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Books > Humanities > History > World history
'The thing that haunts me most to this day is that blokes were dying and I could do bugger all about it - do you look after the bloke who you know is going to die or the bloke who's got a chance?' - Australian ex-POW doctor, 1999 During World War II, 22 000 Australian military personnel became prisoners of war under the Japanese military. Over three and a half years, 8000 died in captivity, in desperate conditions of forced labour, disease and starvation. Many of those who returned home after the war attributed their survival to the 106 Australian medical officers imprisoned alongside them. These doctors varied in age, background and experience, but they were united in their unfailing dedication to keeping as many of the men alive as possible. This is the story of those 106 doctors - their compassion, bravery and ingenuity - and their efforts in bringing back the 14 000 survivors. 'You are unfortunate in being prisoners of a country whose living standards are much lower than yours. You will often consider yourselves mistreated, while we think of you as being treated well.' - Japanese officer to Australian POWs, 1943
We Shall Suffer There chronicles the experiences of Hong Kong's Prisoners of War and civilian internees from their capture by the Japanese in December 1941, to -- for those fortunate or resourceful enough to survive -- liberation, rescue, and repatriation.
By the middle years of the nineteenth century, there seem to have been few places on the globe where British and French commercial, colonial, or religious interests could not clash; and thanks to the extent and flexibility of their sea power the two rivals were able to support these interests with naval force virtually wherever there was enough water to float a warship. The Crimean War brought the British and French navies, the most technologically advanced in the world, into alliance after many years of common hostility. It was a period of enormous technological innovation and development, witnessing the transition from sail to screw, and the birth of the ironclad. In this extensively researched and thorough study, C. I. Hamilton traces the technological development of both British and French navies and analyses the political and diplomatic policies which formed the backdrop to the naval history of the period 1840-1870. Dr Hamilton compares the two navies in a variety of important ways: their recruitment and training systems, dockyard facilities, naval administrations, strategy and tactics. His book makes a noteworthy contribution both to naval history and to our knowledge of Anglo-French relations in the nineteenth century.
This is the first comprehensive, multi-author survey of German
history that features cutting-edge syntheses of major topics by an
international team of leading scholars. Emphasizing demographic,
economic, and political history, this Handbook places German
history in a denser transnational context than any other general
history of Germany. It underscores the centrality of war to the
unfolding of German history, and shows how it dramatically affected
the development of German nationalism and the structure of German
politics. It also reaches out to scholars and students beyond the
field of history with detailed and cutting-edge chapters on
religious history and on literary history, as well as to
contemporary observers, with reflections on Germany and the
European Union, and on 'multi-cultural Germany.'
The traditional legal textbooks aim to give students of the law a synoptic overview of the present state of law in a particular area. In doing so, most books offer only a cursory assessment of how the law came to be the way it is and what economic, political and social forces were brought to bear during its evolution. This study seeks to offer students a different kind of text, which takes as its starting point the law as it was in 1945. Guiding the student through four-and-a-half decades of almost continuous legislative activity, Davies and Freedland show how the law was created, and why it looks as it does today. The history explored is from 1945 to 1990, but not including the period since Mr Major succeeded Mrs Thatcher as Prime Minister. Paul Davies is also the editor of the "Industrial Law Journal". Mark Freedland has also written "The Contract of Employment" and "Labour Law, Cases and Materials" (with Paul Davies).
Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450 was one of the most important popular uprisings to take place in England during the Middle Ages. It began as an orchestrated demonstration of political protest by the inhabitants of south-eastern England against the corruption, mismanagement, and oppression of Henry VI's government. When no assurance of any remedy came from the king the rising soon collapsed into violence. This is the first full-length study of Cade's revolt to be published this century. I. M. W. Harvey charts the course of the rebellion and its associated troubles during the early 1450s, and explores the nature of the society which gave rise to these upheavals. She makes full use of the available contemporary evidence, as well as the work of subsequent historians, in order to uncover the identities of the rebels, explain their actions, assess their relations with the magnates, and to examine their achievements. Dr Harvey's lucid and scholarly analysis of Jack Cade's rebellion helps make intelligible the eventual collapse of Henry VI's reign into the Wars of the Roses.
