Cities into Battlefields
Cities into Battlefields

Author: Stefan Goebel

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-03-02

Total Pages: 400

ISBN-13: 1351951491

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Cities have always had a key role in warfare, as strategic centres which periodically suffered the horrors of siege and sack. With industrialisation, however, they were drawn ever closer to the front line and to direct and continuous experience of fighting and destruction. 'Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War' explores the cultural imprint of military conflict on metropolises world wide in the era of the First and Second World Wars. It brings together cultural and urban historians and scholars of related disciplines including anthropology, education, and geography. The volume examines how the emergence of 'total' warfare blurred the boundaries between home and front and transformed cities into battlefields. The logic of total mobilisation turned the social and cultural fabric of urban life upside down. Arranged so as to bring out the evolution of experience over time, the essays explore Eastern and Central Europe, Britain and Western Europe, and Japan and address several key themes. The first strand - scenarios - explores the apocalyptic imagination of intellectuals and experts in peacetime. Artists and writers anticipating doom presented the coming upheaval as an urban event - a commonplace of late-Victorian and post-1918 pessimism. On a different plane, civil servants and engineers materialised visions of urban chaos and devised countermeasures in case of emergencies. Both groups helped to furnish a repertoire of cultural forms which channelled and encoded the actual experience of war. The second strand deals with metropolitan experiences, notably mobilisation, deprivation, and destruction in wartime. Ruins and the repercussions of war is the central theme of the third strand - commemorations - which investigates post-war efforts to remember and forget. The quest for meaningful forms of commemoration was hard enough after the First World War; the Second World War, which saw whole cities disappear in flames, raised the possibility that the limits of representation had been reached. The central contention of this volume - that total war in the twentieth century has a significant but often overlooked metropolitan dimension - is fully addressed, thereby filling a conspicuous gap in the currently available literature.

Communities Under Fire
Communities Under Fire

Author: Alex Dowdall

Publisher:

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0198856113

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Between 1914 and 1918, the Western Front passed through some of Europe's most populated and industrialised regions, such as the towns of Nancy, Reims, Arras, and Lens. This is the story of how war shaped the civilian identities of people who suffered intense artillery bombardment, military occupation, and forced displacement.

Jeff Shaara's Civil War Battlefields
Jeff Shaara's Civil War Battlefields

Author: Jeff Shaara

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2006-04-25

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 0345464885

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TRAVEL THROUGH A PIVOTAL TIME IN AMERICAN HISTORY Jeff Shaara, America’s premier Civil War novelist, gives a remarkable guided tour of the ten Civil War battlefields every American should visit: Shiloh, Antietam, Fredericksburg/Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, New Market, Chickamauga, the Wilderness/Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, and Petersburg/Appomattox. Shaara explores the history, the people, and the places that capture the true meaning and magnitude of the conflict and provides • engaging narratives of the war’s crucial battles • intriguing historical footnotes about each site • photographs of the locations–then and now • detailed maps of the battle scenes • fascinating sidebars with related points of interest From Antietam to Gettysburg to Vicksburg, and to the many poignant destinations in between, Jeff Shaara’s Civil War Battlefields is the ideal guide for casual tourists and Civil War enthusiasts alike.

Urban Battlefields
Urban Battlefields

Author: Gregory Fremont-Barnes

Publisher: Naval Institute Press

Published: 2024-04-15

Total Pages: 408

ISBN-13: 1682476316

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Urban Battlefields: Lessons Learned from World War II to the Modern Era offers a detailed study of the complexities of urban operations, demonstrating through historical conflicts their key features, the various weapons and tactics employed by both sides, and the factors that contributed to success or failure. Urban operations are a relatively recent phenomenon and an increasingly prominent feature of today’s operational environment, typified by on-going fighting in Syria and Iraq. Here, Gregory Fremont-Barnes has enlisted ten experts to examine the key elements that characterize this particularly costly and difficult method of fighting by focusing on notable examples across the modern era. He covers their nineteenth-century roots, and follows with case studies ranging from major conventional formations to counterinsurgency and civil resistance. The contributors analyze the distinct features of urban warfare, which separate it from fighting in open areas, particularly the three-dimensional nature of the operating environment. These include: the restricted fields of fire and view; the substantial advantages conferred on the defender as a result of concealed positions and ubiquitous cover; the often- abundant presence of subterranean features including cellars, tunnels, and drainage and sewer systems; and the recurrent problems imposed by snipers holding up the progress of troops many times their number. Further, the authors consider how the presence of civilians may influence the rules of engagement and also may provide an advantage to the defender. Urban Battlefields illustrates why warfare in metropolises can be protracted and costly. It also illustrates why modest numbers of soldiers, militia, or insurgents with nothing more than shoulder-borne anti-tank weapons or ground-to-air missile systems, small arms, and improvised explosive devices can drastically reduce the effectiveness of much better disciplined, trained, and armed adversaries. Furthermore, it explains how those short-term advantages can be neutralized and ultimately overcome.

