Irish men and women in the Second World War. By Richard Doherty. Pp 319, illus. Dublin: Four Courts Press. 1999. IR£19.95.

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (124) ◽  
pp. 582-583
Author(s):  
Phyllis Gaffney
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Second World

Colossus, Codebreaking, and the Digital Age

Colossus ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Budiansky
Keyword(s):  
Digital Age ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The paths that took men and women from their ordinary lives and deposited them on the doorstep of the odd profession of cryptanalysis were always tortuous, accidental, and unpredictable. The full story of the Colossus, the pioneering electronic device developed by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) to break German teleprinter ciphers in the Second World War, is fundamentally a story of several of these accidental paths converging at a remarkable moment in the history of electronics—and of the wartime urgency that set these men and women on these odd paths. Were it not for the wartime necessity of codebreaking, and were it not for particular statistical and logical properties of the teleprinter ciphers that were so eminently suited to electronic analysis, the history of computing might have taken a very different course. The fact that Britain’s codebreakers cracked the high-level teleprinter ciphers of the German Army and Luftwaffe high command during the Second World War has been public knowledge since the 1970s. But the recent declassification of new documents about Colossus and the teleprinter ciphers, and the willingness of key participants to discuss their roles more fully, has laid bare as never before the technical challenges they faced—not to mention the intense pressures, the false steps, and the extraordinary risks and leaps of faith along the way. It has also clarified the true role that the Colossus machines played in the advent of the digital age. Though they were neither general-purpose nor stored-program computers themselves, the Colossi sparked the imaginations of many scientists, among them Alan Turing and Max Newman, who would go on to help launch the post-war revolution that ushered in the age of the digital, general-purpose, stored-program electronic computer. Yet the story of Colossus really begins not with electronics at all, but with codebreaking; and to understand how and why the Colossi were developed and to properly place their capabilities in historical context, it is necessary to understand the problem they were built to solve, and the people who were given the job of solving it.

Women Had to Wait

2021 ◽  
pp. 42-68
Author(s):  
Malcolm Crook
Keyword(s):  
Gender Gap ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Almost Everywhere ◽  
Universal Suffrage ◽  
The Subject ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Elected Office ◽  
Second World

The process of enfranchisement for women would prove still more protracted than for men. Historians highlight the fact that the female vote in France was obtained as late as 1944, almost a century after all males were enfranchised, but this surprising delay can be partly explained by the precocious arrival of universal manhood suffrage in 1848, often simply referred to as ‘universal suffrage’ by contemporaries. Almost everywhere, there was an interval between the award of votes to men and women, usually shorter where full male suffrage arrived later. This ‘gender gap’, which has been the subject of much discussion of late, was thus exaggerated in France, but women themselves were more active and inventive in demanding the franchise than is often supposed. They were standing for election and holding local office before their right to vote was finally recognized, despite the frustration of their demands, which stemmed from a gendered ideology of citizenship and the particular resistance of male politicians in parliament. In the period after the Second World War their apprenticeship in voting was rapidly accomplished and, of late, French women have achieved a high degree of parity in elected office.

“Stranger in One’s Own Country”: Afro-Germans and Post-Unification Memory Contests in Laura Horelli’s "Namibia Today" and the Works of Ingrid Mwangi Hutter

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justyna Balisz-Schmelz
Keyword(s):  
German Society ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Wide Spread ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
German Art ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Alternative Discourses ◽  
Second World

The article offers an analysis of the situation of black German men and women after 1989 in the context of post-unification contests of memory. In contrast to the wide-spread and relatively consensual policy of remembering the Second World War and the Holocaust, which was aimed at unification of the German society divided for 40 years, the works of Laura Horelli and Mwangi Hutter discussed in the article are examples of alternative discourses around the definition of the contemporary German identity. They question the dominant and coherent narratives present in numerous post-unification publications and exhibitions treating the specificity of Germanness and German art, and constitute an appeal to broaden the symbolic borders of Germanness.

‘England owes something to these people’: the Anglo-Irish Unemployment Insurance agreement, 1946

2012 ◽  
Vol 38 (150) ◽  
pp. 269-282 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Kelly
Keyword(s):  
Unemployment Insurance ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World ◽  
Insurance Agreement

On 19 December 1946, the Irish President, Seán T. O'Kelly, signed the Unemployment Insurance Act into law. This innocuous-sounding piece of legislation has received very little attention from historians, but was of great importance to one section of post-war Irish society. Under its terms, Dublin and London entered into a special scheme whereby Irish men and women who had served with the British forces during the Second World War were allowed to claim British unemployment insurance payments, while still resident in the twenty-six counties of independent Ireland. Coming at a time of unemployment and economic slump in Ireland, this was of crucial importance to many exservicemen. This article will explore the background, negotiation and implementation of the unemployment insurance agreement, and will speculate on the reasons why the Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, agreed to it. It will also examine the British side of the scheme and explore London's motives, both concrete and notional.

scholarly journals Résistants & Résistantes

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Phoenicia Kempel
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Female Roles ◽  
Second World

This paper explores men and women "Résistants" in France during the Second World War. Six fighters are profiled in order to distinguish both the defining elements of a resistance fighter and the differences between male and female roles in the movement.

Tsevorfene bleter: The Emergence of Yung Vilne

2001 ◽  
pp. 170-191
Author(s):  
Justin D. Cammy
Keyword(s):  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Young Men ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Cultural Life ◽  
The Social ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

This chapter examines Yung Vilne (Young Vilna, 1929–1940). In the decade preceding the outbreak of the Second World War, a group of young, unknown Yiddish poets, writers, and artists helped turn Vilna into the dominant Yiddish cultural centre in Poland. These young men and women, the majority of them from Vilna itself or its neighbouring towns, emerged at a moment when Jewish Vilna's culture was defined by its commitment to Yiddish culture and youth. Drawn together under the rubric Yung Vilne, the group synthesized the aspirations of individual members for artistic experimentation and freedom of expression with a collective concern for the social, political, and cultural life of the city. In doing so, Yung Vilne earned the distinction of being both the last of the major Yiddish avant-garde movements in inter-war Poland, and the literary group most evocative of the pressures of time and place.

scholarly journals Born in War: Canada's Postwar Engineers and Toronto's Ajax Division

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 3-27
Author(s):  
Jean-Louis Trudel
Keyword(s):  
Second World War ◽  
Special Treatment ◽  
World War ◽  
Science And Engineering ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Canadian Universities ◽  
University Of Toronto ◽  
Male Veterans ◽  
The University ◽  
Second World

ABSTRACT With the start of the Second World War, the University of Toronto's Faculty of Applied Science and Engineering embarked on an unprecedented expansion that would eventually lead it to a wartime boomtown forty kilometers to the east of its downtown campus. For three and a half years after the war, returned men and women studied engineering in the converted barracks and buildings of the Ajax shell-filling plant. The stage for the postwar engineering boom, common to many Canadian universities, and especially Toronto's, was set during this time, and some of engineering's more enduring traditions at the University of Toronto may have been reinforced by the forced seclusion of the Ajax engineers as well as by the special treatment accorded to the overwhelmingly male veterans by the faculty and staff. In many ways, the story of Ajax Division is pivotal to understanding the training of engineers at the University of Toronto since the Second World War.

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