The civil wars that brought down the Roman Republic were fought on more than battlefields. Armed gangs infested the Italian countryside, in the city of Rome mansions were besieged, and bounty-hunters searched the streets for "public enemies." Among the astonishing stories to survive from these years is that of a young woman whose parents were killed, on the eve of her wedding, in the violence engulfing Italy. While her future husband fought overseas, she staved off a run on her father's estate. Despite an acute currency shortage, she raised money to help her fiance in exile. And when several years later, her husband, back in Rome, was declared an outlaw, she successfully hid him, worked for his pardon, and joined other Roman women in staging a public protest. The wife's tale is known only because her husband had inscribed on large slabs of marble the elaborate eulogy he gave at her funeral. Though no name is given on the inscriptions, starting as early as the seventeenth century, scholars saw saw similarities between the contents of the inscription and the story, preserved in literary sources, of one Turia, the wife of Quintus Lucretius. Although the identification remains uncertain, and in spite of the other substantial gaps in the text of the speech, the "Funeral Speech for Turia" (Laudatio Turiae), as it is still conventionally called, offers an extraordinary window into the life of a high-ranking woman at a critical moment of Roman history. In this book Josiah Osgood reconstructs the wife's life more fully than it has been before by bringing in alongside the eulogy stories of other Roman women who also contributed to their families' survival while working to end civil war. He shows too how Turia's story sheds rare light on the more hidden problems of everyday life for Romans, including a high number of childless marriages. Written with a general audience in mind, Turia: A Roman Woman's Civil War will appeal to those interested in Roman history as well as war, and the ways that war upsets society's power structures. Not only does the study come to terms with the distinctive experience of a larger group of Roman women, including the prudence they had to show to succeed , but also introduces readers to an extraordinary tribute to married love which, though from another world, speaks to us today.
An Army officer must lead men into frightening and dangerous situations and sometimes make them do things that they never thought they could do. This book recounts how British officers have led their men, and commanded their respect, from the days of Marlborough to the Second Iraq war of 2003. Anthony Clayton explores who the officers, men and now women, have been and are, where they came from, what ideals or traditions have motivated them, and their own perceptions of themselves. His account tells the fascinating story of how the role of the military officer evolved, illustrated by a selection of captivating images, and the personal memoirs, biographies and autobiographies of officers.
Gustav Stresemann was the exceptional German political figure of his time. His early death in 1929 has long been viewed as the beginning of the end for the Weimar Republic and the opening through which Hitler was able to come to power. Stresemann's personality and talents as a politican held together the coalition that provided the only serious opposition to the Nazi party in the 1920s. On his death this opposition collapsed and along with it the only chance of establishing a stable and democratic Germany at the heart of a stable Europe.
In Britain since 1789, Martin Pugh offers a stimulating introduction to the fundamental social, political and economic changes that took place in Great Britain from the late eighteenth century to the present day. In his study of this complex and fascinating period, he explores the major factors governing and determining events and asks: How and why did Britain reach her peak as a great industrial power by 1850? What has been the nature and extent of economic decline since the late-Victorian period? How, as violent, revolutionary change swept across Europe, did the aristocratic British political system give way to mass democracy with scarcely a protest? How did Britain manage to acquire a huge empire in the nineteenth century while investing so little in her armed forces? Drawing on the latest historical research, Pugh presents an accessible, concise and yet wide-ranging analysis of the factors that have shaped contemporary Britain. His study culminates in an evaluation of Britain's dilemmas at the end of this century - following the collapse of consensus politics, the rejection of Thatcherism, the emergence of New Labour and the reappraisal of Britain's relationship with Europe.
Exploration was a central and perhaps defining aspect of the West's encounters with other peoples and lands. Rather than reproduce celebratory narratives of individual heroism and national glory, this volume focuses on exploration's instrumental role in shaping a European sense of exceptionalism and its iconic importance in defining the terms of cultural engagement with other peoples. In chapters offering broad geographic range, the contributors address many of the key themes of recent research on exploration, including exploration's contribution to European imperial expansion, Western scientific knowledge, Enlightenment ideas and practices, and metropolitan print culture. They reassess indigenous peoples' responses upon first contacts with European explorers, their involvement as intermediaries in the operations of expeditions, and the complications that their prior knowledge posed for European claims of discovery. Underscoring that exploration must be seen as a process of mediation between representation and reality, this book provides a fresh and accessible introduction to the ongoing reinterpretation of exploration's role in the making of the modern world.
