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Books > Social sciences > Warfare & defence > War & defence operations
In 1914, the Associated Newspapers sent correspondent Herbert Corey
to Europe on the day Great Britain declared war on Germany. During
the Great War that followed, Corey reported from France, Britain,
and Germany, visiting the German lines on both the western and
eastern fronts. He also reported from Greece, Italy, Switzerland,
Holland, Belgium, and Serbia. When the Armistice was signed in
November 1918, Corey defied the rules of the American Expeditionary
Forces and crossed into Germany. He covered the Paris Peace
Conference the following year. No other foreign correspondent
matched the longevity of his reporting during World War I. Until
recently, however, his unpublished memoir lay largely unnoticed
among his papers in the Library of Congress. With publication of
Herbert Corey's Great War, coeditors Peter Finn and John Maxwell
Hamilton reestablish Corey's name in the annals of American war
reporting. As a correspondent, he defies easy comparison. He
approximates Ernie Pyle in his sympathetic interest in the American
foot soldier, but he also told stories about troops on the other
side and about noncombatants. He is especially illuminating on the
obstacles reporters faced in conveying the story of the Great War
to Americans. As his memoir makes clear, Corey didn't believe he
was in Europe to serve the Allies. He viewed himself as an
outsider, one who was deeply ambivalent about the entry of the
United States into the war. His idiosyncratic, opinionated, and
very American voice makes for compelling reading.
Marthie Voigt (nooi Prinsloo) is in 1931 in Suidwes-Afrika gebore;
die vierde van ses kinders. Wat volg is ’n groot avontuur. Marthie
word groot in die wye en ongetemde vlaktes van Angola. Die
Prinsloo-gesin trek baie rond agter goeie weiding en gesonder
toestande aan. Die lewe in ongerepte Angola het ook sy gevare en
Marthie beleef groot hartseer toe haar sussie op 19 sterf aan
malaria. Nadat Marthie trou met Carl-Wilhelm Voigt en hulle hul
gevestig het op haar skoonouers se koffieplaas, begin die onheil in
Angola roer. Ongelukkig breek daar oorlog uit en die Voigts moet
hulle plaas net so los. Hulle speel ’n groot rol daarin om
vlugtelinge uit Angola te versorg. Marthie Voigt het haar
ongelooflike herinneringe aan hierdie historiese en persoonlike
gebeurtenisse neergeskryf sodat wanneer ’n mens dit lees, dit
glashelder voor jou geestesoog afspeel. ’n Wonderlike lewensverhaal
uit die pen van ’n sterk, intelligente vrou.
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.
Lew Wallace (1827-1905) won fame for his novel, Ben-Hur, and for
his negotiations with William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid, during
the Lincoln County Wars of 1878-81. He was a successful lawyer, a
notable Indiana politician, and a capable military administrator.
And yet, as history and his own memoir tell us, Wallace would have
traded all these accolades for a moment of military glory in the
Civil War to save the Union. Where previous accounts have sought to
discredit or defend Wallace's performance as a general in the war,
author Christopher R. Mortenson takes a more nuanced approach.
Combining military biography, historical analysis, and political
insight, Politician in Uniform provides an expanded and balanced
view of Wallace's military career - and offers the reader a new
understanding of the experience of a voluntary general like Lew
Wallace. A rising politician from Indiana, Wallace became a Civil
War general through his political connections. While he had much
success as a regimental commander, he ran into trouble at the
brigade and division levels. A natural rivalry and tension between
West Pointers and political generals might have accounted for some
of these difficulties, but many, as Mortenson shows us, were of
Wallace's own making. A temperamental officer with a ""rough""
conception of manhood, Wallace often found his mentors wanting,
disrespected his superiors, and vigorously sought opportunities for
glorious action in the field, only to perform poorly when given the
chance. Despite his flaws, Mortenson notes, Wallace contributed
both politically and militarily to the war effort - in the fight
for Fort Donelson and at the Battle of Shiloh, in the defense of
Cincinnati and southern Indiana, and in the administration of
Baltimore and the Middle Department. Detailing these and other
instances of Wallace's success along with his weaknesses and
failures, Mortenson provides an unusually thorough and instructive
picture of this complicated character in his military service. His
book clearly demonstrates the unique complexities of evaluating the
performance of a politician in uniform.
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