This is a major new history of the British army during the Great War written by three leading military historians. Ian Beckett, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly survey operations on the Western Front and throughout the rest of the world as well as the army's social history, pre-war and wartime planning and strategy, the maintenance of discipline and morale and the lasting legacy of the First World War on the army's development. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of the army between 1914 and 1918, engaging with key debates around the adequacy of British generalship and whether or not there was a significant 'learning curve' in terms of the development of operational art during the course of the war. Their findings show how, despite limitations of initiative and innovation amongst the high command, the British army did succeed in developing the effective combined arms warfare necessary for victory in 1918.

We Can Take It explores how the memory of the Second World War continues to affect British contemporary life and why the war effort holds an important place in British culture, history and national identity. Connelly explores the way in which the British memory of the Second World War was created during the war, and maintained after it through cultural artefacts such as films, comics, art, literature and toys. Connelly moves away from recent interpretations of the British war effort which have suggested that the rosy vision of cohesion, solidarity and unity is little more than a myth. Britain's role in the war is seen as something that we should be proud of, and need to come to terms with in order to eradicate problems in our national self-perception.

This is a major new history of the British army during the Great War written by three leading military historians. Ian Beckett, Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly survey operations on the Western Front and throughout the rest of the world as well as the army's social history, pre-war and wartime planning and strategy, the maintenance of discipline and morale and the lasting legacy of the First World War on the army's development. They assess the strengths and weaknesses of the army between 1914 and 1918, engaging with key debates around the adequacy of British generalship and whether or not there was a significant 'learning curve' in terms of the development of operational art during the course of the war. Their findings show how, despite limitations of initiative and innovation amongst the high command, the British army did succeed in developing the effective combined arms warfare necessary for victory in 1918.

The Ypres Times was the journal of the remembrance movement, the Ypres League. Founded in 1921, the League was the creation of Henry Beckles Willson and Beatrix Brice. Both Brice and Beckles Willson understood the crucial significance of Ypres to the British Empire, and believed it their sacred duty to maintain the memory of those who had fought and fell in its defence. As the League's journal, the Ypres Times published a huge range of material. It carried reminiscences of veterans, discussions about the rebuilding of Ypres, the developing work of the Imperial War Graves Commission in the salient, and the erection and unveiling of unit memorials. The Ypres Times reproduced for the first time, in facsimile format and bound in three volumes provides a fascinating insight into the way the British Empire's central commemorative site was understood and imagined in the twenties and thirties.

The Ypres Times was the journal of the remembrance movement, the Ypres League. Founded in 1921, the League was the creation of Henry Beckles Willson and Beatrix Brice. Both Brice and Beckles Willson understood the crucial significance of Ypres to the British Empire, and believed it their sacred duty to maintain the memory of those who had fought and fell in its defence. As the League's journal, the Ypres Times published a huge range of material. It carried reminiscences of veterans, discussions about the rebuilding of Ypres, the developing work of the Imperial War Graves Commission in the salient, and the erection and unveiling of unit memorials. The Ypres Times reproduced for the first time, in facsimile format and bound in three volumes provides a fascinating insight into the way the British Empire's central commemorative site was understood and imagined in the twenties and thirties.

Visitors to the battlefields of France and Belgium expressed pain and anguish, pride and nostalgia, and wonder and surprise at what they saw. Postcards from the Western Front chronicles the many ways in which these sites were perceived and commemorated by British people, both during the First World War and in the twenty years following the Armistice. Mark Connelly’s definitive and engaging study of the former Western Front examines how different and distinctive sub-communities – regional, ethnic and religious, civilian and armed forces – influenced the depth and strength of the visiting public’s relationship with the battlefields, all the while comparing and contrasting this relationship with the viewpoint of the French and Belgian inhabitants of the devastated regions. Connelly draws from a vast archive a number of interlocking themes, including the lingering presence of the battlefields in the British domestic imagination, the often fraught experience of visiting the battlefields, memorials and cemeteries functioning as part of a historical testimony to wartime realities, and the interactions between visitors and the people living in these former fighting zones. Focusing on French and Belgian sites, Connelly nevertheless provides insight into other major battlefields fought over by troops from the British Empire. Extensively illustrated with black and white photographs, Postcards from the Western Front offers a groundbreaking perspective on landscapes that rarely left anyone – whether tourist, inhabitant, veteran, or pilgrim – unmoved.

