Mathematical Modeling: Convoying Merchant Ships

2004 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 382-391
Author(s):  
Susann M. Mathews
Keyword(s):  
Mathematical Modeling ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Preservice Teachers ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
World War I ◽  
Middle School Teachers ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
World War ◽  
School Teachers

Few events of the twentieth century have had as much impact as who won World Wars I and II. In both wars, Great Britain reduced the sinkings of merchant ships by German submarines through sailing their ships in groups (convoying). Before instituting convoys, Great Britain suffered severe losses to attack by German submarines. In World War II, Japan allowed merchant ships to sail individually. Japan's losses to U.S. submarines were a critical element in Japan's defeat (Roscoe 1949). In a convoy, many merchant ships sail in a large group under the escort of naval warships to protect the poorly armed merchant ships. In World War I, the British admiralty opposed sending merchant ships grouped together in convoys for several reasons that proved to be false. I proposed the problem of whether or not the British should convoy their merchant ships to my preservice teachers in a course in mathematical modeling for middle school teachers. While working on this problem, the students analyze and rebut each of the admiralty's arguments against convoying. Mathematical models are used to support the rebuttals.

Railroads in US History

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Churella
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Public Awareness ◽  
Regulatory Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
Labor Policy ◽  
Critical Element ◽  
Labor Costs ◽  
World War ◽  
Regulatory Oversight

Since the early 1800s railroads have served as a critical element of the transportation infrastructure in the United States and have generated profound changes in technology, finance, business-government relations, and labor policy. By the 1850s railroads, at least in the northern states, had evolved into the nation’s first big businesses, replete with managerial hierarchies that in many respects resembled the structure of the US Army. After the Civil War ended, the railroad network grew rapidly, with lines extending into the Midwest and ultimately, with the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869, to the Pacific Coast. The last third of the 19th century was characterized by increased militancy among railroad workers, as well as by the growing danger that railroading posed to employees and passengers. Intense competition among railroad companies led to rate wars and discriminatory pricing. The presence of rebates and long-haul/short-haul price differentials led to the federal regulation of the railroads in 1887. The Progressive Era generated additional regulation that reduced profitability and discouraged additional investment in the railroads. As a result, the carriers were often unprepared for the traffic demands associated with World War I, leading to government operation of the railroads between 1917 and 1920. Highway competition during the 1920s and the economic crises of the 1930s provided further challenges for the railroads. The nation’s railroads performed well during World War II but declined steadily in the years that followed. High labor costs, excessive regulatory oversight, and the loss of freight and passenger traffic to cars, trucks, and airplanes ensured that by the 1960s many once-profitable companies were on the verge of bankruptcy. A wave of mergers failed to halt the downward slide. The bankruptcy of Penn Central in 1970 increased public awareness of the dire circumstances and led to calls for regulatory reform. The 1980 Staggers Act abolished most of the restrictions on operations and pricing, thus revitalizing the railroads.

The Cost of Juridification: Lineages of Cheap Labor in Twentieth-Century Romania

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 30-52
Author(s):  
Adrian Grama
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Import Substitution ◽  
Labor Law ◽  
Full Time ◽  
World War ◽  
East European ◽  
Cheap Labor ◽  
The Cost

This article explores the relationship between the development of labor law and the cost of labor in Romania between the end of World War I and the 1960s. Drawing on a variety of archival and printed sources, the author argues that the historical trajectory of this peripheral East European country shows in exemplary fashion how the increasing juridification of labor relations was first enabled by policy makers’ concern to neutralize class conflict during the 1920s and then propelled by the collapse of industrial wages and the turn to import substitution in the aftermath of the Great Depression. The state socialist regime after 1945, the author further contends, inherited not merely the cheap labor of the interwar epoch but also the institutional mechanisms for controlling prices and wages set up to manage the economy during World War II, all of which facilitated the expansion of socialist labor law during the first two postwar decades. By the second half of the twentieth century, rapidly industrializing socialist Romania could thus integrate an expanding workforce into a type of employment relationship normally deemed standard: full-time, stable, dependent, and socially protected work. The author concludes by pointing out some of the implications of this Eastern European case study for how we might rethink the twin issues of the cost of labor and the transformation of labor law in our age of precarity.

The Russo-Japanese War and the German Wars for Hegemony, 1890–1939

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale C. Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Determinants ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Global War ◽  
First World

This chapter explores the origins of three of the four most important wars of the first half of the twentieth century: the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, World War I, and World War II in Europe. These three wars had more than just a chronological connection to one another. The Russo-Japanese War helped solidify the diplomatic and economic alignments of the great powers in the decade before 1914, while the disaster of the First World War clearly set the stage for the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of yet another global war a generation later. This chapter focuses on providing a fairly comprehensive account of the causes of the Russo-Japanese War, confining the discussion of the world wars to the economic determinants of those conflicts.

Camps Go Global

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aidan Forth
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Concentration Camps ◽  
Refugee Camps ◽  
Racial Hygiene ◽  
World War

Britain’s empire of camps set a template for military detention during World War I and World War II as well as for humanitarian management throughout the twentieth century. British concentration camps must be distinguished from Nazi concentration camps, which were exceptional instruments of terror and genocide. But apart from their propaganda value for rival regimes, British camps foreshadowed practices of racial hygiene and the pre-emptive extrajudicial mass detention of social outsiders in modern authoritarian polities. British camps also anticipated wartime civilian internment and the development of modern refugee camps, which echo the familiar dynamics of coercion and care that first framed the development of camps under the auspices of liberal empire.

