Download or read book Strangers on the Western Front written by Guoqi Xu and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-28 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During World War I, Britain and France imported workers from their colonies to labor behind the front lines. The single largest group of support labor came not from imperial colonies, however, but from China. Xu Guoqi tells the remarkable story of the 140,000 Chinese men recruited for the Allied war effort. These laborers, mostly illiterate peasants from north China, came voluntarily and worked in Europe longer than any other group. Xu explores China’s reasons for sending its citizens to help the British and French (and, later, the Americans), the backgrounds of the workers, their difficult transit to Europe—across the Pacific, through Canada, and over the Atlantic—and their experiences with the Allied armies. It was the first encounter with Westerners for most of these Chinese peasants, and Xu also considers the story from their perspective: how they understood this distant war, the racism and suspicion they faced, and their attempts to hold on to their culture so far from home. In recovering this fascinating lost story, Xu highlights the Chinese contribution to World War I and illuminates the essential role these unsung laborers played in modern China’s search for a new national identity on the global stage.

Download or read book Strangers on the Western Front written by Guoqi Xu and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-02-18 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These laborers, mostly illiterate peasants from north China, came voluntarily and worked in Europe longer than any other group. Xu explores China's reasons for sending its citizens to help the British and French (and, later, the Americans), the backgrounds of the workers, their difficult transit to Europe---across the Pacific, through Canada, and over the Atlantic---and their experiences with the Allied armies. It was the first encounter with Westerners for most of these Chinese peasants, and Xu also considers the story from their perspective: how they understood this distant war, the racism and suspicion they faced, and their attempts to hold on to their culture so far from home. --

Download or read book Strangers in a Stranger Land written by John B. Simon and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-08-27 with total page 489 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What did it feel like to be an openly Jewish soldier fighting alongside German troops in WWII? Could a Jewish nurse work safely in a field hospital operating theater under the supervision of German army doctors? Several hundred members of Finland’s tiny Jewish community found themselves in absurd situations like this, yet not a single one was harmed by the Germans or deported to concentration or extermination camps. In fact, Finland was the only European country fighting on either side in WWII that lost not a single Jewish citizen to the Nazi’s “Final Solution.” Strangers in a Stranger Land explores the unique dilemma of Finland’s Jews in the form of a meticulously researched novel. Where did these immigrant Jews—the last in Europe to achieve citizenship status—come from? What was life like from their arrival in Finland in the early nineteenth century to the time when their grandchildren perversely found themselves on “the wrong side” of WWII? And how could young lovers plan for the future when not only their enemies but also their country’s allies threatened their very existence? Seven years researching Finland’s National Archives plus numerous in-depth interviews with surviving Finnish Jewish war veterans provide the background for a narrative exploration of love, friendship, and commitment but also uncertainty and terror under circumstances that were unique in the annals of “The Good War.” The novel’s protagonists—Benjamin, David and Rachel—adopt varying survival strategies as they struggle with involvement in a brutal conflict and questions posed by their dual loyalty as Finnish citizens and Zionists committed to the creation of a Jewish homeland. Tensions mount as the three young adults painfully work through a relationship love triangle and try to fulfill their commitments as both Jews and Finns while their country desperately seeks to extricate itself from an unwinnable war.

Download or read book Stranger to the Moon written by Evelio Rosero and published by Mountain Leopard Press. This book was released on 2022-03-03 with total page 63 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chilling allegorical novella by the masterful Colombian writer who poses timeless questions about violence and subjugation, power and freedom. Imagining the darkest of power imbalances in a dystopian world, in which the most vulnerable are held captive and wherein survival depends on the ability to remain anonymous, identity is a threat. Those who have everything would revel in the humiliation of others and identification brings with it the ultimate punishment. When hiding is no longer possible, the only choice may be to rebel. More frightening than the dystopia of Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go and with elements of the surreal to rival Kafka's Metamorphosis, Rosero's hypnotic tale builds in tension to deliver a crippling emotional punch.