This detailed case study of a part of London shows how both the survivors and the bereaved sought to come to terms with the losses and implications of the Great War. The modern idea that the Great War was regarded as a futile waste of life by British society in the disillusioned 1920s and 1930s is here called into question by Mark Connelly. Through a detailed local study of a district containing a wide variety of religious, economic and social variations, he shows how both the survivors and the bereaved came to terms with the losses and implications of the Great War. His study illustrates the ways in which communitiesas diverse as the Irish Catholics of Wapping, the Jews of Stepney and the Presbyterian ex-patriate Scots of Ilford, thanks to the actions of the local agents of authority and influence - clergymen, rabbis, councillors, teachers and employers - shaped the memory of their dead and created a very definite history of the war. Close focus on the planning of, fund-raising for, and erection of war memorials expands to a wider examination of how those memorials became a focus for a continuing need to remember, particularly each year on Armistice Day. Mark Connelly is Professor of Modern British Military History, University of Kent.

The Ypres Times was the journal of the remembrance movement, the Ypres League. Founded in 1921, the League was the creation of Henry Beckles Willson and Beatrix Brice. Both Brice and Beckles Willson understood the crucial significance of Ypres to the British Empire, and believed it their sacred duty to maintain the memory of those who had fought and fell in its defence. As the League's journal, the Ypres Times published a huge range of material. It carried reminiscences of veterans, discussions about the rebuilding of Ypres, the developing work of the Imperial War Graves Commission in the salient, and the erection and unveiling of unit memorials. The Ypres Times reproduced for the first time, in facsimile format and bound in three volumes provides a fascinating insight into the way the British Empire's central commemorative site was understood and imagined in the twenties and thirties.

This open access volume presents the latest research in propaganda studies, featuring contributions from a range of leading scholars and covering the most cutting-edge scholarship in the study of propaganda from World War I to the present. Propaganda has always played a key role in shaping attitudes during periods of conflict and the academic study of propaganda, commencing in earnest in 1915, has never really left us. We continue to want to understand propaganda's inner-workings and, in doing so, to control and confine its influence. We remain anxious about pernicious information warfare campaigns, especially those that seemingly endanger liberal democracy or freedom of thought. What are the challenges, then, of studying propaganda studies in the twenty-first century? Much scholarship remains locked into the study of state-led campaigns, however an area of special concern in recent years has been the loss of official control over the basic instruments of mass communication. This has been seen in the rise of 'fake news' and the ability of non-state actors to influence political events. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

Propaganda has been a major tool of war from the earliest times and has never been more vital, and had no greater effect, than in the 20th century - a time of continuous global conflict and two world wars. This title includes contributions from leading academics, media professionals and from the armed services. All aspects are covered: the Press; radio and television, state information services; "virtual war" and psychological operations. The 20th century has seen major shifts in the relationship between war and propaganda, fuelled by the huge technological advances, making propaganda and censorship increasingly potent weapons. The text covers conflict from the Boer War, British and German propaganda in World War I and World War II, the Cold War, the Gulf War and Kosovo. An important aspect - not generally realized except among media professionals - is the control of propaganda by the Ministry of Defence which has access to the largest single television audience in the world through "BBC World". The role of propaganda in the "war against terror" is also analysed in detail.

The films made by the British Instructional Films (BIF) company in the decade following the end of the First World War helped to shape the way in which that war was remembered. This is both a work of cinema history and a study of the public's memory of WW1. By the early twenties, the British film industry was struggling to cope with the power of Hollywood and government help was needed to guarantee its survival. The 1927 Cinematograph Films Act was intended to support the domestic film industry by requiring British cinemas to show a quota of domestically produced films each year. The Act was not the sole saviour of British cinema, but the government intervention did allow the domestic industry to exploit the talents of an emerging group of younger filmmakers including Michael Balcon, Walter Summers and Alfred Hitchcock, who directed the most influential of these BIF war constructions. This book shows that the films are micro-histories revealing huge amounts about perceptions of the Great War, national and imperial identities, the role of cinema as a shaper of attitudes and identities, power relations between Britain and the USA and the nature of popular culture as an international contest in its own right.

Three generations of critics have commented on the parallels between George Orwell and his favorite novelist, George Gissing. I am a great fan of his, Orwell wrote in 1948, proclaiming that England has produced very few better novelists. This in-depth study reveals that Orwell drew heavily on the Gissing novels he admired in shaping his own. Gissing's New Grub Street and The Odd Women directly influenced Orwell's Depression-era novels Keep the Aspidstra Flying and A Clergyman's Daughter. Even Orwell's most imaginative work, Animal Farm, mirrors Gissing's own novel of a failed Socialist Utopia, Demos. Gissing was Orwell's role model and alter ego. Gissing provided him with a touchstone to his beliefs, his pessimism, his love of Dickens and cozy corners, his suspicion of progress, his restless sexuality. To understand Orwell fully, one must first read Gissing.

