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A gripping account of what it was like to be in the midst of the
Norman Invasion on D-Day and immediately afterward. Silent
parachutes dotting the night sky-that's how one woman in Normandy
in June 1944 learned that the D-Day invasion was underway. Though
they yearned for liberation, the people of Normandy steeled
themselves for further warfare, knowing that their homes, land, and
fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack. In
D-Day through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts resets our view of
the usual stories of that momentous operation, taking readers
across the Channel to view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her
history from an impressive range of gripping first-person accounts
from French citizens, reinvigorating a story we thought we knew.
The result is a fresh perspective on the heroism, sacrifice, and
achievement of D-Day.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Based
on groundbreaking original research, this book provides a
comprehensive account of the issues surrounding pregnancy and
parenthood for young people in and leaving care. Featuring the
voices of care-experienced parents, together with reflections from
practitioners, it offers valuable insights into the issues facing
this group. Using qualitative data to explore why parenthood is
such an important issue for young people in and leaving care, this
book shows what can be learned from their experiences in order to
improve outcomes for parents and children in the future. The author
highlights the practical and emotional needs of care-experienced
parents and gives clear advice for practitioners on how these needs
might be better addressed through summary points, practice guidance
and recommendations for policy and practice.
Marching across occupied France in 1944, American GI Leroy Stewart
had neither death nor glory on his mind: he was worried about his
underwear. "I ran into a new problem when we walked," Stewart
wrote, "the shorts and I didn't get along. They would crawl up on
me all the time." Complaints of physical discomfort like
Stewart's-or worse-pervade infantrymen's memories of the European
theater, whether the soldiers were British, American, German, or
French. Wet, freezing misery with no end in sight-this was life for
millions of enlisted men. Crawling underwear may have been a small
price to pay for the liberation of millions of people, but in the
utter wretchedness of the moment, it was quite natural for soldiers
like Stewart to lose sight of that end. Sheer Misery trains a
humane and unsparing eye on the corporeal experiences of the
soldiers who fought in Belgium, France, and Italy during the last
two years of the war. In the horrendously unhygienic and often
lethal conditions of the front line, their bodies broke down,
stubbornly declaring their needs for warmth, rest, and good
nutrition. Feet became too swollen to march, fingers too frozen to
pull triggers; stomachs cramped, and diarrhea stained underwear and
pants. Turning away from the accounts of high-level military
strategy that dominate many WWII histories, acclaimed historian
Mary Louise Roberts instead relies on diaries and letters to bring
to life visceral sense memories like the moans of the "screaming
meemies," the acrid smell of cordite, and the shockingly mundane
sight of rotting corpses. As Roberts writes, "For soldiers who
fought, the war was above all about their bodies. It was as bodies
that they had been recruited, trained, and deployed. Their job was
to injure and kill bodies but also be injured and killed." Told in
inimitable style by one of our most distinctive historians of the
Second World War, Sheer Misery gives readers both an unprecedented
look at the ground-level world of the common soldier and a deeply
felt rendering of the experience of being a body in war.
Despite a proliferation of legislative action in response to
differential outcomes, the relative educational, employment and
lifecourse disadvantages of individuals who have experienced the
care system remains a pressing issue of widespread international
concern. In Wales, a significant body of work has been produced on
and with care-experienced children and young people. This edited
collection attempts to highlight these valuable insights in a
single volume, with contributions from well-established and early
career scholars working in different traditions - including
education, psychology, policy studies, sociology and social work -
to provide a unique opportunity for reflection across disciplinary
boundaries and shed new light on common problems and opportunities
stimulated by research in the field of social care. The volume
introduces a range of contexts and sites - including the home, the
school, alternative educational institutions, contact centres, and
the natural environment - and reflexively explores changes and
continuities within the political and geographical landscape that
constitutes Wales. Each chapter introduces insights, reflections
and recommendations about the care system and its impacts, which
will be useful for readers across geographical contexts who are
concerned with improving the lives of children, young people and
wider family networks.
How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into
deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their
fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and
mass murder? Certainly--but if you're the US Army in 1944, you also
try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women,
waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their
liberators in oh so many ways.
That's not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we've been
given, but it's the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating
effect in "What Soldiers Do." Drawing on an incredible range of
sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials,
official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts
tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military
command systematically spread--and then exploited--the myth of
French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting
chaos--ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to
outright rape and rampant venereal disease--horrified the war-weary
and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the
blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused
serious friction between the two nations just as they were
attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the
liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty.
While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the
soldiers who took part, "What Soldiers Do" reminds us that history
is always more useful--and more interesting--when it is most
honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia
to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who
lived it.
