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      • Trusted Partner
        Literature & Literary Studies
        July 2024

        Mid-century women's writing

        Disrupting the public/private divide

        by Melissa Dinsman, Megan Faragher, Ravenel Richardson

        The traditional narrative of the mid-century (1930s-60s) is that of a wave of expansion and constriction, with the swelling of economic and political freedoms for women in the 1930s, the cresting of women in the public sphere during the Second World War, and the resulting break as employment and political opportunities for women dwindled in the 1950s when men returned home from the front. But as the burgeoning field of interwar and mid-century women's writing has demonstrated, this narrative is in desperate need of re-examination. Mid-century women's writing: Disrupting the public/private divide aims to revivify studies of female writers, journalists, broadcasters, and public intellectuals living or working in Britain, or under British rule, during the mid-century while also complicating extant narratives about the divisions between domesticity and politics.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        December 2022

        Class, work and whiteness

        Race and settler colonialism in Southern Rhodesia, 1919–79

        by Nicola Ginsburgh

        This book offers the first comprehensive history of white workers from the end of the First World War to Zimbabwean independence in 1980. It reveals how white worker identity was constituted, examines the white labouring class as an ethnically and nationally heterogeneous formation comprised of both men and women, and emphasises the active participation of white workers in the ongoing and contested production of race. White wage labourers' experiences, both as exploited workers and as part of the privileged white minority, offer insight into how race and class co-produced one another and how boundaries fundamental to settler colonialism were regulated and policed. Based on original research conducted in Zimbabwe, South Africa and the UK, this book offers a unique theoretical synthesis of work on gender, whiteness studies, labour histories, settler colonialism, Marxism, emotions and the New African Economic History.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        April 2021

        Catholic nuns and sisters in a secular age

        Britain, 1945–90

        by Carmen M. Mangion

        This is the first in-depth study of post-war female religious life. It draws on archival materials and a remarkable set of eighty interviews to place Catholic sisters and nuns at the heart of the turbulent 1960s, integrating their story of social change into a larger British and international one. Shedding new light on how religious bodies engaged in modernisation, it addresses themes such as the Modern Girl and youth culture, '1968', generational discourse, post-war modernity, the voluntary sector and the women's movement. Women religious were at the forefront of the Roman Catholic Church's movement of adaptation and renewal towards the world. This volume tells their stories in their own words.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        June 2021

        The war that won't die

        The Spanish Civil War in cinema

        by David Archibald

        The war that won't die charts the changing nature of cinematic depictions of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, a significant number of artists, filmmakers and writers - from George Orwell and Pablo Picasso to Joris Ivens and Joan Miró - rallied to support the country's democratically-elected Republican government. The arts have played an important role in shaping popular understandings of the Spanish Civil War and this book examines the specific role cinema has played in this process. The book's focus is on fictional feature films produced within Spain and beyond its borders between the 1940s and the early years of the twenty-first century - including Hollywood blockbusters, East European films, the work of the avant garde in Paris and films produced under Franco's censorial dictatorship. The book will appeal to scholars and students of Film, Media and Hispanic Studies, but also to historians and, indeed, anyone interested in why the Spanish Civil War remains such a contested political topic.

      • Trusted Partner
        The Arts
        January 2019

        The war that won't die

        The Spanish Civil War in cinema

        by David Archibald

        The war that won't die charts the changing nature of cinematic depictions of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, a significant number of artists, filmmakers and writers - from George Orwell and Pablo Picasso to Joris Ivens and Joan Miró - rallied to support the country's democratically-elected Republican government. The arts have played an important role in shaping popular understandings of the Spanish Civil War and this book examines the specific role cinema has played in this process. The book's focus is on fictional feature films produced within Spain and beyond its borders between the 1940s and the early years of the twenty-first century - including Hollywood blockbusters, East European films, the work of the avant garde in Paris and films produced under Franco's censorial dictatorship. The book will appeal to scholars and students of Film, Media and Hispanic Studies, but also to historians and, indeed, anyone interested in why the Spanish Civil War remains such a contested political topic.

      • Trusted Partner
        June 2025

        Proxy war in Afghanistan

        The politics of state-wrecking

        by Abbas Farasoo

        This book provides a compelling analysis of proxy warfare and its far-reaching implications for statehood, focusing on the conflict in Afghanistan. Introducing the innovative concept of "state-wrecking," it bridges theory and practice to unravel how external support for insurgent actors fuels violence, undermines territorial control and sovereignty, intensifies violence, and dismantles political legitimacy. The work shifts the discourse on proxy wars from the strategies of global powers to the procedural and structural impacts within target states. Grounded in rigorous empirical research, including interviews, archival data, and conflict analysis, the book critically examines the Pakistan-Taliban nexus and the limitations of US-led interventions. By blending a robust theoretical framework with in-depth case studies, it reveals how proxy dynamics shape conflicts, disrupt governance, and challenge international security. This is an essential resource for those seeking to understand the entanglements of modern warfare and the fragility of states under external influence.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2025

