The Centre for the History of War, Media and Society
Written by Gary Willis
In 1928 the Council for the Preservation of Rural England (CPRE) produced a ‘Saint George for Rural England’ campaigning postcard. It depicted haphazardly located industry, petrol stations, road-side advertising and litter being slayed by CPRE in the image of St George. Soon, however, there was a growing threat from an entirely different direction – preparations for war.
Leave a CommentWritten by Roberto Pérez Castro
Juan Alberto (“Jack”) Adams Langley, the son of an English engineer, was born and raised in Chile. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he could have stayed comfortably in a neutral country, unbound by any recruitment or conscription by the British government. However, he travelled halfway across the world to join the Royal Air Force, where, as a Flying Officer, he was shot down in northern France in July 1944.
Leave a CommentWritten by Jerry Palmer
The majority of the nurse memoirs of the Great War, of all the combatant nations, focus overwhelmingly on their daily work; through this accumulation of detail, they demonstrate their dedication to the well-being of the soldiers, while by the same token their personal lives recede into the background. However, although they play down just how difficult nursing was under these circumstances, perhaps especially for the thousands who were volunteers with no previous medical experience, it is not difficult to work out just how draining it must have been. This is one example of a basic feature of memoirs: because they are inherently selective, what they don’t say is often as instructive as their contents.
Leave a CommentReviewed by Tony Pratley.
According to my well-thumbed copy of ‘Popular History for Dummies’, there are a few basic rules to follow. A potential blockbuster must be long enough for the summer holiday and short enough for the beach. Five hundred divided by 50 is a publisher’s basic rule of thumb. Five hundred pages divided into 50 easily digestible chapters. Unremitting action and a host of compelling characters, good but better bad, is also to be encouraged. As for prose style, a breathless simplicity is best with an occasional authorial nod and a wink. The reader ought to be left in no doubt about the happy ending.
Leave a CommentReviewed by Alison Fell
Mark Connelly’s wonderful new book would make a great companion for a tramp across the Western Front battlefields. It draws on an impressive range of primary sources: maps, letters, diaries, novels, press articles, battlefield guides and, of course, postcards, to evoke the landscapes of Northern France and Belgium that had been so devastated by the war. The landscape constitutes the point of connection between past and present, and makes you aware not only of the ghosts of soldiers who tramped the same battlefields, but of the thousands of ‘pilgrims’ – mourners, veterans and tourists – who followed in their footsteps.
Leave a CommentReviewed by Christopher Kreuzer
Published in 2019 by Palgrave Macmillan, Australian War Graves Workers and World War One: Devoted Labour for the Lost, the Unknown but not Forgotten Dead, is a multi-author collaborative work between two university academics (Fred Cahir and Sara Weuffen) and three other authors (Matt Smith, Peter Bakker and Jo Caminiti). As such, it spans the academic and public history fields, with well-chosen archival photographs, biographical vignettes, and moving personal accounts giving an insight into the gruesome nature and psychological impact of this post-war work.
Leave a CommentWritten by Natalia Kuzovova
The famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine was a genocide of the Ukrainian people that claimed the lives of 3.9 million people. The total number of demographic losses amounted to more than 4.5 million. For a long time, archival documents about the famine were classified. But the surviving Ukrainians kept talking about the fact that ‘we are being killed by hunger’, ‘we were starved to death’. Therefore, the word ‘Holodomor’ became a signifier for this famine.
Leave a CommentReviewed by Charlie Hall
It is a good time to be a historian of the Second World War. Amid the upsurge of public interest generated by the 75th and 80th anniversaries of that conflict, scholars have seemingly endless opportunities to engage with the period. Even just within Britain, and just within the last few years, there has been the launch of entirely new Second World War and Holocaust galleries at the Imperial War Museum, a range of dedicated conferences and events (most notably ‘From the Personal to the Global: Lived Experiences of the Second World War’ at the University of Edinburgh), and a whole host of new publications.
Leave a CommentWritten by Andrew McCarthy
“‘You’re in a tight corner, Richard Hannay’, I said to myself. I was crouching behind the Chesterfield in the drawing room. Von Schwabing’s men kept up a steady fire. Bullets had shattered the French windows, and the curtains billowed in the breeze. I knew that Sandy and his men were on the other side of the garden wall. If I could cut across the lawn and reach the wall, I might have a chance. I buttoned my Aquascutum, and made sure that my pistol was secure on its lanyard. I stepped through the shattered windows, and took aim at a rifleman kneeling beside a tree. A pistol bullet bored through my hat. I fired. The rifleman slumped to the ground. This was going to be a first-class show.”
2 CommentsWritten by Alisha Reid
If I asked you to picture the 1920s “New Woman”, the image that would come to your mind would most likely be based on what you have seen in films and TV shows – both old and modern – of a sexually and financially liberated woman with her short hair and vampy makeup, her boyish-figure draped in a flapper dress. This caricature is not incorrect but it is exactly that: a caricature. This style of woman is almost synonymous with Weimar German culture following the First World War. It is this “New Woman” that people remember seeing in the numerous films that German studios produced over the period. However, what people often fail to remember are the negative narratives surrounding the “New Woman” in Weimar films and the emphasis placed on abandoning this stereotype.
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