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A New Naval History brings together the most significant and interdisciplinary approaches to contemporary naval history. The last few decades have witnessed a transformation in how this topic is researched and understood, and this volume captures the state of a field that continues to develop apace. It examines – through the prism of naval affairs – issues of nationhood and imperialism; the legacy of Nelson; the sociocultural realities of life in ships and naval bases; and the processes of commemoration, journalism and stage-managed pageantry that plotted the interrelationship of ship and shore. This bold and original publication will be essential for undergraduate and postgraduate students of naval and maritime history. Beyond that, though, it marks an important intervention into wider historiographies that will be read by scholars from across the spectrum of social history, cultural studies and the analysis of national identity.
In May 1958, and four years into the Algerian War of Independence, a revolt again appropriated the revolutionary and republican symbolism of the French Revolution by seizing power through a Committee of Public Safety. This book explores why a repressive colonial system that had for over a century maintained the material and intellectual backwardness of Algerian women now turned to an extensive programme of 'emancipation'. After a brief background sketch of the situation of Algerian women during the post-war decade, it discusses the various factors contributed to the emergence of the first significant women's organisations in the main urban centres. It was only after the outbreak of the rebellion in 1954 and the arrival of many hundreds of wives of army officers that the model of female interventionism became dramatically activated. The French military intervention in Algeria during 1954-1962 derived its force from the Orientalist current in European colonialism and also seemed to foreshadow the revival of global Islamophobia after 1979 and the eventual moves to 'liberate' Muslim societies by US-led neo-imperialism in Afghanistan and Iraq. For the women of Bordj Okhriss, as throughout Algeria, the French army represented a dangerous and powerful force associated with mass destruction, brutality and rape. The central contradiction facing the mobile socio-medical teams teams was how to gain the trust of Algerian women and to bring them social progress and emancipation when they themselves were part of an army that had destroyed their villages and driven them into refugee camps.
War films produced by British companies, most notably the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company and Urban & Paul. 8 All these films seem to have presented positive images of the war, carefully avoiding British reverses or the more controversial aspects of the British prosecution of the campaigns. Three films portrayed a skirmish between a troop of cavalry scouts attached to General French on his
hall gave way to the jingoistic cinema. War films proliferated in the 1920s. Social Darwinism and imperial developmental concepts underlay all the expedition, documentary, and newsreel material of the time. The great imperial epics of Alexander Korda and Michael Balcon were among the most popular films of the 1930s, and they were repeatedly reissued during and after the Second World War. The imperial
intended meanings with actual results. As Nicholas Reeves cautions in regard to the well-trod subject of First World War film propaganda, ‘the myth of the power of film propaganda was, in reality, incomparably more powerful than the film propaganda itself’. 1 This is not to say that propaganda did not have multiple effects, both intentional and accidental. Take Nazi propaganda. In his autobiography Five Germanys
forensic evidence presented to the judge and jury. The images represented in crime scene photographs became an increasingly vital narrative in the prosecution and reporting of crime, just as the cinematic depictions of policing in post-war films and television programmes became central to public perceptions of crime and its investigation. By 1974, publicity photographs of the Metropolitan Police could depict the archetypal London crime scene: an investigative team surrounds the body of a young woman in a bomb site, while a crime scene photographer takes pictures. These
engaged with fatherhood from the 1950s, even if there was a discrepancy between the domestic labour of men and women. Alongside the well-documented post-war literature on motherhood, fatherhood was also promoted by social commentators. ‘Family-orientated’ masculinity became a much more important part of male identity and selfhood in this period.32 Even war films from this era promoted the domestic ideal, with many ending with a promised or actual return home.33 However, Martin Francis highlights how these seemingly happy endings were actually far more unsettling and
cultures within that sea. 16 Jonathan Rayner has analysed the impact of the naval war film on cinema and popular culture, 17 while documentary films of naval shipyards shape Victoria Carolan’s examination of regional and national identities. 18 Despite imperial identity appearing prominently within these new cultural analyses of the Royal Navy, the majority of studies are still Euro-centrically focused on
4 dead sons feels no bitterness’, News Chronicle, 16 January 1945, p. 2. 3 R. Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2013). 4 For discussion of the cultural memory of the war in Britain, see M. Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson, 2004); G. Eley, ‘Finding the “people’s war”: film, British collective memories and World War II’, The American Historical Review, 103:3 (2001), pp. 818–38; P. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (London: Routledge, 2004); L. Noakes and J. Pattinson (eds), British
Athens during the winter of 1944–45. 2 Stathis N. Kalyvas and Nikos Marantzidis, ‘To Istoriko parelthon os ergaleio propagandas’ [The historical past as propaganda tool], Kathimerini, 21 July 2013. 3 Kostis Kornetis, ‘From reconciliation to vengeance: the Greek Civil War on screen in Pantelis Voulgaris’s A Soul so Deep and Kostas Charalambous’s Tied Red Thread’, FILMICON: Journal of Greek Film Studies 2 (2014), pp. 93–116; v 263 v A history of the Greek resistance E.R. Kosmidou, European Civil War Films: Memory, Conflict, and Nostalgia (New York: Routledge, 2013