Download or read book Bombing States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940 1945 written by Claudia Baldoli and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-06-30 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first book to treat bombing during WWII as a European phenomenon and not just the 'Blitz' on Britain and Germany. With Western Europe now at the heart of a united continent, it is even more difficult to explain how only 70 years ago European states destroyed much of the urban landscape from the air. There were many blitzes between 1940 and 1945 with an estimated 700,000 people killed. The purpose of this book is to provide the basis for a comparison of the experience of western states under the impact of bombing. In particular, it considers the political, cultural and social responses to bombing rather than the military, strategic and social dimensions which have formed the core of the discussion hitherto. This book will correct the popular perception of the British Blitz as the key bombing experience by exposing the reality of life under the bombs for communities as far apart as Brest, Palermo, and Rostock. An international panel of historians consider the issues raised amidst the bombing of human rights and protection of civilians in this seminal event in C20th history.
Download or read book Defeat and Division written by Douglas Porch and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-08-25 with total page 745 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Defeat and Division launches a definitive new account of France in the Second World War. In this first volume, Douglas Porch dissects France's 1940 collapse, the dynamics of occupation, and the rise of Charles de Gaulle's Free France crusade, culminating in the November 1942 Allied invasion of French North Africa. He captures the full sweep of France's wartime experience in Europe, Africa, and beyond, from soldiers and POWs to civilians-in-arms, colonial subjects, and foreign refugees. He recounts France's struggles to reconstruct military power within the context of a global conflict, with its armed forces shattered into warring factions and the country under Axis occupation. Disagreements over the causes of the 1940 debacle and the subsequent requirement for the armistice mirrored long-standing fractures in politics, society, and the French military itself, as efforts to reconstitute French military power crumbled into Vichy collaboration, De Gaulle's exile resistance, Alsace-Moselle occupation struggles, and a scuffle for imperial supremacy.
Download or read book The Fall of France in the Second World War written by Richard Carswell and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how the fall of France in the Second World War has been recorded by historians and remembered within society. It argues that explanations of the fall have usually revolved around the four main themes of decadence, failure, constraint and contingency. It shows that the dominant explanation claimed for many years that the fall was the inevitable consequence of a society grown rotten in the inter-war period. This view has been largely replaced among academic historians by a consensus which distinguishes between the military defeat and the political demise of the Third Republic. It emphasizes the contingent factors that led to the military defeat. At the same time it seeks to understand the constraints within which France’s policy-makers were required to act and the reasons for their policy-making failures in economics, defence and diplomacy.
Download or read book Germany and the Second World War written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1990 with total page 1186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Volume V Part II of the comprehensive and authoritative Germany and the Second World War series spans the years 1942 to 1945, and looks in closely researched detail, and against a background of growing military setbacks and disasters leading to final defeat, at the administration and ruthless exploitation of the occupied countries and of Germany's own allies, and the effect on their populations (in particular their Jews, Roma, and Sinti) and national economies. This comprehensive study of the meteoric rise to prominence of Hitler's crown prince Albert Speer, and his struggle to implement a 'total war' armaments policy in the face of opposition from the Party's Gauleiters and political rivals in the Nazi leadership, documents with a wealth of maps, diagrams, and tables the achievements of the arms drive he masterminded; a large part of this success is shown to have relied on the forced or slave labour of those under German domination. The conflicting claims of industry and the Wehrmacht for dwindling manpower resources are also considered.
Download or read book The Jews of France written by Esther Benbassa and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2001-07-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the first English-language edition of a general, synthetic history of French Jewry from antiquity to the present, Esther Benbassa tells the intriguing tale of the social, economic, and cultural vicissitudes of a people in diaspora. With verve and insight, she reveals the diversity of Jewish life throughout France's regions, while showing how Jewish identity has constantly redefined itself in a country known for both the Rights of Man and the Dreyfus affair. Beginning with late antiquity, she charts the migrations of Jews into France and traces their fortunes through the making of the French kingdom, the Revolution, the rise of modern anti-Semitism, and the current renewal of interest in Judaism. As early as the fourth century, Jews inhabited Roman Gaul, and by the reign of Charlemagne, some figured prominently at court. The perception of Jewish influence on France's rulers contributed to a clash between church and monarchy that would culminate in the mass expulsion of Jews in the fourteenth century. The book examines the re-entry of small numbers of Jews as New Christians in the Southwest and the emergence of a new French Jewish population with the country's acquisition of Alsace and Lorraine. The saga of modernity comes next, beginning with the French Revolution and the granting of citizenship to French Jews. Detailed yet quick-paced discussions of key episodes follow: progress made toward social and political integration, the shifting social and demographic profiles of Jews in the 1800s, Jewish participation in the economy and the arts, the mass migrations from Eastern Europe at the turn of the twentieth century, the Dreyfus affair, persecution under Vichy, the Holocaust, and the postwar arrival of North African Jews. Reinterpreting such themes as assimilation, acculturation, and pluralism, Benbassa finds that French Jews have integrated successfully without always risking loss of identity. Published to great acclaim in France, this book brings important current issues to bear on the study of Judaism in general, while making for dramatic reading.