Download or read book All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque and published by Random House. This book was released on 2025-01-07 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic tale of a young soldier's harrowing experiences in the trenches, widely acclaimed as the greatest war novel of all time—featuring an Introduction by historian Norman Stone. Now a Netflix Film. When twenty-year-old Paul Bäumer and his classmates enlist in the German army during World War I, they are full of youthful enthusiam. But the world of duty, culture, and progress they had been taught to believe in shatters under the first brutal bombardment in the trenches. Through the ensuing years of horror, Paul holds fast to a single vow: to fight against the principle of hate that meaninglessly pits young men of the same generation but different uniforms against one another. Erich Maria Remarque's classic novel not only portrays in vivid detail the combatants' physical and mental trauma, but dramatizes as well the tragic detachment from civilian life felt by many upon returning home. Remarque's stated intention—“to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war"—remains as powerful and relevant as ever, a century after that conflict's end." Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Download or read book An International Rediscovery of World War One written by Robert B. McCormick and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-08-31 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International contributors from the fields of political science, cultural studies, history, and literature grapple with both the local and global impact of World War I on marginal communities in China, Syria, Europe, Russia, and the Caribbean. Readers can uncover the neglected stories of this World War I as contributors draw particular attention to features of the war that are underrepresented such as Chinese contingent labor, East Prussian deportees, remittances from Syrian immigrants in the New World to struggling relatives in the Ottoman Empire, the war effort from Serbia to Martinique, and other war experiences. By redirecting focus away from the traditional areas of historical examination, such as battles on the Western Front and military strategy, this collection of chapters, international and interdisciplinary in nature, illustrates the war’s omnipresence throughout the world, in particular its effect on less studied peoples and regions. The primary objective of this volume is to examine World War I through the lens of its forgotten participants, neglected stories, and underrepresented peoples.

Download or read book Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I written by Graziella Parati and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2016-09-14 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I dialogues with the variety of texts recently published to commemorate the Great War. It explores Italian socialist pacifism, the role of women during the conflict and a dominant cultural movement, Futurism, whose leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, glorified war and enlisted in the fight. Other soldiers created documents about the war that differ from the heroic and virile endeavor that Marinetti placed at the center of his works on war. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I pays attention to the representations of the soldiers through an analysis of their letters, dominated by descriptions of the terrible hunger they suffered. In contrast, popular film absorbed the cultural lessons in Marinetti's writings and represented soldiers as modernist heroes in comedies and dramas. However, film did not shy away from representing cowards who could only be baffoons and fools in propaganda films. In another medium, the concern was to publish texts that would serve the fighting soldier and inform readers about ideological and historical motivations for the conflict. The publishing industry supported national propaganda efforts. Only socialism could endanger anti-war publication, but after its initial opposition to the conflict, socialists occupied a neutral position. Italian socialism still remained the only European socialist party that did not renege its pacifism in order to embrace nationalism and the war, but it was also not in favor of actions that would sabotage in the Italian war industry. ltalian socialism is only one feature of Italian culture that was dramatically changed during the war. WWI impacted every aspect of Italian and of European cultures. For instance, as an essay in Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I explores, the war industry needed workers. The solution was to bring Chinese men France to contribute in the war effort. After the war, they moved to other countries and in Milan, Italy, they founded one of the oldest Chinatowns in Europe, dramatically changing the human landscape of Italy as they later moved to other Italian cities. Italy and the Cultural Politics of World War I supplies essential research articles to the construction of an inclusive portrayal of WWI and Italian culture by deepening our understanding of the transformative role it played in 20th century Italy and Europe.

Download or read book The East Asian Dimension of the First World War written by Jan Schmidt and published by Campus Verlag. This book was released on 2020-03-11 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Welche Rolle spielte Ostasien im Ersten Weltkrieg? Wie sahen und bewerteten ostasiatische Beobachter den "totalen Krieg" in Europa, welche Lehren zogen sie daraus für ihre Gesellschaften? Wie verschoben sich wirtschaftliche Netzwerke durch den Krieg? Welchen Einfluss hatte er auf Ordnungsvorstellungen und Weltbilder in Ostasien? Das Ziel der neueren Geschichtsschreibung, die Globalität des Ersten Weltkriegs stärker zu erfassen, ohne seine lokalen Rückwirkungen aus dem Blick zu verlieren, verfolgt dieser Band gut 100 Jahre nach dem Beginn des Krieges am Beispiel Chinas, Japans und Koreas.

