Letter To An Unknown Soldier A New Kind Of War Memorial

On Platform One of Paddington Station in London, there is a statue of an unknown soldier; he’s reading a letter. On the hundredth anniversary of the declaration of war everyone in the country was invited to take a moment and write that letter. A selection of those letters are published here, in a new kind of war memorial – one made only of words.

On Platform One of Paddington Station in London, there is a statue of an unknown soldier; he s reading a letter. On the hundredth anniversary of the declaration of war everyone in the country was invited to take a moment and write that letter. A selection of those letters are published here, in a new kind of war memorial one made only of words. In a year of public commemoration Letter to an Unknown Soldier invited everyone to step back from the public ceremonies and take a few private moments to think. Providing a space for people to reconsider the familiar imagery we associate with the war memorials cenotaphs, poppies, and silence it asked the following questions: if you could say what you want to say about that war, with all we ve learned since 1914, with all your own experience of life and death to hand, what would you say? If you were able to send a personal message to this soldier, a man who served and was killed during World War One, what would you write? The response was extraordinary. The invitation was to everyone and, indeed, all sorts of people responded: schoolchildren, pensioners, students, artists, nurses, serving members of the forces and even the Prime Minister. Letters arrived from all over the United Kingdom and beyond, and many well-known writers and personalities contributed. Opening on 28th June 2014, the centenary of the Sarajevo assassinations, and closing at 11 pm on the night of 4 August 2014, the centenary of the moment when Prime Minister Asquith announced to the House of Commons that Britain had joined the First World War, this book offers a snapshot of what people in this country and across the world were thinking and feeling about the centenary of World War One."

The self styled William Topaz McGonagall of Welsh Poetry collects together in one volume his prodigious output so far with previously unseen 'Early Doors' poetry from the last Millennium. He's been at this game awhile. The launch of this volume is to coincide with the writer's birthday at 53 years of age on March 1st but you can get your sticky dib dabs on it early. Celebrate the alternative St David with a purchase of this humorous yet miserable book.

A must for all classroom teachers and those training to teach, this book explores the nature of creativity with ideas and practical strategies for nurturing pupils’ creative skills in primary and secondary schools. It offers a detailed exploration of pedagogy that nurtures creativity, specifically examining the concept of creative agency by looking at how individuals are encouraged to develop their own skills of imagination, innovation and collaboration. Accounts from people well-known for being creative provide a lens through which to critically examine a variety of theoretical frameworks, published creative education checklists, and other relevant research and case studies demonstrating creative pedagogical practices. The book thus draws together consensus from multiple perspectives about the conditions most effective for nurturing creativity. This practical theorising approach will help professionals in educational settings engage in critical enquiry about teaching for creativity, while reflective questions encourage the reader to explore their own perceptions and practice.

The First World War was a conflict of unprecedented ferocity that unleashed such demons as mechanized warfare and mass death on the twentieth century. After the last shot was fired and the troops marched home, approximately three million soldiers remained unaccounted for. Some bodies were found, but they bore no trace of identification; many more men had been blown to smithereens or had simply vanished in battlefields where as many as a hundred shells had fallen on every square yard. An unassuming English chaplain first proposed a symbolic burial of one of those unknown soldiers in memory of all the missing dead. The idea was picked up by almost every country that had an army in the war, and each laid a body to rest amid an outpouring of national grief -- in London’s Westminster Abbey, Paris’s Arc de Triomphe, Rome’s Victor Emmanuelle Monument, and, for the United States, Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Reviewers have praised Neil Hanson’s account of the plight of the sailors in The Confident Hope of a Miracle, a history of the Spanish Armada, his last book. In Unknown Soldiers, he once again offers an unflinching yet compassionate account of the reality of battle on the front lines. He focuses on three soldiers—an American, an Englishman, and a German—and narrates their war experiences through their diaries and letters. Hanson describes how each man endured the nearly unbearable conditions in the trenches and in the air and relates what is known about their deaths: all three died on the battlefields of the Somme, within gunshot sound of one another. He delves into their familial ties, the ideals they expressed in their letters, and he explains how the death of one, the American pilot George Seibold, was instrumental in the creation of the Gold Star Mothers, an organization caring for bereaved mothers, wives, and families that is still active today. Hanson animates and brings to life the combatants who perished without a trace, and shows how the Western world arrived at the now time-honored way of mourning and paying tribute to all those who die in war.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER SHORTLISTED for the 2021 Lionel Gelber Prize Thoughtful and brilliant insights into the very nature of war--from the ancient Greeks to modern times--from world-renowned historian Margaret MacMillan. War--its imprint in our lives and our memories--is all around us, from the metaphors we use to the names on our maps. As books, movies, and television series show, we are drawn to the history and depiction of war. Yet we nevertheless like to think of war as an aberration, as the breakdown of the normal state of peace. This is comforting but wrong. War is woven into the fabric of human civilization. In this sweeping new book, international bestselling author and historian Margaret MacMillan analyzes the tangled history of war and society and our complicated feelings towards it and towards those who fight. It explores the ways in which changes in society have affected the nature of war and how in turn wars have changed the societies that fight them, including the ways in which women have been both participants in and the objects of war. MacMillan's new book contains many revelations, such as war has often been good for science and innovation and in the 20th century it did much for the position of women in many societies. But throughout, it forces the reader to reflect on the ways in which war is so intertwined with society, and the myriad reasons we fight.

This book brings together a collection of works by scholars who have produced some of the most innovative and influential work on the topic of First World War nursing in the last ten years. The contributors employ an interdisciplinary collaborative approach that takes into account multiple facets of Allied wartime nursing: historical contexts (history of the profession, recruitment, teaching, different national socio-political contexts), popular cultural stereotypes (in propaganda, popular culture) and longstanding gender norms (woman-as-nurturer). They draw on a wide range of hitherto neglected historical sources, including diaries, novels, letters and material culture. The result is a fully-rounded new study of nurses’ unique and compelling perspectives on the unprecedented experiences of the First World War.

Wars do not fully end when the shooting stops. As G. Kurt Piehler reveals in this book, after every conflict from the Revolution to the Persian Gulf War, Americans have argued about how and for what deeds and heroes wars should be remembered. Drawing on sources ranging from government documents to Embalmer's Monthly, Piehler recounts efforts to commemorate wars by erecting monuments, designating holidays, forming veterans' organizations, and establishing national cemetaries. The federal government, he contends, initially sidestepped funding for memorials, thereby leaving the determination of how and whom to honor in the hands of those with ready money—and those who responded to them. In one instance, monuments to “Yankee heroes” erected by the Daughters of the American Revolution were countered by immigrant groups, who added such figures as Casimir Pulaski and Thaddeus Kosciusko to the record of the war. Piehler argues that the conflict between these groups is emblematic of the ongoing reinterpretation of wars by majority and minority groups, and by successive generations. Demonstrating that the battles over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial are not unique in American history, Remembering War the American Way reveals that the memory of war is intrinsically bound to the pluralistic definition of national identity.