"Like big black umbrellas, they rain down on the fields across the
way, and then disappear behind the black line of the hedges."
Silent parachutes dotting the night sky--that's how one woman in
Normandy in June of 1944 learned that the D-Day invasion was under
way. Though they yearned for liberation, the French in Normandy
nonetheless had to steel themselves for war, knowing that their
homes and land and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of
the attack. Already battered by years of Nazi occupation, they knew
they had one more trial to undergo even as freedom beckoned.
With "D-Day through French Eyes," Mary Louise Roberts turns the
usual stories of D-Day around, taking readers across the Channel to
view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her history from an
impressive range of gripping first-person accounts of the invasion
as seen by French citizens throughout the region. A farm family
notices that cabbage is missing from their garden--then discovers
that the guilty culprits are American paratroopers hiding in the
cowshed. Fishermen rescue pilots from the wreck of their B-17, only
to struggle to find clothes big enough to disguise them as
civilians. A young man learns how to estimate the altitude of
bombers and to determine whether a bomb was whistling overhead or
silently headed straight for them. In small towns across Normandy,
civilians hid wounded paratroopers, often at the risk of their own
lives. When the allied infantry arrived, they guided soldiers to
hidden paths and little-known bridges, giving them crucial
advantages over the German occupiers. Through story after story,
Roberts builds up an unprecedented picture of the face of battle as
seen by grateful, if worried, civilians.
As she did in her acclaimed account of GIs in postwar France,
"What Soldiers Do," Roberts here reinvigorates and reinvents a
story we thought we knew. The result is a fresh perspective on the
heroism, sacrifice, and achievement of D-Day.
Other ISBNs in this set include: 0548810079.
Other ISBNs in this set include: 0548808872.
Other ISBNs in this set include: 0548808872.
Other ISBNs in this set include: 0548810079.
According to most histories of French archives and libraries, the
nineteenth century was a period of slow but steady recovery from
the trauma of the revolutionary era. In contrast, Moore argues that
the organization of archives and libraries in nineteenth-century
France was neither steady nor progressive. By following the
development of the Ecole des Chartes, the state school for
archivists and librarians, Moore shows that conceptions of "order"
changed dramatically from one decade to the next. More important,
she argues that these changing notions of "order" were directly
connected to contemporary shifts in state politics. Since each new
political regime had its own conceptions of both national history
and public knowledge, each one worked to "restore order" in a
different way.
In the raucous decade following World War I, newly blurred
boundaries between male and female created fears among the French
that theirs was becoming a civilization without sexes. This new
gender confusion became a central metaphor for the War's impact on
French culture and led to a marked increase in public debate
concerning female identity and woman's proper role. Mary Louise
Roberts examines how in these debates French society came to grips
with the catastrophic horrors of the Great War.
In sources as diverse as parliamentary records, newspaper articles,
novels, medical texts, writings on sexology, and vocational
literature, Roberts discovers a central question: how to come to
terms with rapid economic, social, and cultural change and
articulate a new order of social relationships. She examines the
role of French trauma concerning the War in legislative efforts to
ban propaganda for abortion and contraception, and explains
anxieties about the decline of maternity by a crisis in gender
relations that linked soldiery, virility, and paternity.
Through these debates, Roberts locates the seeds of actual change.
She shows how the willingness to entertain, or simply the need to
condemn, nontraditional gender roles created an indecisiveness over
female identity that ultimately subverted even the most
conservative efforts to return to traditional gender roles and
irrevocably altered the social organization of gender in postwar
France.
In fin-de-siecle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender
roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new
women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who
became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained
single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the
professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of
them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living
unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside
the home.
Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women
active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand,
founder of the women's newspaper" La Fronde"; the journalists
Severine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts
demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas
allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted
gender roles. The existence of "La men--even" itself was such an
act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well
about the same subjects as men-even about the volatile Dreyfus
Affair. When female reporters for "La Fronde" put on disguises to
get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played
men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not
fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures
of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was
exposed as a choice, not a destiny.
Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, "Disruptive Acts" will be a
major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of
cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.
In fin-de-siecle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender
roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new
women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who
became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained
single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the
professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of
them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living
unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside
the home.
Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women
active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand,
founder of the women's newspaper" La Fronde"; the journalists
Severine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts
demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas
allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted
gender roles. The existence of "La men--even" itself was such an
act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well
about the same subjects as men--even about the volatile Dreyfus
Affair. When female reporters for "La Fronde" put on disguises to
get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played
men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not
fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures
of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was
exposed as a choice, not a destiny.
Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, "Disruptive Acts" will be a
major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of
cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.
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