Marilou Awiakta

2020 ◽  
pp. 299-302

Poet, storyteller, and essayist Marilou Awiakta explores the intersection of traditional and modern Appalachian life by blending her Appalachian and Cherokee heritages with the legacy of post–World War II nuclear energy research in her hometown of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Born Marilou Bonham in Knoxville to a family with Scots-Irish and Native American roots reaching back to the 1730s, Awiakta (her middle name) was raised with an awareness of social and environmental responsibility. When Awiakta was nine, her family moved to Oak Ridge, where her father agreed to work for two years in the nuclear facility, known locally as “the secret city.” After graduating from the University of Tennessee in 1958, Awiakta moved to France with her husband, a physician with the US Air Force. While there, she worked as a liaison and translator for the base....

1999 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 239-254
Author(s):  
Alan Cook

R.V. Jones came to Churchill's notice in 1940 when he identified navigational beams for German bombers, and thereafter developed scientific intelligence throughout World War II. Dissatisfied with postwar plans for military intelligence, he became Professor of Natural Philosophy at Aberdeen and from 1946 pursued very precise measurements in physics. He became unsympathetic to academic developments that followed the Robbins Report. The Royal Air Force (RAF), the US Air Force, and intelligence circles in the USA always held him in very high repute. Many thought he never received adequate recognition for his wartime work; his Companionship of Honour came almost too late.


2003 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 107-118
Author(s):  
Joseph G. Gall

With the death of Harold Garnet (‘Mick’) Callan on 3 November 1993, the community of cell biologists lost one of the twentieth century's most profound and colourful students of chromosomes. During his 50-year scientific career the study of chromosomes and genes went from purely descriptive and morphological to deeply analytical and molecular. Steeped by training in the earlier tradition, Callan nevertheless contributed enormously to this revolution with his meticulous studies on the giant chromosomes of amphibians, all the while maintaining that he was a ‘mere cytologist’ on whom much of the molecular analysis was lost. Mick Callan and I were professional colleagues and close personal friends whose careers intersected at many points. We visited and worked in each other's laboratories, we published together, we generated a voluminous correspondence (much of it in the days when letters were handwritten), and our families enjoyed many good times together in Scotland and the USA. My most difficult task in writing this biography has been to extract from the vast amount of public and personal information in my possession those parts of Mick Callan's life and work that will be of chief interest to a broader audience. I have been helped in this by a 30 000-word autobiography written by him near the end of his life, covering the period from his birth in 1917 to the end of World War II in 1945. This account provides considerable insight into the factors that shaped his later professional career and is an engrossing account of the life of a boy in prewar England and a young man at Oxford and in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the worst days of the war. Callan's autobiography has been deposited in the University library, St Andrews, Scotland.


Author(s):  
Robert Volpicelli

Chapter 5 demonstrates how W. H. Auden’s public lecturing was deeply interconnected with his poetry writing during the World War II era. Important to this argument is the fact that Auden didn’t come to the US with the intention of conducting a lecture tour; instead, he arrived as a European émigré during the onset of World War II. Once in America, though, he started delivering lectures as a means of generating a secondary income. Taking these circumstances into account, this chapter examines how the outbreak of World War II informed Auden’s approach to public speaking. Through his work as a lecturer, the poet quickly assumed the role of a wartime correspondent. Yet his early lectures and addresses left him with deep ambivalence about how easily he could stir up the emotions of his audiences. This is an anxiety that compelled Auden to move to the university as a place of semi-detachment. The rest of this chapter thus goes on to trace how he used his poetry to develop a new mode of allegorical speech that still allowed him to address political issues from his new position within the postwar academic institution.


Author(s):  
Brian D. Laslie

On 30 September 1974, General Laurence S. Kuter, US Air Force retired, sat on a small chair in his apartment in Naples, Florida. He wore an open-collar button-down short-sleeved shirt and pants with a pattern of crossed golf clubs. His skin was a deep bronzed color thanks to the days in retirement spent on the golf courses of the southwestern Florida coastal city. At nearly seventy years of age, he still looked every part an air force general. With the general in his apartment sat two air force historians who were there to conduct an oral history interview to preserve the historical value of the general’s life from his earliest days through World War I and his experiences in the newly formed US Air Force of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. It was part of a program that Brigadier General Kuter himself authorized in the early days of American involvement in World War I when he directed that the Air Staff Historical Section gather history “while it is hot” and that “personnel be selected and an agency set up for a clear historian’s job without axe to grind or defense to prepare.” That directive, signed in July 1942, and the documents, interviews, mission reports, and other items collected during the war became the nucleus of the official archives of the US Air Force, now held at the Air Force Historical Research Agency. This was made possible because Kuter directed that that material be collected, preserved, and archived. Kuter himself might have been unaware at the time that so much of his own story would be captured by this program and that years later his personal remembrance of events would itself be archived away as an official report....


2019 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-73
Author(s):  
EDWARD P. F. ROSE

ABSTRACT ‘Bill’ Wager, after undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, became a lecturer at the University of Reading in southern England in 1929. He was granted leave in the 1930s to participate in lengthy expeditions that explored the geology of Greenland, an island largely within the Arctic Circle. With friends made on those expeditions, he became in June 1940 an early recruit to the Photographic Development Unit of the Royal Air Force that pioneered the development of aerial photographic interpretation for British armed forces. He was quickly appointed to lead a ‘shift’ of interpreters. The unit moved in 1941 from Wembley in London to Danesfield House in Buckinghamshire, known as Royal Air Force Medmenham, to become the Central Interpretation Unit for Allied forces—a ‘secret’ military intelligence unit that contributed significantly to Allied victory in World War II. There Wager led one of three ‘shifts’ that carried out the ‘Second Phase’ studies in a three-phase programme of interpretation that became a standard operating procedure. Promoted in 1941 to the rank of squadron leader in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, he was given command of all ‘Second Phase’ work. Sent with a detachment of photographic interpreters to the Soviet Union in 1942, he was officially ‘mentioned in a Despatch’ on return to England. By the end of 1943 the Central Interpretation Unit had developed into a large organization with an experienced staff, so Wager was allowed to leave Medmenham in order to become Professor of Geology in the University of Durham. He resigned his commission in July 1944. Appointed Professor of Geology in the University of Oxford in 1950, he died prematurely from a heart attack in 1965, best remembered for his work on the igneous rocks of the Skaergaard intrusion in Greenland and an attempt to climb Mount Everest in 1933.


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