Aerial Warfare: A Very Short Introduction

Author(s):  
Frank Ledwidge

Aerial warfare has dominated war-making for over 100 years, and despite regular announcements of its demise, it shows no sign of becoming obsolete. Aerial Warfare: A Very Short Introduction looks at the history of aerial warfare, introducing the major battles, crises, and controversies where air power has taken centre stage, and the changes in technology and air power capabilities over time. Highlighting the role played by air power in the First and Second World Wars, it also sheds light on the lesser-known theatres where the roles of air forces have been clearly decisive in conflicts in Africa, South America, and Asia. It also considers whether there is a future for manned air power.

Total War ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 157-176
Author(s):  
Joy Damousi

In October 1949, in the closing month of the Greek Civil War, a young soldier named Pandelis Klinkatsis was killed stepping on a landmine in Northern Greece. Pandelis was my uncle. The announcement of his death devastated his immediate family including my mother Sophia. I focus this chapter on the individual story of the loss of my uncle and my mother’s grief to cast a wider canvas on the emotions of war and their enduring legacies. This story explores the repercussions of war such as migration, the impact on sibling and romantic love, absence and separation during and after war. It examines the implications of these displacements in writing an emotional history of war. Such a history is typically conveyed through oral storytelling, and oral history forms the basis of the narrative. But there are two other ways in which the memory and emotion of war experience are kept alive in a transnational world. The first expression is in the form of photography, the second is the role grave sites play in the nexus between mourning and memory over time. Pandelis’s story takes us to Greece, Austria, America, and Australia. I argue that it encapsulates the complex geographical and emotional fragments created by war, which are manifest in love and death, mourning and memory, in a transnational context across four countries. Both the Second World War and the Greek Civil War created a landscape of emotions—the legacies of which are indelible—and continue to the present day.


Author(s):  
Robert J. McMahon

The Cold War: A Very Short Introduction discusses the Cold War, which dominated international life from the end of the Second World War to the fall of the Berlin Wall. But how did the dispute begin, and why did it move from its origins in post-war Europe to encompass virtually every corner of the globe? This VSI considers these questions and more, providing a truly international history of the Cold War and examining its enduring legacy. It draws on the most recent scholarship and documents to offer a full analysis of all aspects of the war. These include the Vietnam War and the changing global politics since the 1970s.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (26) ◽  
pp. 429-457
Author(s):  
Katarzyna Matyja

[The Dominicans in Tarnobrzeg during the Second World War in the light of a monastic chronicle. A critical edition] The aim of the article is to edit an unknown and unused source, i.e. the chronicle of the Tarnobrzeg monastery from 1939–1945. The edition was preceded by a short introduction to the history of the Dominican community in Tarnobrzeg. For the almost entire period of the occupation, Father Fabian Madura was the prior of the monastery in Tarnobrzeg, and in his activities – also for the benefit of the needy – he was characterized by great courage. He acted on many levels: among others he organized aid for the displaced persons from Wielkopolska, or a kitchen for the poorest. He was active in ministry: he founded a choir which performed numerous charity concerts. Other fathers and brothers who lived in the monastery helped him in all the activities. The source delivers a lot of information about the life of monks in Tarnobrzeg and the history of the city in the war period. The entries from September 1939, when the Nazis invaded the city, are particularly interesting, as well as from the turn of July and August 1944 – at that time Tarnobrzeg was „liberated” by the Soviet army. As a result of these activities, many buildings – including those belonging to the Dominicans – were seriously damaged, which is also mentioned in the presented source.


1984 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 269-276
Author(s):  
George Philip

THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF SOUTH AMERICA COULD ALMOST be written in terms of military coups and returns to barracks. In Argentina, to take only the period since the Second world War, the military has relinquished power in 1946,1958, 1963, 1973 and 1983 (launching coups in 1955,1962,1966 and 1976). The military in Brazil, although less hyperactive than in Argentina, has relinquished power to civilians in 1945, 1955 and, incompletely so far, since 1982, while taking over government in 1954 and 1964. It seems therefore – rather paradoxically for some earlier writers on comparative politics (as was noted in the introduction) – that it is possible to speak of a military-civilian political system operating in much of South America. This features periods of military as well as civilian rule and operates largely because of a high degree of military self-confidence and the willingness of many civilians to contemplate military rule, even over a long period, with equanimity. A mere military coup, or return to barracks, need not imply a change in the political system itself. This point is not tautologous; the politica system may undergo genuine change, but only if civilian attitudes to the military (and willingness to accept military intervention) and military attitudes to civilian politics chan e fundamentally. Is there any sign that this has happened or is about to happen in the cases of Brazil and Argentina?


2007 ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
Sara Bender

The author discusses the history of the Jews of Chmielnik, a town situated 30 kilometres away from Kielce: from a short introduction covering the inter-war period, through the German invasion, ghetto formation, everyday life n the ghetto, deportations and the fate of the survivors. The author extensively describes social organisations and their activity in Chmielnik  (Judenrat, Ha Szomer ha-Cair), as well as the contacts between the Jews and the Poles.


2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 122-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Padfield

Charles Waterton was the eccentric “Lord of Walton Hall” near Wakefield in Yorkshire. His Wanderings in South America was first published in 1826; translated into French, German and Spanish, it was a best seller. He brought back wourali used by the Macoushi natives of British Guiana (now Guyana) for killing prey; there is a piece of it in the Wakefield Museum. This paper traces the history of wourali which paralyses its victims; its attempted medical use for rabies and tetanus and, though different from curare, its belated use in modern anaesthesia.


