A Very English Family 1945 1954

Richard Perceval Graves, who has written acclaimed biographies of A.E. Housman, Richard Hughes, the Powys Brothers and his uncle Robert Graves, has now turned the spotlight on his own life and times: primarily because he wishes to give a true account of what it was like being brought up in those far-off and very different days of the 1940s and 1950s. At the start of Richard’s story, we are living in the shadow of the Second World War. Rationing still exists. Traditional patriarchal families are the norm, with most women staying at home to look after their children. England is a largely white, largely Christian and highly deferential society. There is no Internet and no such thing as a smartphone; and children are reading many of the same books and being brought up in much the same way as their late-nineteenth-century predecessors, although the wireless now brings them Children’s Hour. The British Empire still exists: King George VI remains Emperor of India; but a Labour Government is coming to power and great social changes lie immediately ahead.

Richard Perceval Graves, who has written acclaimed biographies of A.E. Housman, Richard Hughes, the Powys Brothers and his uncle Robert Graves, has now turned the spotlight on his own life and times: primarily because he wishes to give a true account of what it was like being brought up in those far-off and very different days of the 1940s and 1950s. At the start of Richard's story, we are living in the shadow of the Second World War. Rationing still exists. Traditional patriarchal families are the norm, with most women staying at home to look after their children. England is a largely white, largely Christian and highly deferential society. There is no Internet and no such thing as a smartphone; and children are reading many of the same books and being brought up in much the same way as their late-nineteenth-century predecessors, although the wireless now brings them Children's Hour. The British Empire still exists: King George VI remains Emperor of India; but a Labour Government is coming to power and great social changes lie immediately ahead.

“Someday,” Candelaria Garcia said to the author, “you will get all the stories.” It was a tall order, in Magdalena, New Mexico, a once booming frontier town where Navajo, Anglo, and Hispanic people have lived in shifting, sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping worlds for well over a hundred years. But these were the stories, and this was the world, that David Wallace Adams set out to map, in a work that would capture the intimate, complex history of growing up in a Southwest borderland. At the intersection of memory, myth, and history, his book asks what it was like to be a child in a land of ethnic and cultural boundaries. The answer, as close to “all the stories” as one might hope to get, captures the diverse, ever-changing experience of a Southwest community defined by cultural borders—--and the nature and role of children in defending and crossing those borders. In this book, we listen to the voices of elders who knew Magdalena nearly a century ago, and the voices of a younger generation who negotiated the community’s shifting boundaries. Their stories take us to sheep and cattle ranches, Navajo ceremonies, Hispanic fiestas, mining camps, First Communion classes, ranch house dances, Indian boarding school drill fields, high school social activities, and children’s rodeos. Here we learn how class, religion, language, and race influenced the creation of distinct identities and ethnic boundaries, but also provided opportunities for cross-cultural interactions and intimacies. And we see the critical importance of education, in both reinforcing differences and opening a shared space for those differences to be experienced and bridged. In this, Adams’s work offers a close-up view of the transformation of one multicultural community, but also of the transformation of childhood itself over the course of the twentieth century. A unique blend of oral, social, and childhood history, Three Roads to Magdalena is a rare living document of conflict and accommodation across ethnic boundaries in our ever-evolving multicultural society. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

After World War II, tracing and documenting Nazi victims emerged against the background of millions of missing persons and early compensation proceedings. This was a process in which the Allies, international aid organizations, and survivors themselves took part. New archives, documentation centers and tracing bureaus were founded amid the increasing Cold War divide. They gathered documents on Nazi persecution and structured them in specialized collections to provide information on individual fates and their grave repercussions: the loss of relatives, the search for a new home, physical or mental injuries, existential problems, social support and recognition, but also continued exclusion or discrimination. By doing so, institutions involved in this work were inevitably confronted with contentious issues—such as varying political mandates, neutrality vs. solidarity with those formerly persecuted, data protection vs. public interest, and many more. Over time, tracing bureaus and archives changed methods and policies and even expanded their activities, using historical documents for both research and public remembrance. This is the first publication to explore this multifaceted history of tracing and documenting past and present.

President Nixon's famous 1972 trip has gone down in history as the first great opening between the West and Communist China. However, eighteen years previously, former prime minister Clement Attlee had also been to China to shake Chairman Mao by the hand. In the second half of 1954, scores of European delegations set off for Beijing, in response to Prime Minister Chou En-lai's invitation to 'come and see' the New China and celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Communist victory. In this delightfully eclectic book, part comedy, part travelogue, and part cultural history, Patrick Wright uncovers the story of the four British delegations that made this journey. These delegations included an amazing range of people from the political, academic, artistic, and cultural worlds of the day: Clement Attlee and his former Health Minister, Nye Bevan; dapper and self-important philosopher A. J. Ayer; the brilliant young artist-reporter Paul Hogarth; poet and novelist Rex Warner (a former Marxist who had just married a Rothschild); and the infuriatingly self-obsessed Stanley Spencer who famously lectured Chou En-lai on the merits of his hometown of Cookham, but who emerges as the unlikely hero of the story. Using a host of previously unpublished letters and diaries, Patrick Wright reconstructs their journey via the USSR to the New China, capturing the impressions - both mistaken and genuinely insightful - of the delegates as they ventured behind both the iron and the bamboo curtains. Full of comic detail of the delegates and their interactions, it is also a study of China as it has loomed in the British mind: the primitive orient of early western philosophy, a land of backwardness that was used to contrast with the progressive dynamism of Victorian Britain, as well as the more recent allure of revolutionary transformation as it appeared in the minds of twentieth century Britons.