Download or read book Ecclesiastical Colony written by Ernest P. Young and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013-04-25 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The French Religious Protectorate was an institutionalized and enduring policy of the French government, based on a claim by the French state to be guardian of all Catholics in China. The expansive nature of the Protectorate's claim across nationalities elicited opposition from official and ordinary Chinese, other foreign countries, and even the pope. Yet French authorities believed their Protectorate was essential to their political prominence in the country. This book examines the dynamics of the French policy, the supporting role played in it by ecclesiastical authority, and its function in embittering Sino-foreign relations. In the 1910s, the dissidence of some missionaries and Chinese Catholics introduced turmoil inside the church itself. The rebels viewed the link between French power and the foreign-run church as prejudicial to the evangelistic project. The issue came into the open in 1916, when French authorities seized territory in the city of Tianjin on the grounds of protecting Catholics. In response, many Catholics joined in a campaign of patriotic protest, which became linked to a movement to end the subordination of the Chinese Catholic clergy to foreign missionaries and to appoint Chinese bishops. With new leadership in the Vatican sympathetic to reforms, serious steps were taken from the late 1910s to establish a Chinese-led church, but foreign bishops, their missionary societies, and the French government fought back. During the 1930s, the effort to create an indigenous church stalled. It was less than halfway to realization when the Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949. Ecclesiastical Colony reveals the powerful personalities, major debates, and complex series of events behind the turmoil that characterized the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century experience of the Catholic church in China.

Download or read book Back to the Front written by Stephen O'Shea and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2009-05-26 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: World War I is beyond the memory of almost everyone alive today. Yet it has left as deep a scar on the imaginative landscape of our century as it has on the land where it was fought. Nowhere is that more evident than on the Western Front-the sinuous, deadly line of trenches that stretched from the coast of Belgium to the border of France and Switzerland, a narrow swath of land in which so many million lives were lost. For journalist Stephen O'Shea, the legacy of the Great War is personal (both his grandfathers fought on the front lines) and cultural. Stunned by viewing the "immense wound" still visible on the battlefield of the Somme, and feeling that "history is too important to be left to the professionals," he set out to walk the entire 450 miles through no-man's-land to discover for himself and for his generation the meaning of the war. Back to the Front is a remarkable combination of vivid history and opinionated travel writing. As his walk progresses, O'Shea recreates the shocking battles of the Western Front, many now legendary-Passchendaele, the Somme, the Argonne, Verdun-and offers an impassioned perspective on the war, the state of the land, and the cultivation of memory. His consummate skill with words and details brings alive the players, famous and faceless, on that horrific stage, and makes us aware of why the Great War, indeed history itself, still matters. An evocative fusion of past and present, Back to the Front will resonate, for all who read it, as few other books on war ever have.

Download or read book Handbook Global History of Work written by Karin Hofmeester and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2017-11-20 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Coffee from East Africa, wine from California, chocolate from the Ivory Coast - all those every day products are based on labour, often produced under appalling conditions, but always involving the combination of various work processes we are often not aware of. What is the day-to-day reality for workers in various parts of the world, and how was it in the past? How do they work today, and how did they work in the past? These and many other questions comprise the field of the global history of work – a young discipline that is introduced with this handbook. In 8 thematic chapters, this book discusses these aspects of work in a global and long term perspective, paying attention to several kinds of work. Convict labour, slave and wage labour, labour migration, and workers of the textile industry, but also workers' organisation, strikes, and motivations for work are part of this first handbook of global labour history, written by the most renowned scholars of the profession.

