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Far from the battlefront, hundreds of thousands of workers toiled in Bohemian factories over the course of World War I, and their lives were inescapably shaped by the conflict. In particular, they faced new and dramatic forms of material hardship that strained social ties and placed in sharp relief the most mundane aspects of daily life, such as when, what, and with whom to eat. This study reconstructs the experience of the Bohemian working class during the Great War through explorations of four basic spheres—food, labor, gender, and protest—that comprise a fascinating case study in early twentieth-century social history.

Revolutions, droughts, famines, invasions, wars, regicides, government collapses-the calamities of the mid-seventeenth century were unprecedented in both frequency and extent. The effects of what historians call the \"General Crisis\" extended from England to Japan, from the Russian Empire to sub-Saharan Africa. The Americas, too, did not escape the turbulence of the time. In this meticulously researched volume, master historian Geoffrey Parker presents the firsthand testimony of men and women who saw and suffered from the sequence of political, economic, and social crises between 1618 to the late 1680s. Parker also deploys the scientific evidence of climate change during this period. His discoveries revise entirely our understanding of the General Crisis: changes in prevailing weather patterns, especially longer winters and cooler and wetter summers, disrupted growing seasons and destroyed harvests. This in turn brought hunger, malnutrition, and disease; and as material conditions worsened, wars, rebellions, and revolutions rocked the world. Parker's demonstration of the link between climate change, war, and catastrophe 350 years ago stands as an extraordinary historical achievement. And the implications of his study are equally important: are we adequately prepared-or even preparing-for the catastrophes that climate change brings?

This book explores the life courses of children born of war in different twentieth-century conflicts, including the Second World War, the Vietnam War, the Bosnian War, the Rwandan Genocide and the LRA conflict. It investigates both governmental and military policies vis-à-vis children born of war and their mothers, as well as family and local community attitudes, building a complex picture of the multi-layered challenges faced by many children born of war within their post-conflict receptor communities. Based on extensive archival research, the book also uses oral history and participatory research methods which allow the author to add the voices of the children born of war to historical analysis.

In his On the Glory of Athens, Plutarch complained that the Athenian people spent more on the production of dramatic festivals and \"the misfortunes of Medeas and Electras than they did on maintaining their empire and fighting for their liberty against the Persians.\" This view of the Athenians' misplaced priorities became orthodoxy with the publication of August Böckh's 1817 book Die Staatshaushaltung der Athener [The Public Economy of Athens], which criticized the classical Athenian dēmos for spending more on festivals than on wars and for levying unjust taxes to pay for their bloated government. But were the Athenians' priorities really as misplaced as ancient and modern historians believed?Drawing on lines of evidence not available in Böckh's time, Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens calculates the real costs of religion, politics, and war to settle the long-standing debate about what the ancient Athenians valued most highly. David M. Pritchard explains that, in Athenian democracy, voters had full control over public spending. When they voted for a bill, they always knew its cost and how much they normally spent on such bills. Therefore, the sums they chose to spend on festivals, politics, and the armed forces reflected the order of the priorities that they had set for their state. By calculating these sums, Pritchard convincingly demonstrates that it was not religion or politics but war that was the overriding priority of the Athenian people.

Why do international criminal tribunals write histories of the origins and causes of armed conflicts? Richard Ashby Wilson conducted empirical research with judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and expert witnesses in three international criminal tribunals to understand how law and history are combined in the courtroom.

This sweeping new assessment of Civil War monuments unveiled in the United States between the 1860s and 1930s argues that they were pivotal to a national embrace of military values. Americans' wariness of standing armies limited construction of war memorials in the early republic, Thomas J. Brown explains, and continued to influence commemoration after the Civil War. As large cities and small towns across the North and South installed an astonishing range of statues, memorial halls, and other sculptural and architectural tributes to Civil War heroes, communities debated the relationship of military service to civilian life through fund-raising campaigns, artistic designs, oratory, and ceremonial practices. Brown shows that distrust of standing armies gave way to broader enthusiasm for soldiers in the Gilded Age. Some important projects challenged the trend, but many Civil War monuments proposed new norms of discipline and vigor that lifted veterans to a favored political status and modeled racial and class hierarchies. A half century of Civil War commemoration reshaped remembrance of the American Revolution and guided American responses to World War I. Brown provides the most comprehensive overview of the American war memorial as a cultural form and reframes the national debate over Civil War monuments that remain potent presences on the civic landscape.

Since the 1990s, sexual violence in conflict zones has received much media attention. In large part as a result of grassroots feminist organizing in the 1970s and 1980s, mass rapes in the wars in the former Yugoslavia and during the Rwandan genocide received widespread coverage, and international organizations-from courts to NGOs to the UN-have engaged in systematic efforts to hold perpetrators accountable and to ameliorate the effects of wartime sexual violence. Yet many millennia of conflict preceded these developments, and we know little about the longer-term history of conflict-based sexual violence.Sexual Violence in Conflict Zoneshelps to fill in the historical gaps. It provides insight into subjects that are of deep concern to the human rights community, such as the aftermath of conflict-based sexual violence, legal strategies for prosecuting it, the economic functions of sexual violence, and the ways perceived religious or racial difference can create or aggravate settings of sexual danger. Essays in the volume span a broad geographic, chronological, and thematic scope, touching on the ancient world, medieval Europe, the American Revolutionary War, precolonial and colonial Africa, Muslim Central Asia, the two world wars, and the Bangladeshi War of Independence. By considering a wide variety of cases, the contributors analyze the factors making sexual violence in conflict zones more or less likely and the resulting trauma more or less devastating. Topics covered range from the experiences of victims and the motivations of perpetrators, to the relationship between wartime and peacetime sexual violence, to the historical background of the contemporary feminist-inflected human rights moment. In bringing together historical and contemporary perspectives, this wide-ranging collection provides historians and human rights activists with tools for understanding long-term consequences of sexual violence as war-ravaged societies struggle to achieve postconflict stability.

This book argues that the role of the British East India Company in transforming warfare in South Asia has been overestimated. Although it agrees with conventional wisdom that, before the British, the nature of Indian society made it difficult for central authorities to establish themselves fully and develop a monopoly over armed force, the book argues that changes to warfare in South Asia were more gradual, and the result of more complicated socio-economic forces than has been hitherto acknowledged. The book covers the period from 1740, when the British first became a major power broker in south India, to 1849, when the British eliminated the last substantial indigenous kingdom in the sub-continent. Placing South Asian military history in a global, comparative context, it examines military innovations; armies and how they conducted themselves; navies and naval warfare; major Indian military powers - such as the Mysore and Khalsa kingdoms, the Maratha confederacy - and the British, explaining why they succeeded.

In its totality, the “Long Second World War”—extending from the beginning of the Spanish Civil War to the end of hostilities in 1945—has exerted enormous influence over European culture. Bringing together leading historians, sociologists, and literary and film scholars, this broadly interdisciplinary volume investigates Europeans’ individual and collective memories and the ways in which they have shaped the continent’s cultural heritage. Focusing on the major combatant nations—Spain, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia—it offers thoroughly contextualized explorations of novels, memoirs, films, and a host of other cultural forms to illuminate European public memory.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.