Although the Blitz has come to symbolize the experience of civilians under attack, Germany first launched air raids on Britain at the end of 1914 and continued them during the First World War. With ...the advent of air warfare, civilians far removed from traditional battle zones became a direct target of war rather than a group shielded from its impact. This is a study of how British civilians experienced and came to terms with aerial warfare during the First and Second World Wars. Memories of the World War I bombings shaped British responses to the various real and imagined war threats of the 1920s and 1930s, including the bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War and, ultimately, the Blitz itself. The processes by which different constituent bodies of the British nation responded to the arrival of air power reveal the particular role that gender played in defining civilian participation in modern war.
The United States lost thousands of troops during World War I, and the government gave next-of-kin a choice about what to do with their fallen loved ones: ship them home for burial or leave them ...permanently in Europe, in makeshift graves that would be eventually transformed into cemeteries in France, Belgium, and England. World War I marked the first war in which the United States government and military took full responsibility for the identification, burial, and memorialization of those killed in battle, and as a result, the process of burying and remembering the dead became intensely political. The government and military attempted to create a patriotic consensus on the historical memory of World War I in which war dead were not only honored but used as a symbol to legitimize America's participation in a war not fully supported by all citizens.The saga of American soldiers killed in World War I and the efforts of the living to honor them is a neglected component of United States military history, and in this fascinating yet often macabre account, Lisa M. Budreau unpacks the politics and processes of the competing interest groups involved in the three core components of commemoration: repatriation, remembrance, and return. She also describes how relatives of the fallen made pilgrimages to French battlefields, attended largely by American Legionnaires and the Gold Star Mothers, a group formed by mothers of sons killed in World War I, which exists to this day. Throughout, and with sensitivity to issues of race and gender, Bodies of War emphasizes the inherent tensions in the politics of memorialization and explores how those interests often conflicted with the needs of veterans and relatives.
Enables a reckoning with the legacy of the Forgotten War
through literary and cinematic works of cultural
memory
Though often considered "the forgotten war," lost between the end
of World War II and ...the start of the Cold War, the Korean War was,
as Daniel Y. Kim argues, a watershed event that fundamentally
reshaped both domestic conceptions of race and the interracial
dimensions of the global empire that the United States would go on
to establish. He uncovers a trail of cultural artefacts that speaks
to the trauma experienced by civilians during the conflict but also
evokes an expansive web of complicity in the suffering that they
endured.
Taking up a range of American popular media from the 1950s, Kim
offers a portrait of the Korean War as it looked to Americans while
they were experiencing it in real time. Kim expands this archive to
read a robust host of fiction from US writers like Susan Choi,
Rolando Hinojosa, Toni Morrison, and Chang-rae Lee, and the Korean
author Hwang Sok-yong. The multiple and ongoing historical
trajectories presented in these works testify to the resurgent
afterlife of this event in US cultural memory, and of its lasting
impact on multiple racialized populations, both within the US and
in Korea. The Intimacies of Conflict offers a robust,
multifaceted, and multidisciplinary analysis of the pivotal-but
often unacknowledged-consequences of the Korean War in both
domestic and transnational histories of race.
The most extensive examination yet of control across disciplines and cultural modes of expression – showing that control is the cultural logic of the 21st century
The First World War was waged through the participation not just of soldiers but of men, women, and children on the home front. Mass-produced, full-color, large-format war posters were both a sign ...and an instrument of this historic shift in warfare. War posters celebrated, in both their form and content, the modernity of the conflict. They also reached an enormous international audience through their prominent display and continual reproduction in pamphlets and magazines in every combatant nation, uniting diverse populations as viewers of the same image and bringing them closer, in an imaginary and powerful way, to the war.
Most war posters were aimed particularly at civilian populations. Posters nationalized, mobilized, and modernized those populations, thereby influencing how they viewed themselves and their activities. The home-front life-factory work, agricultural work, domestic work, the consumption and conservation of goods, as well as various forms of leisure-became, through the viewing of posters, emblematic of national identity and of each citizen's place within the collective effort to win the war.
Essays by Jay Winter, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Jennifer D. Keene, and others reveal the centrality of visual media, particularly the poster, within the specific national contexts of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States during World War I. Ultimately, posters were not merely representations of popular understanding of the war, but instruments influencing the reach, meaning, and memory of the war in subtle and pervasive ways.