        England’s military heartland

        Preparing for war on Salisbury Plain

        by Vron Ware, Antonia Lucia Dawes, Mitra Pariyar, Alice Cree

        What is it like to live next door to a British Army base? England's military heartland provides an eye-opening account of the sprawling military presence on Salisbury Plain, drawing on a wide range of voices from both sides of the divide. Targeted for expansion under government plans to reorganise the UK's global defence estate, the Salisbury 'super garrison' offers a unique opportunity to explore the impact of the military footprint in a particular place. But this is no ordinary environment: as well as being the world-famous site of Stonehenge, the grasslands of Salisbury Plain are home to rare plants and wildlife. How does the army take responsibility for conserving this unique landscape as it trains young men and women to use lethal weapons? Are its claims that its presence is a positive for the environment anything more than propaganda? This book investigates these questions against the backdrop of a historic landscape inscribed with the legacy of perpetual war.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        January 2022

        Exiting war

        The British Empire and the 1918–20 moment

        by Romain Fathi, Margaret Hutchison, Andrekos Varnava, Michael Walsh, Alan Lester

        Exiting war explores a particular 1918-20 'moment' in the British Empire's history, between the First World War's armistices of 1918, and the peace treaties of 1919 and 1920. That moment, we argue, was a challenging and transformative time for the Empire. While British authorities successfully answered some of the post-war tests they faced, such as demobilisation, repatriation, and fighting the widespread effects of the Spanish flu, the racial, social, political and economic hallmarks of their imperialism set the scene for a wide range of expressions of loyalties and disloyalties, and anticolonial movements. The book documents and conceptualises this 1918-20 'moment' and its characteristics as a crucial three-year period of transformation for and within the Empire, examining these years for the significant shifts in the imperial relationship that occurred and as laying the foundation for later change in the imperial system.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2020

        Class, work and whiteness

        by Nicola Ginsburgh, Alan Lester

      • Trusted Partner
        Business, Economics & Law
        June 2024

        The labour movement in Lebanon

        Power on hold

        by Lea Bou Khater

        The labour movement in Lebanon: Power on hold narrates the history of the Lebanese labour movement from the early twentieth century to today. Bou Khater demonstrates that trade unionism in the country has largely been a failure, for reasons including state interference, tactical co-optation, and the strategic use of sectarianism by an oligarchic elite, together with the structural weakness of a service-based laissez-faire economy. Drawing on a vast body of Arabic-language primary sources and difficult-to-access archives, the book's conclusions are significant not only for trade unionism, but also for new forms of workers' organisations and social movements in Lebanon and beyond. The Lebanese case study presented here holds significant implications for the wider Arab world and for comparative studies of labour. This authoritative history of the labour movement in Lebanon is vital reading for scholars of trade unionism, Lebanese politics, and political economy.

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        Humanities & Social Sciences
        March 2017

        Popular imperialism and the military, 1850-1950

        by John M. MacKenzie

        Colonial war played a vital part in transforming the reputation of the military and placing it on a standing equal to that of the navy. The book is concerned with the interactive culture of colonial warfare, with the representation of the military in popular media at home, and how these images affected attitudes towards war itself and wider intellectual and institutional forces. It sets out to relate the changing image of the military to these fundamental facts. For the dominant people they were an atavistic form of war, shorn of guilt by Social Darwinian and racial ideas, and rendered less dangerous by the increasing technological gap between Europe and the world. Attempts to justify and understand war were naturally important to dominant people, for the extension of imperial power was seldom a peaceful process. The entertainment value of war in the British imperial experience does seem to have taken new and more intensive forms from roughly the middle of the nineteenth century. Themes such as the delusive seduction of martial music, the sketch of the music hall song, powerful mythic texts of popular imperialism, and heroic myths of empire are discussed extensively. The first important British war correspondent was William Howard Russell (1820-1907) of The Times, in the Crimea. The 1870s saw a dramatic change in the representation of the officer in British battle painting. Up to that point it was the officer's courage, tactical wisdom and social prestige that were put on display.

      • Trusted Partner
        Humanities & Social Sciences
        September 2023

        Civil war London

        Mobilizing for parliament, 1641–5

        by Jordan S. Downs

        This book looks at London's provision of financial and military support for parliament's war against King Charles I. It explores for the first time a series of episodic, circumstantial and unique mobilisations that spanned from late 1641 to early 1645 and which ultimately led to the establishment of the New Model Army. Based on research from two-dozen archives, Civil war London charts the successes and failures of efforts to move London's vast resources and in the process poses a number of challenges to longstanding notions about the capital's 'parliamentarian' makeup. It reveals interactions between London's Corporation, parochial communities and livery companies, between preachers and parishioners and between agitators, propagandists and common people. Within these tangled webs of political engagement reside the untold stories of the movement of money and men, but also of parliament's eventual success in the English Civil War.

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