Which People S War

Which People's War? examines how national belonging, or British national identity, was envisaged in the public culture of the World War II home front. Using materials from newspapers, magazines, films, novels, diaries, letters, and all sorts of public documents, it explores such questions as: who was included as 'British' and what did it mean to be British? How did the British describe themselves as a singular people, and what were the consequences of those depictions? It also examines the several meanings of citizenship elaborated in various discussions concerning the British nation at war. This investigation of the powerful constructions of national identity and understandings of citizenship circulating in Britain during the Second World War exposes their multiple and contradictory consequences at the time. It reveals the fragility of any singular conception of 'Britishness' even during a war that involved the total mobilization of the country's citizenry and cost 400,000 British civilian lives.

The Second World War was, for Britain, a 'total war'; no section of society remained untouched by military conscription, air raids, the shipping crisis and the war economy. In this comprehensive and engrossing narrative Angus Calder presents not only the great events and leading figures but also the oddities and banalities of daily life on the Home Front, and in particular the parts played by ordinary people: air raid wardens and Home Guards, factory workers and farmers, housewives and pacifists. Above all this revisionist and important work reveals how, in those six years, the British people came closer to discarding their social conventions than at any time since Cromwell's republic. Winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys prize in 1970, The People’s War draws on oral testimony and a mass of neglected social documentation to question the popularised image of national unity in the fight for victory.

The People's War lifts the Stalinist veil of secrecy to probe an almost untold side of World War II: the experiences of the Soviet people themselves. Going beyond dry and faceless military accounts of the eastern front of the "Great Patriotic War" and the Soviet state's one-dimensional "heroic People," this volume explores how ordinary citizens responded to the war, Stalinist leadership, and Nazi invasion. Drawing on a wealth of archival and recently published material, contributors detail the calculated destruction of a Jewish town by the Germans and present a chilling picture of life in occupied Minsk. They look at the cultural developments of the war as well as the wartime experience of intellectuals, for whom the period was a time of relative freedom. They discuss women's myriad roles in combat and other spheres of activity. They also reassess the behavior and morale of ordinary Red Army troops and offer new conclusions about early crushing defeats at the hands of the Germans--defeats that were officially explained as cowardice on the part of high officers. A frank investigation of civilian life behind the front lines, The People's War provides a detailed, balanced picture of the Stalinist USSR by describing not only the command structure and repressive power of the state but also how people reacted to them, cooperated with or opposed them, and adapted or ignored central policy in their own ways. By putting the Soviet people back in their war, this volume helps restore the range and complexity of human experience to one of history's most savage periods.

More than 25 years have passed since South Africans were being shot or hacked or burned to death in political violence, and the memory of the trauma has faded. Nevertheless, some 20 500 people were killed between 1984 and 1994. Conventional wisdom has it that most died as a result of the ANC's people's war. Many books have been written on South Africa's political transition, but none has dealt adequately with the people's war. This book does. It shows the extraordinary success of the people's war in giving the ANC a virtual monopoly on power, as well as the great cost at which this was done. The high price of it is still being paid. Apart from the terror and killings it sparked at the time, the people's war set in motion forces that cannot easily be tamed. Violence, once unleashed, is not easy to stamp out. 'Ungovernability', once generated, is not readily reversed. For this new edition, Anthea Jeffery has revised and abridged her seminal work. She has also included a brief overview of the ANC's National Democratic Revolution for which the people's war was intended to prepare the way. Since 1994, the NDR has been implemented in many different spheres. It is now being speeded up in its second and more radical phase.

Jonathan Fennell captures for the first time the true wartime experience of the ordinary soldiers from across the empire who made up the British and Commonwealth armies. He analyses why the great battles were won and lost and how the men that fought went on to change the world.

This collection includes the major writings of General Giap, who, on the evidence of his record as well as his theoretical work, has long been recognized as one of the military geniuses of modern times. The book includes writings from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s.

This book presents an overview of the democracy movement and the history of education in Nepal. It shows how schools became the battleground for the state and the Maoists as well as captures emerging trends in the field, challenges for the state and negotiations with political commitments. It looks at the factors that contributed to the conflict, and studies the politics of the region alongside gender and identity dynamics. One of the first studies on the subject, the book highlights how conflict and education are intrinsically linked in Nepal. It illustrates how schools became the centre of attention between warring groups and how they were used for political meetings and recruitment of fighters during the political transitions in a contested terrain in South Asia. It brings to the fore incidents of abduction and killing of teachers and students, and the use of children as porters for arms and ammunitions. Drawing extensively on both primary and secondary sources and qualitative analyses, the book provides the key to a complex web of relationships among the stakeholders during conflict and also models of education in post-conflict situations. This book will interest scholars and researchers in education, politics, peace and conflict studies, sociology, development studies, social work, strategic and security studies, contemporary history, international relations, and Nepal and South Asian studies.