The role of religion in the founding of America has long been a hotly debated question. Some historians have regarded the faith of a few famous founders, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine, as evidence that the founders were deists who advocated the strict separation of church and state. Popular Christian polemicists, on the other hand, have attempted to show that virtually all of the founders were orthodox Christians in favor of state support for religion. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, a diverse array of religious traditions informed the political culture of the American founding. Faith and the Founders of the American Republic includes studies both of minority faiths, such as Islam and Judaism, and of major traditions, such as Calvinism. It also includes nuanced analysis of specific founders-Quaker John Dickinson, prominent Baptists Isaac Backus and John Leland, and Federalist Gouverneur Morris, among many others-with attention to their personal histories, faiths, constitutional philosophies, and views on the relationship between religion and the state. This volume will be a crucial resource for anyone interested in the place of faith in the founding of the American constitutional republic, from political, religious, historical, and legal perspectives.
Migration began with our origin as the human species and continues today. Each chapter of world history features distinct types of migration. The earliest migrations spread humans across the globe. Over the centuries, as our cultures, societies, and technologies evolved in different material environments, migrants conflicted, merged, and cohabited with each other, creating, entering, and leaving various city-states, kingdoms, empires, and nations. During the early modern period, migrations reconnected the continents, including through colonization and forced migrations of subject peoples, while political concepts like "citizen" and "alien" developed. In recent history, migrations changed their character as nation-states and transnational unions sought in new ways to control the peoples who migrated across their borders. This volume will explore the process of migration chronologically and also at several levels, from the illuminating example of the migration of a individual community, to larger patterns of the collective movements of major ethnic groups, to the more abstract study of the processes of emigration, migration, and immigration. This book will concentrate on substantial migrations covering long distances and involving large numbers of people. It will intentionally balance evidence from the now diverse people's of the world, for example, by highlighting an exemplary migration for each of the six chapters that highlights different trajectories and by keeping issues of gender and socio-economic class salient wherever appropriate. Further, as a major theme, the volume will consider how technology, the environment, and various polities have historically shaped human migration. Exciting new scholarship in the several fields inherent in this topic make it a particularly valuable and timely project. Each chapter will contain short individual examples, maps, illustrations, and brief quotations from diverse types of primary documents, all integrated with each other and analyzed engagingly in the text.
Calvet's Web is a study of a circle of French antiquarians, naturalists, and bibliophiles in the period 1750-1810. By using the surviving correspondence of its members, Laurence Brockliss assembles a vivid picture of the French Republic of Letters in an era of rapid change, showing how the world of scholarship relates to the movement historians call the Enlightenment and how it is torn apart, then reconstructed, in the social and political turmoil of the French Revolution.
For introductory World or Global history classes, especially those that cover the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries; upper-division courses on global imperialism in the modern era. Imperialism in the Modern World combines narrative, primary and secondary sources, and visual documents to examine global relations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The three co-editors, Professors Bowman, Chiteji, and Greene, have taught for many years global history classes in a variety of institutions. They wrote Imperialism in the Modern World to solve the problem of allowing teachers to combine primary and secondary texts easily and systematically to follow major themes in global history (some readers use primary materials exclusively. Some focus on secondary arguments). This book is more focused than other readers on the markets for those teachers who are offering more specialized world history courses--one important trend in global history is away from simply trying to cover everything to teaching real connections in more chronologically and thematically focused courses. invites students to study seriously world history from a critical framework. Too many readers offer a smorgasbord approach to world history that leaves students dazed and confused. This reader avoids that approach and will therefore solve many problems that teachers have in constructing and teaching world history courses at the introductory or upper-division levels. The reader will allow show students how to read historical documents through a hands-on demonstration in the introduction. The book also incorporates images as visual documents. Finally, the book conceives of global history in the widest possible terms; it contains pieces on political, diplomatic, economic, and military history, to be sure, but it also has selections on technology, medicine, women, the environment, social changes, and cultural patterns. Other readers can not match this text's breadth because they are chronologically and thematically so extended.
Children born out of wedlock were commonly stigmatized as "bastards" in early modern France. Deprived of inheritance, they were said to have neither kin nor kind, neither family nor nation. But why was this the case? Gentler alternatives to "bastard" existed in early modern French discourse, and many natural parents voluntarily recognized and cared for their extramarital offspring. Drawing upon a wide array of archival and published sources, Matthew Gerber has reconstructed numerous disputes over the rights and disabilities of children born out of wedlock in order to illuminate the changing legal condition and practical treatment of extramarital offspring over a period of two and half centuries. His book reveals that the exclusion of extramarital offspring from the family was perpetually contested in early modern France. Legal debate over illegitimacy carried political implications for France's dynastic monarchy. When Louis XIV, the Sun King, created a political firestorm by declaring his own extramarital offspring to be capable of inheriting the French crown, political theorists drew upon precedents of private law to argue for or against the exclusion of children born out of wedlock from the throne. Conversely, lawyers and litigants frequently invoked political interest in the course of private lawsuits involving extramarital offspring. In tracing the evolution of early modern debates over illegitimacy, Bastards offers a political history of the family from the oblique perspective of those who were theoretically excluded from it. With a cast of characters ranging from royal bastards to foundlings, Bastards offers a broad exploration of the relationship between social and political change in the early modern era. It offers new insight into the changing nature of early modern French law, revealing its evolving contribution to the historical construction of both the family and the state.