Download or read book The Egyptian Labor Corps written by Kyle J. Anderson and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During World War I, the British Empire enlisted half a million young men, predominantly from the countryside of Egypt, in the Egyptian Labor Corps (ELC) and put them to work handling military logistics in Europe and the Middle East. British authorities reneged on their promise not to draw Egyptians into the war, and, as Kyle Anderson shows, the ELC was seen by many in Egypt as a form of slavery. The Egyptian Labor Corps tells the forgotten story of these young men, culminating in the essential part they came to play in the 1919 Egyptian Revolution. Combining sources from archives in four countries, Anderson explores Britain’s role in Egypt during this period and how the ELC came to be, as well as the experiences and hardships these men endured. As he examines the ways they coped—through music, theater, drugs, religion, strikes, and mutiny—he illustrates how Egyptian nationalists, seeing their countrymen in a state akin to slavery, began to grasp that they had been racialized as “people of color.” Documenting the history of the ELC and its work during the First World War, The Egyptian Labor Corps also provides a fascinating reinterpretation of the 1919 revolution through the lens of critical race theory.

Download or read book Chinese Grammatology written by Yurou Zhong and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Today, Chinese characters are described as a national treasure, the core of the nation’s civilizational identity. Yet for nearly half of the twentieth century, reformers waged war on the Chinese script. They declared it an archaic hindrance to modernization, portraying the ancient system of writing as a roadblock to literacy and therefore science and democracy. Movements spanning the political spectrum proposed abandonment of characters and alphabetization of Chinese writing, although in the end the Communist Party opted for character simplification. Chinese Grammatology traces the origins, transmutations, and containment of this script revolution to provide a groundbreaking account of its formative effects on Chinese literature and culture, and lasting implications for the encounter between the alphabetic and nonalphabet worlds. Yurou Zhong explores the growth of competing Romanization and Latinization movements aligned with the clashing Nationalists and Communists. She finds surprising affinities between alphabetic reform and modern Chinese literary movements and examines the politics of literacy programs and mass education against the backdrop of war and revolution. Zhong places the Chinese script revolution in the global context of a phonocentric dominance that privileges phonetic writing, contending that the eventual retention of characters constituted an anti-ethnocentric, anti-imperial critique that coincided with postwar decolonization movements and predated the emergence of Deconstructionism. By revealing the consequences of one of the biggest linguistic experiments in history, Chinese Grammatology provides an ambitious rethinking of the origins of Chinese literary modernity and the politics of the science of writing.

Download or read book Betrayed Ally written by Frances Wood and published by Pen and Sword. This book was released on 2016-10-14 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great War helped China emerge from humiliation and obscurity and take its first tentative steps as a full member of the global community.In 1912 the Qing Dynasty had ended. President Yuan Shikai, who seized power in 1914, offered the British 50,000 troops to recover the German colony in Shandong but this was refused. In 1916 China sent a vast army of labourers to Europe. In 1917 she declared war on Germany despite this effectively making the real enemy Japan an ally.The betrayal came when Japan was awarded the former German colony. This inspired the rise of Chinese nationalism and communism, enflamed by Russia. The scene was set for Japans incursions into China and thirty years of bloodshed.One hundred years on, the time is right for this accessible and authoritative account of Chinas role in The Great War and assessment of its national and international significance

Download or read book Killing Strangers written by and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-09 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bewildering feature of so much contemporary political violence is its stunning impersonality, with every city centre a potential shooting gallery; every metro system a potential bomb alley. Killing Strangers explores how acts of political violence have changed over time, becoming 'unchained' from inter-personal relationships.

Download or read book World Histories from Below written by Antoinette Burton and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2022-02-10 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History has traditionally privileged elites and their accomplishments. World Histories from Below provides an antidote, placing 'ordinary' people and subordinated subjects at the heart of the themes it explores. Arguing that disruption and dissent are overlooked agents of historical change, it takes a global view of topics including political revolution, religious conversion, labour struggles and body politics. This 2nd edition includes two additional chapters on indigenous peoples, migration and environmental histories from below. With an updated preface, this enhanced text also includes additional images and case studies to grapple with themes that have more recently come to the fore, such as populism and the environment. Offering a study of these themes from 1750 to the present day, World Histories from Below refocuses our entire approach to teaching world history.

Download or read book The Official Guide Book to Philadelphia A New Handbook for Strangers and Citizens written by Thompson Westcott and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2024-06-24 with total page 546 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.