2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 305-331
Author(s):  
John Owen Havard

John Owen Havard, “‘What Freedom?’: Frankenstein, Anti-Occidentalism, and English Liberty” (pp. 305–331) “If he were vanquished,” Victor Frankenstein states of his monstrous creation in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), “I should be a free man.” But he goes on: “Alas! what freedom? such as the peasant enjoys when his family have been massacred before his eyes, his cottage burnt, his lands laid waste, and he is turned adrift, homeless, pennyless, and alone, but free.” Victor’s circumstances approximate the deracinated subject of an emergent economic liberalism, while looking to other destitute and shipwrecked heroes. Yet the ironic “freedom” described here carries an added charge, which Victor underscores when he concludes this account of his ravaged condition: “Such would be my liberty.” This essay revisits the geographic plotting of Frankenstein: the digression to the East in the nested “harem” episode, the voyage to England, the neglected episode of Victor’s imprisonment in Ireland, and the creature’s desire to live in South America. Locating Victor’s concluding appeal to his “free” condition within the novel’s expansive geography amplifies the political stakes of his downfall, calling attention to not only his own suffering but the wider trail of destruction left in his wake. Where existing critical accounts have emphasized the French Revolution and its violent aftermath, this obscures the novel’s pointed critique of a deep and tangled history of English liberty and its destructive legacies. Reexamining the novel’s geography in tandem with its use of form similarly allows us to rethink the overarching narrative design of Frankenstein, in ways that disrupt, if not more radically dislocate, existing rigid ways of thinking about the novel.


2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-93
Author(s):  
Jessica Moberg

Immediately after the Second World War Sweden was struck by a wave of sightings of strange flying objects. In some cases these mass sightings resulted in panic, particularly after authorities failed to identify them. Decades later, these phenomena were interpreted by two members of the Swedish UFO movement, Erland Sandqvist and Gösta Rehn, as alien spaceships, or UFOs. Rehn argued that ‘[t]here is nothing so dramatic in the Swedish history of UFOs as this invasion of alien fly-things’ (Rehn 1969: 50). In this article the interpretation of such sightings proposed by these authors, namely that we are visited by extraterrestrials from outer space, is approached from the perspective of myth theory. According to this mythical theme, not only are we are not alone in the universe, but also the history of humankind has been shaped by encounters with more highly-evolved alien beings. In their modern day form, these kinds of ideas about aliens and UFOs originated in the United States. The reasoning of Sandqvist and Rehn exemplifies the localization process that took place as members of the Swedish UFO movement began to produce their own narratives about aliens and UFOs. The question I will address is: in what ways do these stories change in new contexts? Texts produced by the Swedish UFO movement are analyzed as a case study of this process.


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 106-115
Author(s):  
Sindorela Doli Kryeziu

Abstract In our paper we will talk about the whole process of standardization of the Albanian language, where it has gone through a long historical route, for almost a century.When talking about standard Albanian language history and according to Albanian language literature, it is often thought that the Albanian language was standardized in the Albanian Language Orthography Congress, held in Tirana in 1972, or after the publication of the Orthographic Rules (which was a project at that time) of 1967 and the decisions of the Linguistic Conference, a conference of great importance that took place in Pristina, in 1968. All of these have influenced chronologically during a very difficult historical journey, until the standardization of the Albanian language.Considering a slightly wider and more complex view than what is often presented in Albanian language literature, we will try to describe the path (history) of the standard Albanian formation under the influence of many historical, political, social and cultural factors that are known in the history of the Albanian people. These factors have contributed to the formation of a common state, which would have, over time, a common standard language.It is fair to think that "all activity in the development of writing and the Albanian language, in the field of standardization and linguistic planning, should be seen as a single unit of Albanian culture, of course with frequent manifestations of specific polycentric organization, either because of divisions within the cultural body itself, or because of the external imposition"(Rexhep Ismajli," In Language and for Language ", Dukagjini, Peja, 1998, pp. 15-18.)


2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Julius M. Gathogo

The Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), otherwise known as Mau-Mau revolutionary movement was formed after returnees of the Second World War (1939–1945) ignited the African populace to militarily fight for land and freedom (wiyathi nai thaka). John Walton’s theory of reluctant rebels informs this article theoretically, as it is indeed the political elites who inspired this armed struggle. To do this, they held several meetings in the capital city of Nairobi, drew the war structures from the national level to the sub-location level, especially in the central region of Kenya, and tasked locals with filling in the leadership vacuums that were created. In view of this, the article seeks to unveil the revolutionary history of the Mau-Mau medical Doctor, also known as Major Judge Munene Gachau (born in 1935), whose contribution in the Kenyan war of independence (1952–1960) remains unique. This uniqueness can be attested to by considering various factors. First, he is one of the few surviving leaders who joined the guerrilla forest war while he was relatively young. Normally, the Mau-Mau War Council did not encourage people below the age of 25 to join the rebels in the forest of Mt. Kenya, Aberdare Mountains and/or other places. Nor did they encourage adults past the age of 35 to join as combatants in the forest fight. Second, he is the only known Mau-Mau rebel in Kirinyaga county of Kenya to have gone back to school after the war had ended, traveled abroad, and studied up to a Masters degree level. Third, Munene Gachau belongs in the category that joined the rebels while still relatively educated and eventually got promoted to the rank of Major, upon being confirmed as the Mau-Mau Doctor.


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