Download or read book 2009 written by Massimo Mastrogregori and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Portuguese at War written by Nuno Severiano Teixeira and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2019-05-28 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From war campaigns to peacekeeping operations, The Portuguese at War presents an overview of the conflicts, wars and revolutions in which Portugal was involved from the nineteenth century to the present day. From the French invasions to the civil wars, from the African Empire to the wars of decolonisation, from belligerence in the First World War to neutrality in the Second, from participation in the Atlantic Alliance to peacekeeping operations in Kosovo, East Timor, Lebanon and Afghanistan. The book addresses the military interventions in politics and the role of the countrys political regimes in military reform: from the Liberal Revolutions to the Republic, from the military dictatorship and authoritarian regime to the 25th of April Revolution and the transition to democracy. The historical record of Portugals war involvement is not only closely aligned to international and European circumstance but to internal factors: the economy, society, public opinion and political/military power. A historical perspective must of necessity link Portuguese war excursions with the military institutions in place at the time: their recruitment system, social composition and organisation of the army, navy and air force; the military ethos; the evolution of equipment, weapons and military technologies; strategic military doctrine and how this impacted on tactics and military operations; and of course the war outcomes. Special attention is given to the effects of international isolation after the Estado Novo, and post-Cold War europeanisation. The book does not eschew the plurality of interpretative theories. Rather, it seeks to combine historical accuracy of the Portuguese at war within a highly readable literary narrative aimed not only at undergraduate and research levels, but at a broader public audience interested in the complex reach and role of Portugal in world history.
Download or read book The Fall and Rise of French Sea Power written by Hugues Canuel and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2021-04-15 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fall and Rise of French Sea Power explores the renewal of French naval power from the fall of France in 1940 through the first two decades of the Cold War. The Marine nationale continued fighting after the Armistice, a service divided against itself. The destruction of French sea power—at the hands of the Allies, the Axis, and fratricidal confrontations in the colonies—continued unabated until the scuttling of the Vichy fleet in 1942. And yet, just over twenty years after this dark day, Charles de Gaulle announced a plan to complement the country’s nuclear deterrent with a force of nuclear-powered, ballistic missile-carrying submarines. Completing the rebuilding effort that followed the nadir in Toulon, this force provided the means to make the Marine nationale a fully-fledged blue-water navy again, ready to face the complex circumstances of the Cold War. An important continuum of cooperation and bitter tensions shaped naval relations between France and the Anglo-Americans from World War II to the Cold War. The rejuvenation of a fleet nearly wiped out during the hostilities was underpinned by a succession of forced compromises, often the least bad possible, reluctantly accepted by French politicians and admirals but effectively leveraged in their pursuit of an independent naval policy within a strategy of alliance. Hugues Canuel demonstrates that the renaissance of French sea power was shaped by a naval policy formulated within a strategy of alliance closely adapted to the needs of a continental state with worldwide interests. This work fills a distinct void in the literature concerned with the evolution of naval affairs from World War II to the 1960s. The author, drawing upon extensive research through French, British, American, and NATO archives (including those made public only recently regarding the sensitive circumstances surrounding the French nuclear deterrent) maps out for readers the unique path adopted in France to rebuild a blue-water fleet during unprecedented circumstances.
Download or read book Zombie Army written by Daniel Byers and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2016-07-21 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zombie Army tells the story of Canada’s Second World War military conscripts – reluctant soldiers pejoratively referred to as “zombies” for their perceived similarity to the mindless movie monsters of the 1930s. As Byers argues, although conscripts were only liable for home defence, they also soon came to be a steady source of recruits for active duty overseas. While Canadian generals were criticized for championing an overseas army too large to maintain through voluntary enlistment – leading inevitably to calls to send conscripts to Europe – until now there has been little satisfactory explanation for why military leaders pushed for (and why politicians accepted) such a sizeable overseas force. In the first full-length book on the subject in almost forty years, Byers combines underused and newly discovered records to argue that although conscripts were only liable for home defence, they soon became a steady source of recruits from which the army found volunteers to serve overseas. He also challenges the traditional nationalist-dominated impression that Quebec participated only grudgingly in the war.
