...Joining the ranks of Hannah
Arendt's Imperialism, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, and
Edward Said's Orientalism, this book is destined to become a
classic text of postcolonial studies and political theory."
-Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? "A
masterwork of historical comparison and razor-sharp political
analysis, with grave lessons about the pitfalls of forgetting,
moralizing, or criminalizing this violence. Mamdani also offers a
hopeful rejoinder in a revived politics of decolonization." -Karuna
Mantena, Columbia University "A powerfully original argument, one
that supplements political analysis with a map for our political
future." -Faisal Devji, University of Oxford
Near the end of World War II and after, a small-town Nebraska
youth, Jimmy Kugler, drew more than a hundred double-sided sheets
of comic strip stories. Over half of these six-panel tales retold
the Pacific War as fought by "Frogs" and "Toads," humanoid
creatures brutally committed to a kill-or-be-killed struggle. The
history of American youth depends primarily on adult reminiscences
of their own childhoods, adult testimony to the lives of youth
around them, or surmises based on at best a few creative artifacts.
The survival then of such a large collection of adolescent comic
strips from America's small-town Midwest is remarkable. Michael
Kugler reproduces the never-before-published comics of his father's
adolescent imagination as a microhistory of American youth in that
formative era. Also included in Into the Jungle! A Boy's Comic
Strip History of World War II are the likely comic book models for
these stories and inspiration from news coverage in newspapers,
radio, movies, and newsreels. Kugler emphasizes how US propaganda
intended to inspire patriotic support for the war gave this young
artist a license for his imagined violence. In a context of
progressive American educational reform, these violent comic
stories, often in settings modeled on the artist's small Nebraska
town, suggests a form of adolescent rebellion against moral
conventions consistent with comic art's reputation for "outsider"
or countercultural expressions. Kugler also argues that these
comics provide evidence for the transition in American taste from
war stories to the horror comics of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Kugler's thorough analysis of his father's adolescent art explains
how a small-town boy from the plains distilled the popular culture
of his day for an imagined war he could fight on his audacious,
even shocking terms.
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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