In 1914, Ypres was a sleepy Belgian city admired for its magnificent Gothic architecture. The arrival of the rival armies in October 1914 transformed it into a place known throughout the world, each of the combatants associating the place with it its own particular palette of values and imagery. It is now at the heart of First World War battlefield tourism, with much of it's economy devoted to serving the interests of visitors from across the world. The surrounding countryside is dominated by memorials, cemeteries, and museums, many of which were erected in the 1920s and 1930s, but the number of which are being constantly added to as fascination with the region increases. Mark Connelly and Stefan Goebel explore the ways in which Ypres has been understood and interpreted by Britain and the Commonwealth, Belgium, France, and Germany, including the variants developed by the Nazis, looking at the ways in which different groups have struggled to impose their own narratives on the city and the region around it. They explore the city's growth as a tourist destination and examine the sometimes tricky relationship between local people and battlefield visitors, on the spectrum between respectful pilgrims and tourists seeking shocks and thrills. The result of new and extensive archival research across a number of countries, this new volume in the Great Battles series offers an innovative overview of the development of a critical site of Great War memory.

Visitors to the battlefields of France and Belgium expressed pain and anguish, pride and nostalgia, and wonder and surprise at what they saw. Postcards from the Western Front chronicles the many ways in which these sites were perceived and commemorated by British people, both during the First World War and in the twenty years following the Armistice. Mark Connelly's definitive and engaging study of the former Western Front examines how different and distinctive sub-communities - regional, ethnic and religious, civilian and armed forces - influenced the depth and strength of the visiting public's relationship with the battlefields, all the while comparing and contrasting this relationship with the viewpoint of the French and Belgian inhabitants of the devastated regions. Connelly draws from a vast archive a number of interlocking themes, including the lingering presence of the battlefields in the British domestic imagination, the often fraught experience of visiting the battlefields, memorials and cemeteries functioning as part of a historical testimony to wartime realities, and the interactions between visitors and the people living in these former fighting zones. Focusing on French and Belgian sites, Connelly nevertheless provides insight into other major battlefields fought over by troops from the British Empire. Extensively illustrated with black and white photographs, Postcards from the Western Front offers a groundbreaking perspective on landscapes that rarely left anyone - whether tourist, inhabitant, veteran, or pilgrim - unmoved.

This open access volume presents the latest research in propaganda studies, featuring contributions from a range of leading scholars and covering the most cutting-edge scholarship in the study of propaganda from World War I to the present. Propaganda has always played a key role in shaping attitudes during periods of conflict and the academic study of propaganda, commencing in earnest in 1915, has never really left us. We continue to want to understand propaganda's inner-workings and, in doing so, to control and confine its influence. We remain anxious about pernicious information warfare campaigns, especially those that seemingly endanger liberal democracy or freedom of thought. What are the challenges, then, of studying propaganda studies in the twenty-first century? Much scholarship remains locked into the study of state-led campaigns, however an area of special concern in recent years has been the loss of official control over the basic instruments of mass communication. This has been seen in the rise of 'fake news' and the ability of non-state actors to influence political events. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollection.com. Open access was funded by Knowledge Unlatched.

George Orwell (1903-1950) is one of the most influential authors in the English language. His landmark novels Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) have been translated into many foreign languages and inspired numerous stage and film adaptations. His well-known essays, "A Hanging" and "Shooting an Elephant", are widely anthologized and often taught in college composition classes. The writer is credited with inventing the terms "Big Brother", "thought crime", "unperson" and "double think". His name itself has become an adjective - "Orwellian." Seventy years after its publication, 1984 remains very popular, its sales surging in an era of enhanced surveillance and media manipulation. This literary companion provides an extensive chronology and 175 entries about both his literary works and personal life. Also included are discussion questions and research topics, notable quotations by Orwell and an extensive bibliography of related sources.

A three-time National Book Award for Fiction winner, Saul Bellow (1915-2005) is one of the most highly regarded American authors to emerge since World War II. His 60-year career produced 14 novels and novellas, two volumes of nonfiction, short story collections, plays and a book of collected letters. His 1953 breakthrough novel The Adventures of Augie March was followed by Seize the Day (1956), Herzog (1964) and Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970). His Humboldt's Gift won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 and contributed to his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature that year. This literary companion provides more than 200 entries about his works, literary characters, events and persons in his life. Also included are an introduction and overview of Bellow's life, statements made by him during interviews, suggestions for writing and further study and an extensive bibliography.