Download or read book The Library Catalogs of the Hoover Institution on War Revolution and Peace Stanford University written by Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace and published by . This book was released on 1969 with total page 840 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Music in World War II written by Pamela M. Potter and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-06 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How can music withstand the death and destruction brought on by war? Global conflicts of the 20th century fundamentally transformed not only national boundaries, power relations, and global economies, but also the arts and culture of every nation involved. An important, unacknowledged aspect of these conflicts is that they have unique musical soundtracks. Music in World War II explores how music and sound took on radically different dimensions in the United States and Europe before, during, and after World War II. Additionally, the collection examines the impact of radio and film as the disseminators of the war's musical soundtrack. Contributors contend that the European and American soundtrack of World War II was largely one of escapism rather than the lofty, solemn, heroic, and celebratory mode of "war music" in the past. Furthermore, they explore the variety of experiences of populations forced from their homes and interned in civilian and POW camps in Europe and the United States, examining how music in these environments played a crucial role in maintaining ties to an idealized "home" and constructing politicized notions of national and ethnic identity. This fascinating and well-constructed volume of essays builds understanding of the role and importance of music during periods of conflict and highlights the unique aspects of music during World War II.
Download or read book The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism 1914 1958 written by John Francis Pollard and published by Oxford History of the Christia. This book was released on 2014 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Papacy in the Age of Totalitarianism, 1914-1958 examines the most momentous years in papal history. Popes Benedict XV (1914-1922), Pius XI (1922-1939), and Pius XII (1939-1958) faced the challenges of two world wars and the Cold War, and threats posed by totalitarian dictatorships like Italian Fascism, German National Socialism, and Communism in Russia and China. The wars imposed enormous strains upon the unity of Catholics and the hostility of the totalitarian regimes to Catholicism lead to the Church facing persecution and martyrdom on a scale similar to that experienced under the Roman Empire and following the French Revolution. At the same time, these were years of growth, development, and success for the papacy. Benedict healed the wounds left by the 'modernist' witch hunt of his predecessor and re-established the papacy as an influence in international affairs through his peace diplomacy during the First World War. Pius XI resolved the 'Roman Question' with Italy and put papal finances on a sounder footing. He also helped reconcile the Catholic Church and science by establishing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and took the first steps to move the Church away from entrenched anti-Semitism. Pius XI continued his predecessor's policy of the 'indigenisation' of the missionary churches in preparation for de-colonisation. Pius XII fully embraced the media and other means of publicity, and with his infallible promulgation of the Assumption in 1950, he took papal absolutism and centralism to such heights that he has been called the 'last real pope'. Ironically, he also prepared the way for the Second Vatican Council.
Download or read book Secret Intelligence in the European States System 1918 1989 written by Jonathan Haslam and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2013-12-18 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of secret intelligence, like secret intelligence itself, is fraught with difficulties surrounding both the reliability and completeness of the sources, and the motivations behind their release—which can be the product of ongoing propaganda efforts as well as competition among agencies. Indeed, these difficulties lead to the Scylla and Charybdis of overestimating the importance of secret intelligence for foreign policy and statecraft and also underestimating its importance in these same areas—problems that generally beset the actual use of secret intelligence in modern states. But in recent decades, traditional perspectives have given ground and judgments have been revised in light of new evidence. This volume brings together a collection of essays avoiding the traditional pitfalls while carrying out the essential task of analyzing the recent evidence concerning the history of the European state system of the last century. The essays offer an array of insight across countries and across time. Together they highlight the critical importance of the prevailing domestic circumstances—technological, governmental, ideological, cultural, financial—in which intelligence operates. A keen interdisciplinary eye focused on these developments leaves us with a far more complete understanding of secret intelligence in Europe than we've had before.
Download or read book Pope Pius XII written by Margherita Marchione and published by Gracewing Publishing. This book was released on 2000 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Churches and Religion in the Second World War written by Jan Bank and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-03-24 with total page 625 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the wealth of historical literature on the Second World War, the subject of religion and churches in occupied Europe has been undervalued – until now. This critical European history is unique in delivering a rich and detailed analysis of churches and religion during the Second World War, looking at the Christian religions of occupied Europe: Catholicism, Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Orthodoxy. The authors engage with key themes such as relations between religious institutions and the occupying forces; religion as a key factor in national identity and resistance; theological answers to the Fascist and National Socialist ideologies, especially in terms of the persecution of the Jews; Christians as bystanders or protectors in the Holocaust; and religious life during the war. Churches and Religion in the Second World War will be of great value to students and scholars of European history, the Second World War and religion and theology.
Download or read book Nazi Germany and Neutral Europe During the Second World War written by Christian Leitz and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of the ambitions, activities and achievements of Methodist missionaries in northern Burma from 1887-1966 and the expulsion of the last missionaries by Ne Win. The story is told through painstaking original research in archives which contain thousands of hitherto unpublished documents and eyewitness accounts meticulously recorded by the Methodist missionaries. This accessible study constitutes a significant contribution to a very little-known area of missionary history. Leigh pulls together the themes of conflict, politics and proselytisation in to a fascinating study of great breadth. The historical nuances of the relationship between religion and governance in Burma are traced in an accessible style. This book will appeal to those teaching or studying colonial and postcolonial history, Burmese politics, and the history of missionary work.
