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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.
This book examines the history and influence of the Group Theatre,
the most significant acting company in America. Founded during the
Great Depression, the Group presented the first plays of Clifford
Odets, Sidney Kingsley, and William Saroyan and launched the
careers of Franchot Tone, John Garfield, Elia Kazan, Lee J. Cobb,
Karl Malden, Martin Ritt, and Luther Adler. The intense realism of
their performances inspired generations of writers, actors, and
directors in both theater and film. After the Group closed, its
former members directed or produced the Broadway plays Brigadoon, A
Streetcar Named Desire, Death of a Salesman, Camino Real, Bus Stop,
The Music Man, Equus, and Yentl. In Hollywood, Group alumni
produced, directed, or starred in the award-winning films On the
Waterfront, East of Eden, Twelve Angry Men, Hud, Fail-Safe, 1776,
Serpico, Network, Norma Rae, and The Verdict. Four of the nation's
best-known acting teachers--Lee Strasberg, Sanford Meisner, Robert
Lewis, and Stella Adler--came from the Group. The studios they
established remain the most highly regarded acting schools in the
world, with venues on four continents.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 Irish Republican Army (IRA) has for decades pursued the goal of
unifying its homeland into a single sovereign nation, ending
British rule in North Ireland. Over the years, the IRA has been
dramatized in motion pictures directed by John Ford (The Informer),
Carol Reed (Odd Man Out), David Lean (Ryan's Daughter), Neil Jordan
(Michael Collins), and many others. Such international film stars
as Liam Neeson, James Cagney, Richard Gere and Anthony Hopkins have
portrayed IRA members as heroic patriots, psychotic terrorists and
tormented rebels. This illustrated history analyzes celluloid
depictions of the IRA from the 1916 Easter Rising to the peace
process of the 1990s. Topics include America's role in creating
both the IRA and its cinematic image, the organization's brief
association with the Nazis, and critical reception of IRA films in
Ireland, Britain and the United States.
This book shows why Bomber Command, in one of the largest and bloodiest campaigns of World War II, with 55,000 aircrew lost and more officer fatalities than in World War I, has received so much attention and yet is still a "lost and black sheep" among British wartime glories. This book provides a new and revisionary narrative of the campaign and is both a military history and an investigation of how the modern image has come about.
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