Interview with Richard Overy

2015 ◽  
Vol 97 (900) ◽  
pp. 969-983
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
World War ◽  
Traditional Use ◽  
Total War ◽  
The World ◽  
The University

Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter and the author of more than twenty-five books on the age of the World Wars and European dictatorship, including The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.Airpower has been used in armed conflicts since World War I. Aircraft have been deployed in support of the army on the ground and the navy on the surface. However, the twentieth century, with two World Wars, has also seen aerial bombardment of cities that fell outside the traditional use of airpower. During World War II, as part of the ideology of “total war”, cities were deliberately selected as targets of such attacks with the purpose of undermining the morale of the enemy's population and “winning the war”. Nowadays, although the deliberate bombing of entire cities is prohibited, it is still believed that aerial bombardment can produce certain political dividends for belligerents. In this interview, Richard Overy provides a historical perspective on the evolution of aerial bombardment since the World Wars, and puts in context the use of airpower in contemporary armed conflicts.

Whence American Internationalism

2000 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeffrey W. Legro
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
International Relations ◽  
General Framework ◽  
World War ◽  
Ideational Change

One of the most important puzzles of twentieth-century international relations is why the American conception of security vis-à-vis the European Powers shifted from unilateralism to internationalism after World War II but not after World War I. In this article I document that this shift was measurably one of collective ideas and explain the transformation. Scholarship on the sea change in American global thinking has been hampered by the lack of attention to the broader issues of when and why collective ideas change. To address this gap I offer a general framework to account for ideational change: I highlight the interaction between collective ideas and events that allows individuals and societies to overcome barriers to ideational change in some circumstances but not others. This argument clarifies the otherwise puzzling development of American ideas and offers a template for understanding change in other areas.

Geographers and the urban century

2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Hall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Local Government ◽  
Policy Making ◽  
Direct Impact ◽  
World War ◽  
Academic Geography ◽  
Country Planning

Geographers only began to make a serious contribution to urban debates in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Their contributions fed actively into policy-making during and immediately after World War II, when geographers began to be recruited in substantial numbers into the new planning machinery at both central and local government levels, following the passage of the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act. But there was one notable if somewhat eccentric exception, who must form a preamble to the main story. He was Patrick Geddes, a trained botanist who made his mark at the very start of the twentieth century. Another person who made an outstanding geographical contribution to planning was Lionel Dudley Stamp, who single-handedly launched the Land Utilisation Survey of Great Britain. This chapter also discusses the direct impact of academic geography upon planning in the country.

scholarly journals Particular qualities of press in Transjordan and Arabian Peninsula between World War I and World War II

2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 134-140
Author(s):  
Alexey Kimovich Malakhovsky ◽  
Al-Imad Fakeer
Keyword(s):  
Saudi Arabia ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
World War I ◽  
Mass Media ◽  
Arabian Peninsula ◽  
World War ◽  
The Press ◽  
The World ◽  
British Colonial

The article analyzed particular qualities of press in Transjordan and Arabian Peninsula which was making its first steps during the period of transition from Ottoman influence to British colonial dependency marked by formation of modern territorial configuration for the states of the region. At present the region attracts particular attention of the world mass media. Authors underscore peculiarities of Hashemite Transjordan’s press, as well as of that of Saudi Arabia, of North Yemen monarchy and of South Yemen colonized by Great Britain. The authors conclude that the press of the region is decades behind the press of advanced Arab states.

Peace Witness in World War II

Worldview ◽  
1975 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-57
Author(s):  
Gordon C. Zahn
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Reasonable Estimate ◽  
Simple Estimate ◽  
The Dead ◽  
Book Of The Dead ◽  
Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen, one of the poetic voices stilled by World War I, chose as his subject “war and the pity of war,” finding his poetry in the pity. It can be argued that even then the pity had gone out of war. It is certain that the events of subsequent wars—large and small, local as well as worldwide—have been so pitiless in character and conduct that little or no “poetry” remains.We are three-quarters through a century of unprecedented violence, with the grim prospect of even greater evils tying ahead. In his Twentieth Century Book of the Dead Gil Eliot offers what he considers a reasonable estimate of 100,000,000 “man-made” deaths since 1900. That figure alone is enough to give us pause. But it is not merely the number of deaths that should concern us here, but who is killed and the manner in which the victims are killed. In World War I, of the ten million or so victims, 90 per cent were soldiers. The carnage of World War II was so great and so indiscriminate that an equally simple estimate is almost impossible to contrive.

Contending with Modernity

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gleason
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Intellectual Development ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
World War ◽  
American Catholicism ◽  
Catholic Colleges ◽  
American Catholic

How did Catholic colleges and universities deal with the modernization of education and the rise of research universities? In this book, Philip Gleason offers the first comprehensive study of Catholic higher education in the twentieth century, tracing the evolution of responses to an increasingly secular educational system. At the beginning of the century, Catholics accepted modernization in the organizational sphere while resisting it ideologically. Convinced of the truth of their religious and intellectual position, the restructured Catholic colleges grew rapidly after World War I, committed to educating for a "Catholic Renaissance." This spirit of militance carried over into the post-World War II era, but new currents were also stirring as Catholics began to look more favorably on modernity in its American form. Meanwhile, their colleges and universities were being transformed by continuing growth and professionalization. By the 1960's, changes in church teaching and cultural upheaval in American society reinforced the internal transformation already under way, creating an "identity crisis" which left Catholic educators uncertain of their purpose. Emphasizing the importance to American culture of the growth of education at all levels, Gleason connects the Catholic story with major national trends and historical events. By situating developments in higher education within the context of American Catholic thought, Contending with Modernity provides the fullest account available of the intellectual development of American Catholicism in the twentieth century.

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