First published in 1963, F.F. Bruce's work Israel and the Nations has achieved wide recognition as an excellent introduction to the history of Israel. This new edition, revised by David F. Payne, includes some new material and an updated bibliography.
Jean Desmarets, later Sieur de Saint-Sorlin, was a late Renaissance `universal man': first Chancellor and founder-member of the Academie-francaise, last jester of the French royal court and star performer in ballets, novelist, playwright, poet, architect, inventor, and mystic. He was also the first man to publicize the notion of `a century of Louis XIV'. Hugh Gaston Hall's book examines that notion by looking afresh at Desmarets' vigorous career and relating the `century of Louis XIV' to its origins in the reign of Louis XIII. It questions historical misconceptions about Cardinal Richelieu's cultural policies and demonstrates the importance for the Court ballet of his patronage. Giovanni Bernini's illusionist sets and lighting effects for the Grand'Salle, which later became Moliere's theatre and the Opera, are discussed here in English for the first time. Desmarets' many high-level court offices, his family connections, and works - ballets, plays, poems, and religious and polemical pieces - reveal new and important links with contemporary institutions and preoccupations. In particular Dr Hall considers the plays in the light of exemplary eloquence, and considers the intentions of the Academie-francaise, and the Quarrel of the Imaginaires, in relation to royal policy and the Cartesian revolution.
Progressive unions flourished in the 1930s by working alongside federal agencies created during the New Deal. Yet in 1950, few progressive unions remained. Why? Most scholars point to domestic anti-communism and southern conservatives in Congress as the forces that diminished the New Deal state, eliminated progressive unions, and destroyed the radical potential of American liberalism. Rights Delayed: The American State and the Defeat of Progressive Unions argues that anti-communism and Congressional conservatism merely intensified the main reason for the decline of progressive unions: the New Deal state's focus on legal procedure. Initially, progressive unions thrived by embracing the procedural culture of New Deal agencies and the wartime American state. Between 1935 and 1945, unions mastered the complex rules of the NLRB and other federal entities by working with government officials. In 1946 and 1947, however, the emphasis on legal procedure made the federal state too slow to combat potentially illegal cooperation between employers and the Teamsters. Workers who supported progressive unions rallied around procedural language to stop what they considered Teamster collusion, but found themselves dependent on an ineffective federal state. The state became even less able to protect employees belonging to left-led unions after the Taft-Hartley Act's anti-communist provisions-and decisions by union leaders-limited access to the NLRB's procedures. From 1946 until 1950, progressive unions withered and eventually disappeared from the Pacific canneries as the unions failed to pay the cost of legal representation before the NLRB. Workers supporting progressive unions had embraced procedural language to claim their rights, but by 1950, those workers discovered that their rights had vanished in an endless legal discourse.
Making Slavery History focuses on how commemorative practices and
historical arguments about the American Revolution set the course
for antislavery politics in the nineteenth century. The particular
setting is a time and place in which people were hyperconscious of
their roles as historical actors and narrators: Massachusetts in
the period between the Revolution and the Civil War. This book
shows how local abolitionists, both black and white, drew on their
state's Revolutionary heritage to mobilize public opposition to
Southern slavery. When it came to securing the citizenship of free
people of color within the Commonwealth, though, black and white
abolitionists diverged in terms of how they idealized black
historical agency.
Thousands of texts, written over a period of three thousand years
on papyri and potsherds, in Egyptian, Greek, Latin, Aramaic,
Hebrew, Persian, and other languages, have transformed our
knowledge of many aspects of life in the ancient Mediterranean and
Near Eastern worlds. The Oxford Handbook of Papyrology provides an
introduction to the world of these ancient documents and literary
texts, ranging from the raw materials of writing to the languages
used, from the history of papyrology to its future, and from
practical help in reading papyri to frank opinions about the nature
of the work of papyrologists. This volume, the first major
reference work on papyrology written in English, takes account of
the important changes experienced by the discipline within
especially the last thirty years.
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