The Age Of The Gas Mask

"It was a bitterly cold evening, and I had just finished giving a talk that shared the glimmerings of a new research project that looked seriously at how the gas mask, a peculiar object that came into being in 1915, could elucidate what it meant to face total war. At that point, the project had begun by asking why many countries including Britain by 1939 to distribute tens of millions of gas masks as the primary means of protecting their inhabitants against the worst elements of modern war. After I had finished, an older man buttoning his coat and tying his woolen scarf around his neck, came up to me to report that my remarks had made him recall vividly some of his earliest fears from his childhood in England, when his brother would put on his gas mask and chase him around their house"--

Uncovers how a material object - the civilian gas mask - can reveal the power and limits of the modern state facing total war.

Although the Blitz has come to symbolize the experience of civilians under attack, Germany first launched air raids on Britain at the end of 1914 and continued them during the First World War. With the advent of air warfare, civilians far removed from traditional battle zones became a direct target of war rather than a group shielded from its impact. This is a study of how British civilians experienced and came to terms with aerial warfare during the First and Second World Wars. Memories of the World War I bombings shaped British responses to the various real and imagined war threats of the 1920s and 1930s, including the bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War and, ultimately, the Blitz itself. The processes by which different constituent bodies of the British nation responded to the arrival of air power reveal the particular role that gender played in defining civilian participation in modern war.

With more than 650 photographs, this book provides in depth information and a reference guide for identifying 53 common American military gas masks and it also includes information about another 43 uncommon military, special purpose and civilian American gas masks. The book is easily usable by a novice military collector that knows little or nothing about American military gas masks and at the same time, provides a useful quick reference book for the advanced collector. It covers American gas masks and accessories used during the Great War of 1917-1918 to the modern day M50 series Joint Service General Purpose Masks. Additional collector information is included about the quantities of masks manufactured for or procured by the United States military, manufacturing date markings on masks, fakes and reproductions, items issued with gas masks, hints for easy gas mask identification and historical information relating to collecting of American military gas masks.

Profiles the man responsible for inventing the traffic light and gas mask, both very important elements for safety.

How do children cope when their world is transformed by war? This book draws on memory narratives to construct an historical anthropology of childhood in Second World Britain, focusing on objects and spaces such as gas masks, air raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In their struggles to cope with the fears and upheavals of wartime, with families divided and familiar landscapes lost or transformed, children reimagined and reshaped these material traces of conflict into toys, treasures and playgrounds. This study of the material worlds of wartime childhood offers a unique viewpoint into an extraordinary period in history with powerful resonances across global conflicts into the present day.

Exploring the history of the gas mask in Germany from 1915 to the eve of the Second World War, Peter Thompson traces how chemical weapons and protective technologies like the gas mask produced new relationships to danger, risk, management and mastery in the modern age of mass destruction. Recounting the apocalyptic visions of chemical death that circulated in interwar Germany, he argues that while everyday encounters with the gas mask tended to exacerbate fears, the gas mask also came to symbolize debates about the development of military and chemical technologies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. He underscores how the gas mask was tied into the creation of an exclusionary national community under the Nazis and the altered perception of environmental danger in the second half of the twentieth century. As this innovative new history shows, chemical warfare and protection technologies came to represent poignant visions of the German future.

Annotation Contains papers presented at the Second International Symposium on [title] held in Tampa, FL, January 1987. Concerns the protective quality of various types of apparel for protection against chemical and thermal hazards. Topics include: human factors, user attitudes, new materials, thermal protection, industrial chemical stresses, protection from pesticides. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.