The story of propaganda and patriotism in First World War Britain too often focuses on the clichés of Kitchener, ‘over by Christmas’ and the deaths of patriotic young volunteers at the Somme and ...elsewhere. A common assumption is that familiar forms of patriotism did not survive the war. However, the activities of the National War Aims Committee in 1917-18 suggest that propaganda and patriotism remained vigorous in Britain in the last years of the war. The NWAC, a semi-official Parliamentary organisation responsible for propaganda to counteract civilian war-weariness, produced masses of propaganda material aimed at re-stimulating civilian patriotism and yet remains largely unknown and rarely discussed. This book provides the first detailed study of the NWAC’s activities, propaganda and reception. It demonstrates the significant role played by the NWAC in British society after July 1917, illuminating the local network of agents and committees which conducted its operations and the party political motivations behind these. At the core of the book is a comprehensive analysis of the Committee’s propaganda. NWAC propaganda contained an underlying patriotic narrative which re-presented many familiar pre-war patriotic themes in ways that sought to encompass the experiences of civilians worn down by years of total war. By interpreting propaganda through the purposes it served, rather than the quantity of discussion of particular aspects, the book rejects common and reductive interpretations which depict propaganda as being mainly about the vilification of enemies. Through this analysis, the book makes a wider plea for deeper attention to the purposes behind patriotic language.
Situating Obama's end-of-war discourse in the historical context of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Obama, the Media, and Framing the U.S. Exit from Iraq and Afghanistan begins with a detailed comparison ...with the Bush war-on-terror security narrative before examining elements of continuity and change in post-9/11 elite rhetoric. Erika King deftly employs two case studies of presidential and media framing - the weeks surrounding the formal announcements of Obama's December 2009 'surge-then-exit' strategy from Afghanistan and the end of combat operations in Iraq in August 2010 - to explore the role of mass media in presenting presidential narratives of war and finds evidence of an interpretive disconnect between the media and a president seeking to present a more nuanced approach to keeping America safe. Eloquently scrutinizing Obama's discourse on the U.S. exit from two post-9/11 wars and contrasting the presidential endgame frame with the U.S. mainstream media's narratives of the wars’ meaning, accomplishments, and denouement provides a unique combination of qualitative content analysis and topical case studies and makes this volume an ideal resource for scholars and researchers grappling with the complicated and ever-evolving nexus of war, the president, and the media.
Shadow Lives reveals the unseen side of the '9/11 wars': their impact on the wives and families of men incarcerated in Guantanamo, or in prison or under house arrest in Britain and the US. Victoria ...Brittain shows how these families have been made socially invisible and a convenient scapegoat for the state in order to exercise arbitrary powers under the cover of the 'War on Terror'. A disturbing exposé of the perilous state of freedom and democracy in our society, the book reveals how a culture of intolerance and cruelty has left individuals at the mercy of the security services’ unverifiable accusations and punitive punishments. Both a j'accuse and a testament to the strength and humanity of the families, Shadow Lives shows the methods of incarceration and social control being used by the British state and gives a voice to the families whose lives have been turned upside down. In doing so it raises urgent questions about civil liberties which no one can afford to ignore.
Balkan genocides Mojzes, Paul
2011., 2011, 2011-10-16, 20110101
eBook
During the 20th century, the Balkan Peninsula was affected by three major waves of genocides and ethnic cleansings, some of which are still being denied today. In Balkan Genocides Paul Mojzes ...provides a balanced and detailed account of these events, placing them in their proper historical context and debunking the common misrepresentations and misunderstandings of the genocides themselves. A native of Yugoslavia, Mojzes offers new insights into the Balkan genocides, including a look at the unique role of ethnoreligiosity in these horrific events and a characterization of the first and second Balkan wars as mutual genocides. Mojzes also looks to the region's future, discussing the ongoing trials at the International Criminal Tribunal in Yugoslavia and the prospects for dealing with the lingering issues between Balkan nations and different religions. Balkan Genocides attempts to end the vicious cycle of revenge which has fueled such horrors in the past century by analyzing the terrible events and how they came to pass.
