From the opening of the Great Western Railway in 1838 through to the end of steam traction on the Western Region in 1965 the ‘engine shed’ formed an important role in both the infrastructure and operation of the railway. As the Great Western system expanded so did the need for larger locomotive servicing facilities and from the 1870s right through to the 1930s many sheds were rebuilt into larger locomotive depots or in some cases replaced by entirely new structures Nationalisation of the railways in 1948 saw the formation of the ‘British Railways Western Region’. Apart from a few early sub-shed closures the number of Western Region steam depots and sub-sheds remained almost unaltered until the regional boundary changes of 1958. Using black and white and color images from the Great Western Trust archive at Didcot, the book illustrates Western Region steam depots and ‘sub sheds’ that were in operation in the mid 1950s. With many previously unpublished photographs the book should interest modellers, historians and enthusiasts of the Western Region. Today the unique atmosphere of the steam ‘shed’ can be still be experienced at Didcot, where the original 1932 locomotive shed forms the centrepiece of the Didcot Railway Centre.
In Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, Edward Wright-Rios investigates how Catholicism was lived and experienced in the Archdiocese of Oaxaca, a region known for its distinct indigenous cultures and vibrant religious life, during the turbulent period of modernization in Mexico that extended from the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth. Wright-Rios centers his analysis on three “visions” of Catholicism: an enterprising archbishop’s ambitious religious reform project, an elderly indigenous woman’s remarkable career as a seer and faith healer, and an apparition movement that coalesced around a visionary Indian girl. Deftly integrating documentary evidence with oral histories, Wright-Rios provides a rich, textured portrait of Catholicism during the decades leading up to the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and throughout the tempestuous 1920s. Wright-Rios demonstrates that pastors, peasants, and laywomen sought to enliven and shape popular religion in Oaxaca. The clergy tried to adapt the Vatican’s blueprint for Catholic revival to Oaxaca through institutional reforms and attempts to alter the nature and feel of lay religious practice in what amounted to a religious modernization program. Yet some devout women had their own plans. They proclaimed their personal experiences of miraculous revelation, pressured priests to recognize those experiences, marshaled their supporters, and even created new local institutions to advance their causes and sustain the new practices they created. By describing female-led visionary movements and the ideas, traditions, and startling innovations that emerged from Oaxaca’s indigenous laity, Wright-Rios adds a rarely documented perspective to Mexican cultural history. He reveals a remarkable dynamic of interaction and negotiation in which priests and parishioners as well as prelates and local seers sometimes clashed and sometimes cooperated but remained engaged with one another in the process of making their faith meaningful in tumultuous times.
Based on twenty years of research in formerly secret archives, this book reveals for the first time the full significance of War Plan Orange—the U.S. Navy's strategy to defeat Japan, formulated over the forty years prior to World War II.
The Encyclopedia of Politics in the American West is an A to Z reference work on the political development of one of America’s most politically distinct, not to mention its fastest growing, region. This work will cover not only the significant events and actors of Western politics, but also deal with key institutional, historical, environmental, and sociopolitical themes and concepts that are important to more fully understanding the politics of the West over the last century.
Contains 150 articles that provide information about significant topics in American political history, including ideas, philosophies, movements, economics, religion, and more.
Four peoples, each with its own culture, language, and faith, shared a small Mediterranean town named Rhodes, and experienced, each in its own way, the upheavals of war, modernity, emigration, and occupation. With the German takeover in 1943, the Holocaust in 1944, and the beginning of Greek rule in 1947, this multiethnic world perished forever. At the center of this book stands the Sephardi community: Spanish-speaking Jews who arrived in Rhodes sometime after the Spanish expulsion edict of 1492 and who remained the largest single group within the old city walls until Italy adopted German racial legislation in 1938. When Sultan Abdulhamit II ascended to the Ottoman throne in 1876, the Jews of Rhodes were among his most loyal and traditional, not to say hidebound, subjects. But, within the course of a few decades, this bastion of piety and rabbinical tradition was thoroughly transformed by French rationalism, Italian secularism, and the pressures of economic globalization. In this book, many unlikely characters come alive in the vibrant and irretrievably lost world of Rhodes: the French monks who impart universal values to provincial Turks, Greeks, and Jews * the Rhodian schoolboy lost in a Congolese jungle * the Italian general who brings sanitation to the medieval town * the Greek shepherd who knows the history of Rhodes better than any scholar * the Turkish diplomat whose wife was murdered by the Nazis and then risked his life to save Jews from the SS. These are just some of the stories related directly to the author, who combines journalism with scholarship in the recreation of a unique cultural microcosm.
IFC Lessons of Experience Paper No. 3. Describes the International Finance Corporation's (IFC's) 20 years of leasing experience in developing countries and assesses the developmental impact of leasing. The IFC has invested in leasing companies in more than half of the developing countries that have a leasing industry today.