The role of Bomber Command in the Second World War is still shrouded in mystery. This book provides a new story of the campaign and is both a military history and an investigation as to how the modern image has come about. There have been hundreds of books about the RAF and Bomber Command ranging from highly researched histories, technical studies of the aircraft, to popular works; as well as countless films, television shows and newspaper reportage. Mark Connelly draws together all the strands to look at the image created by this outpouring. Reaching for the Stars shows why Bomber Command, in one of the largest and bloodiest campaigns of the war - with 55,000 aircrew lost and more officer fatalities than in World War I - has received so much attention yet is still a 'lost and black sheep' among British wartime glories.

In its 80+ years, the Hardy Boys series has sold more than 50 million books in 25 or more languages, and has inspired five television series and many stage plays, websites, comic books, graphic novels, and computer games. The series has shaped the way millions of American children see themselves and society, and has shaped the perceptions of America held by young people around the world. This book follows the creation and development of the series through 1979. Topics include the writing of Stratemeyer and McFarlane; the so-called ""weird period""; the Cold War and the disco age; race, class and gender; family values; and law and order. Illustrations, bibliography, appendices and index.

This book provides an original perspective on the West's most enduring social and cultural institution. The author covers all the vital themes contributing to the modern Christmas: its Anglo-German origins and the idea of the bourgeois Christmas expressing family virtues; the need for a touchstone with the past in an age of rapid expansion and thus the myth of Merrie England; and the revival of English music: in short, all the elements making up the modern Christmas.

The period 1902-1914 was one of great change for the British army. The experience of the South African War (1899-1902) had been a profound shock and it led to a period of intense introspection in order to determine the strengths and weaknesses of the force. As a result of a series of investigations and government-led reorganisation, the army embarked on a series of reforms to improve its recruitment, standards of professionalism, training, and preparation for war. Until now many of the studies covering this period have tended to look at the army in a top-down manner, and have often concluded that the reform process was extremely beneficial to the army leading it to be the most efficient force in Europe by the outbreak of war in 1914. Bowman and Connelly take a different approach. The Edwardian Army takes a bottom-up perspective and examines the many difficulties the army experienced trying to incorporate the reforms demanded by government and the army's high command. It reveals that although many good ideas were devised, the severely overstretched army was never in a position to act on them and that few regimental officers had the opportunity, or even the desire, to change their approach. Unable to shake-off the feeling that the army's primary purpose was to garrison and police the British Empire, it was by no means as well prepared for European continental warfare as many have presumed.

This book fully revises standard regimental history by establishing the framework and background to the regiment's role in the Great War. It tests the current theories about the British army in the war and some of the conclusions of modern military historians. In recent years a fascinating reassessment of the combat performance of the British Army in the Great War has stressed the fact that the British Army ascended a 'learning curve' during the conflict resulting in a modern military machine of awesome power. Research carried out thus far has been on a grand scale with very few examinations of smaller units. This study of the battalion of the Buffs has tested these theoretical ideas. The central questions addressed in this study are: * The factors that dominated the officer-man relationship during the war. * How identity and combat efficiency was maintained in the light of heavy casualties. * The relative importance of individual characters to the efficiency of a battalion as opposed to the 'managerial structures' of the BEF. * The importance of brigade and division to the performance of a battalion. * The effective understanding and deployment of new weapons. * The reactions of individual men to the trials of war. * The personal and private reactions of the soldiers' communities in Kent. Using previously uncovered material, this book adds a significant new chapter to our understanding of the British army on the Western Front, and the way its home community in East Kent reacted to experience. It reveals the way in which the regiment adjusted to the shock of modern warfare, and the bloody learning curve the Buffs ascended as they shared the British Expeditionary Force's march towards final victory.

Charles Jackson (1903-1968) is best known for his novel, The Lost Weekend. Published less than a decade after the founding of AA, the novel's intense psychological portrait of an alcoholic captivated both the public and critics. But Jackson's success was short-lived. His second novel probed a subject far more daring than chemical dependency. In 1946 he published The Fall of Valor, a novel about a married professor's homosexual attachment to a young Marine captain. The critics who applauded his frank approach to alcoholism were disturbed that he would write about a subject many deemed unsuitable for fiction. This book examines the life and fiction of Charles Jackson, a pioneer gay writer who addressed taboo issues with insight and sensitivity. The closets of addiction, repressed sexuality, and violence he explored were not merely "untidy" but deadly. His stories about "outing," gay-bashing, molestation, thrill killers, and media sensationalism are more relevant today than when they appeared fifty years ago.

This book is the first and only comprehensive guide for administrators building ESL programs. The guide provides insight into the development, administration, and evaluation of programs for ESOL students. It stresses the importance of facilitating policy decisions and creating a solid infrastructure for quality programming. The variety of integrated perspectives presented enables administrators to better make valid, grounded decisions related to the education of their increasing numbers of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students.