Architectures of survival
Architectures of survival

Author: Adam Page

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2019-01-02

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 152612260X

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Architectures of survival is an original and innovative work of history that investigates the relationship between air war and urbanism in modern Britain. It asks how the development of airpower and the targeting of cities influenced perceptions of urban spaces and visions of urban futures from the interwar period into the Cold War, highlighting the importance of war and the anticipation of war in modern urban history. Airpower created a permanent threat to cities and civilians, and this book considers how architects, planners and government officials reframed bombing as an ongoing urban problem, rather than one contingent to a particular conflict. It draws on archival material from local and national government, architectural and town planning journals and cultural texts, to demonstrate how cities were recast as targets, and planning for defence and planning for development became increasingly entangled.

Disassembled Cities
Disassembled Cities

Author: Elizabeth L. Sweet

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-12-07

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1351598627

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This book explores the urban, political, and economic effects of contemporary capitalism as well being concerned with a collective analytic that addresses these processes through the lens of disassembling and reassembling dynamics. The processes of contemporary globalization have resulted in the commodification of various dimensions that were previously the domain of state action. This book evaluates the varying international responses from communities as they cope and confront the negative impacts of neoliberalism. In-depth case studies from scholars working in Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia showcase how various cities are responding to the effects of neoliberalism. Chapters investigate and demonstrate how the neoliberal processes of dissembling are being countered by positive and engaged efforts of reassembly. From Colombia to Siberia, Chicago to Nigeria, contributions engage with key economic and urban questions surrounding the militarization of state, democracy, the rise of the global capital and the education of young people in slums. This book will have a broad appeal to academic researchers and urban planning professionals. It is recommended core reading for students in Urban Planning, Geography, Sociology, Anthropology, and Urban Studies.

The Cambridge History of the First World War: Volume 2, The State
The Cambridge History of the First World War: Volume 2, The State

Author: Jay Winter

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2014-01-09

Total Pages: 1004

ISBN-13: 1316025535

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Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of the First World War offers a history of the war from a predominantly political angle and concerns itself with the story of the state. It explores the multifaceted history of state power and highlights the ways in which different political systems responded to, and were deformed by, the near-unbearable pressures of war. Every state involved faced issues of military-civilian relations, parliamentary reviews of military policy, and the growth of war economies; and yet their particular form and significance varied in every national case. Written by a global team of historical experts, this volume sets new standards in the political history of the waging of war in an authoritative new narrative which addresses problems of logistics, morale, innovation in tactics and weapons systems, the use and abuse of science; all of which were ubiquitous during the conflict.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields
Our Bodies, Their Battlefields

Author: Christina Lamb

Publisher: Scribner

Published: 2020-09-22

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 150119917X

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From Christina Lamb, the coauthor of the bestselling I Am Malala and an award-winning journalist—an essential, groundbreaking examination of how women experience war. In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars—the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle. Lamb chronicles extraordinary tragedy and challenges in the lives of women in wartime. And none is more devastating than the increase of the use of rape as a weapon of war. Visiting warzones including the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Iraq, and spending time with the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, she records the harrowing stories of survivors, from Yazidi girls kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters and the beekeeper risking his life to rescue them; to the thousands of schoolgirls abducted across northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, to the Congolese gynecologist who stitches up more rape victims than anyone on earth. Told as a journey, and structured by country, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields gives these women voice. We have made significant progress in international women’s rights, but across the world women are victimized by wartime atrocities that are rarely recorded, much less punished. The first ever prosecution for war rape was in 1997 and there have been remarkably few convictions since, as if rape doesn’t matter in the reckoning of war, only killing. Some courageous women in countries around the world are taking things in their own hands, hunting down the war criminals themselves, trying to trap them through Facebook. In this profoundly important book, Christina Lamb shines a light on some of the darkest parts of the human experience—so that we might find a new way forward. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is as inspiring and empowering is as it is urgent, a clarion call for necessary change.

Philadelphia Battlefields
Philadelphia Battlefields

Author: John Kromer

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2020-08-21

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1439919720

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Should the surprisingly successful outcomes achieved by outsider candidates in Philadelphia elections be interpreted as representing fundamental changes in the local political environment, or simply as one-off victories, based largely on serendipitous circumstances that advanced individual political careers? John Kromer’s insightful Philadelphia Battlefields considers key local campaigns undertaken from 1951 to 2019 that were extraordinarily successful despite the opposition of the city’s political establishment. Kromer draws on election data and data-mapping tools that explain these upset elections as well as the social, economic, and demographic trends that influenced them to tell the story of why these campaign strategies were successful. He deftly analyzes urban political dynamics through case studies of newcomer Rebecca Rhynhart’s landslide victory over a veteran incumbent for Philadelphia City Controller; activist Chaka Fattah’s effective use of grassroots organizing skills to win a seat in Congress; and Maria Quiñones-Sánchez’s hard-fought struggle to become the first Hispanic woman to win a City Council seat, among others. Philadelphia Battlefields shows how these candidates’ efforts to increase civic engagement, improve municipal governance, and become part of a new generation of political leadership at the local and state level were critical to their successes.