Author : A. C. Grayling
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 41,54 MB
Release : 2007-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 0802715656
Presents an analysis of the miltary rationale used by Britain and the United States for bombing civilian targets in Germany and Japan during World War II, discussing the reasons why such tactics were both largely ineffective and morally reprehensible. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.
Author : A. C. Grayling
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 402 pages
File Size : 37,96 MB
Release : 2009-05-26
Category : History
ISBN : 0802718663
In Among the Dead Cities, the acclaimed philosopher A. C. Grayling asks the provocative question, how would the Allies have fared if judged by the standards of the Nuremberg Trials? Arguing persuasively that the victor nations have never had to consider the morality of their policies during World War II, he offers a powerful, moral re-examination of the Allied bombing campaigns against civilians in Germany and Japan, in the light of principles enshrined in the post-war conventions on human rights and the laws of war. Grayling begins by narrating the Royal Air Force's and U. S. Army Air Force's dramatic and dangerous missions over Germany and Japan between 1942 and 1945. Through the eyes of survivors, he describes the terrifying experience on the ground as bombs created inferno and devastation among often-unprepared men, women, and children. He examines the mindset and thought-process of those who planned the campaigns in the heat and pressure of war, and faced with a ruthless enemy. Grayling chronicles the voices that, though in the minority, loudly opposed attacks on civilians, exploring in detail whether the bombings ever achieved their goal of denting the will to wage war. Based on the facts and evidence, he makes a meticulous case for, and one against, civilian bombing, and only then offers his own judgment. Acknowledging that they in no way equated to the death and destruction for which Nazi and Japanese aggression was responsible, he nonetheless concludes that the bombing campaigns were morally indefensible, and more, that accepting responsibility, even six decades later, is both a historical necessity and a moral imperative.
Author : William A. Blair
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 22,49 MB
Release : 2011-01-20
Category : History
ISBN : 0807876232
Exploring the history of Civil War commemorations from both sides of the color line, William Blair places the development of memorial holidays, Emancipation Day celebrations, and other remembrances in the context of Reconstruction politics and race relations in the South. His grassroots examination of these civic rituals demonstrates that the politics of commemoration remained far more contentious than has been previously acknowledged. Commemorations by ex-Confederates were intended at first to maintain a separate identity from the U.S. government, Blair argues, not as a vehicle for promoting sectional healing. The burial grounds of fallen heroes, known as Cities of the Dead, often became contested ground, especially for Confederate women who were opposed to Reconstruction. And until the turn of the century, African Americans used freedom celebrations to lobby for greater political power and tried to create a national holiday to recognize emancipation. Blair's analysis shows that some festive occasions that we celebrate even today have a divisive and sometimes violent past as various groups with conflicting political agendas attempted to define the meaning of the Civil War.
Author : Joseph Roach
Publisher : Columbia University Press
Page : 251 pages
File Size : 35,28 MB
Release : 2021-11-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0231555261
In the early eighteenth century, a delegation of Iroquois visited Britain, exciting the imagination of the London crowds with images of the “feathered people” and warlike “Mohocks.” Today, performing in a popular Afrodiasporic tradition, “Mardi Gras Indians” or “Black Masking Indians” take to the streets of New Orleans at carnival time and for weeks thereafter, parading in handmade “suits” resplendent with beadwork and feathers. What do these seemingly disparate strands of culture share over three centuries and several thousand miles of ocean? Interweaving theatrical, musical, and ritual performance along the Atlantic rim from the eighteenth century to the present, Cities of the Dead explores a rich continuum of cultural exchange that imaginatively reinvents, recreates, and restores history. Joseph Roach reveals how performance can revise the unwritten past, comparing patterns of remembrance and forgetting in how communities forge their identities and imagine their futures. He examines the syncretic performance traditions of Europe, Africa, and the Americas in the urban sites of London and New Orleans, through social events ranging from burials to sacrifices, auctions to parades, encompassing traditions as diverse as Haitian Voudon and British funerals. Considering processes of substitution, or surrogation, as enacted in performance, Roach demonstrates the ways in which people and cultures fill the voids left by death and departure. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition of this classic work features a new preface reflecting on the relevance of its arguments to the politics of performance and performance in contemporary politics.
Author : Chris Philbrook
Publisher :
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 28,34 MB
Release : 2021-01-29
Category :
ISBN :
Like a brick at a birthday cake.Shoreham Port in Brighton England has been secured by Adrian Ring alongside his friends, with the five Navy ships that made the trans-Atlantic voyage to find the European Trinity. He must find the Soul, the Scribe, and the Warden and get them on their path, as he walked his, but there are obstacles.The undead in Europe are faster and stronger than anything they've encountered, and the survivors here are hungry, and desperate for help. They can't fight every zombie, but each one they pass could be a lethal threat to their own people, or to the locals who've fought hard to survive.Luckily, he encounters a small, well-armed group of car-equipped survivors, led by a friendly man calling himself Chief, who dwarfs even the burly Adrian. They decide to work together to procure ground vehicles for the march north.But Chief isn't the savior he's pretended to be, and there are far more monsters roaming in the dark of the old world than Adrian is prepared to face.Dead Cities contains Adrian's Journal entries from September 9th, 2014 through November 27th, 2014. It also contains the side fictions; The Ghost in the Boiler Room, Rachel and Mara, Fetters, Sanctuary, and Ernest Goes for a Walk.
Author : A. C. Grayling
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 18,41 MB
Release : 2007
Category : World War, 1939-1945
ISBN :
Author : Mike Davis
Publisher : Haymarket Books
Page : 593 pages
File Size : 48,55 MB
Release : 2024-10-01
Category : Nature
ISBN :
For the late great Mike Davis, the ravaging of the climate by capital—and his prescient analysis of its consequences for those of us left to deal with the resulting crises—was always a central part of his urban geography. In these wide ranging, incisive, and hauntingly relevant essays, Davis asks us to consider what we would find if we put a microscope to the ruins of Metropolis, and provides a riveting account of the disasters—natural, man-made, and those (as in the case of climate calamity) where the distinction is impossible to make—that he finds on the other end. He begins his examination by sifting through the rubble of the twin towers in the wake of 9/11, presciently identifying the seeds of war already germinating in the scorched soil of ground zero, and closes by considering how little prepared our hollowed out urban infrastructure is to deal with shocks of any kind, be they from car bombs or ice storms. In between we are treated to tours of blasted wastelands where American generals built and destroyed replicas of Berlin, glimpses of Las Vegas’s penchant for annihilating its own best-known landmarks, and other riveting tales of the dialectic between nature and the city. Dead Cities, written over twenty years ago, abounds with prophecies fulfilled, contains echoes of our current moment where conspiracies abound and anxieties drown out official celebrations of prosperity, and offers dreams of alternative paths not taken.
Author : Daniel Ellsberg
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Page : 433 pages
File Size : 25,82 MB
Release : 2017-12-05
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 1608196747
Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist for The California Book Award in Nonfiction The San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year List Foreign Affairs Best Books of the Year In These Times “Best Books of the Year" Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books List LitHub's “Five Books Making News This Week” From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day. Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization--and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era. Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating--this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing "doomsday machine" and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the future of the world.
Author : A. C. Grayling
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 377 pages
File Size : 40,12 MB
Release : 2014-04-24
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 1472534050
Is it ever right to target civilians in a time of war? Or do the ends sometimes justify the means? The twentieth century - the age of 'total war' - marked the first time that civilian populations came to be seen as legitimate military targets. At this policy's most terrible extreme came the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but it is an issue that remains relevant today with the needs of the 'War on Terror' used to justify the use of drone strikes. In Among the Dead Cities, A.C. Grayling explores these moral issues in all their complexity with a detailed examination of the Allied bombing of German cities during World War 2. Considering the cases for and against the area bombing and the experiences of the bombed and the bombers, Grayling asks: was the targeting of civilians in Germany a crime? Now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series, the book includes a new afterword by the author considering the issues in light of later conflicts up to the present day.
Author : Geoffrey E. Hill
Publisher : Abbott Press
Page : 260 pages
File Size : 31,82 MB
Release : 2013-10-21
Category : History
ISBN : 1458210111
In Ghosts of 45, Geoffrey E. Hill addresses the great questions revolving around Japans past militarismhow did it get started, why were they so aggressive, why were individuals submissive to authority, what was the reason Japanese felt superior, was American bombing and the atomic bombs really justified, why are the Japanese reluctant to recognize their militaristic past, and what can the Japanese do to emerge from this predominantly negative war legacy. After World War II, the Japanese people rebuilt their country, established a new government, restored their infrastructure and became a pacifist nation. Despite these profound changes, modern Japan has not been able to achieve a desired national purpose and a leadership standing in the international community. In Ghosts of 45, Hill examines this problem by exploring the roots and evolution of Japans militaristic period through historical sources and the recollections of people living in wartime Japan. He features in-depth interviews with both well-educated Japanese individuals familiar with Western culture and American POWs subjected to forced labor. Three narratives are brought together that could help guide Japan toward finding renewed national purpose and international respect: the roots of Japans militarism, the ongoing war legacy, and key principles concerning the status of the emperor and public education about wartime Japan. In addition, Hill discusses comparisons between the emperor and the pope, the samurai code and the code of the English knights during the Middle Ages, and the beliefs that allowed Japanese wartime brutality and American slavery.
