The First Day on the Somme

The First Day on the Somme PDF Author: Martin Middlebrook
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473814243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
A history of the British Army’s experience at the Battle of the Somme in France during World War I. After an immense but useless bombardment, at 7:30 AM on July 1, 1916, the British Army went over the top and attacked the German trenches. It was the first day of the battle of the Somme, and on that day, the British suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, two for every yard of their front. With more than fifty times the daily losses at El Alamein and fifteen times the British casualties on D-day, July 1, 1916, was the blackest day in the history of the British Army. But, more than that, as Lloyd George recognized, it was a watershed in the history of the First World War. The Army that attacked on that day was the volunteer Army that had answered Kitchener’s call. It had gone into action confident of a decisive victory. But by sunset on the first day on the Somme, no one could any longer think of a war that might be won. Martin Middlebrook’s research has covered not just official and regimental histories and tours of the battlefields, but interviews with hundreds of survivors, both British and German. As to the action itself, he conveys the overall strategic view and the terrifying reality that it was for front-line soldiers. Praise for The First Day on the Somme “The soldiers receive the best service a historian can provide: their story is told in their own words.” —The Guardian (UK)

The First Day on the Somme

The First Day on the Somme PDF Author: Martin Middlebrook
Publisher: Pen and Sword
ISBN: 1473814243
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Get Book Here

Book Description
A history of the British Army’s experience at the Battle of the Somme in France during World War I. After an immense but useless bombardment, at 7:30 AM on July 1, 1916, the British Army went over the top and attacked the German trenches. It was the first day of the battle of the Somme, and on that day, the British suffered nearly 60,000 casualties, two for every yard of their front. With more than fifty times the daily losses at El Alamein and fifteen times the British casualties on D-day, July 1, 1916, was the blackest day in the history of the British Army. But, more than that, as Lloyd George recognized, it was a watershed in the history of the First World War. The Army that attacked on that day was the volunteer Army that had answered Kitchener’s call. It had gone into action confident of a decisive victory. But by sunset on the first day on the Somme, no one could any longer think of a war that might be won. Martin Middlebrook’s research has covered not just official and regimental histories and tours of the battlefields, but interviews with hundreds of survivors, both British and German. As to the action itself, he conveys the overall strategic view and the terrifying reality that it was for front-line soldiers. Praise for The First Day on the Somme “The soldiers receive the best service a historian can provide: their story is told in their own words.” —The Guardian (UK)

Early Modern Germany, 1477-1806

Early Modern Germany, 1477-1806 PDF Author: Michael Hughes
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812214277
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
Attempts to present a coherent account of early modern German history are often hampered by the German equivalent of the Whig theory of history, by which all useful roads lead up to the creation of the nineteenth-century power state (Machstaat) or institutional state (Anstalstaat). In this kind of historiography, there are large "blank" areas between the "important" events like the Reformation, the Thiry Years War, the Seven Years War, and the French Revolution. During the intervals of apparent stagnation between these events, "Germany" seems to disappear, to be replaced by states such as Prussian and Austria, Saxony, Bavaria, and the Palatinate. Substantial areas are ignored, and groups such as the parliamentary Estates, which stood in the way of state-building, are virtually written out of most accounts. Rather than focusing on the separate histories of the individual German states, Michael Hughes looks to the structure of the Holy Roman Empire in its final centuries and writes an account of Germany as a functioning, federative state, with institutions capable of reform and modernization. For nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians, the Empire was seen as the embodiment of division and weakness. But by examining the first Reich, Hughes reveals the persistence of the idea of Germanness and German national feeling during a period when, according to most accounts, Germany had virtually ceased to exist. At the same time, he examines "the element of continuity in Germany's development . . . in an attempt to discover how far back in Germany's past it is necessary to go to find the roots of the 'German problem,' the Germans' search for a political expression of their strongly developed awareness of cultural unity."

Germany & the Prussian Spirit

Germany & the Prussian Spirit PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 56

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Book Description


Secret Reports on Nazi Germany

Secret Reports on Nazi Germany PDF Author: Franz Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691134138
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 704

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Book Description
A groundbreaking book that gathers key wartime intelligence reports During the Second World War, three prominent members of the Frankfurt School—Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse, and Otto Kirchheimer—worked as intelligence analysts for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA. This book brings together their most important intelligence reports on Nazi Germany, most of them published here for the first time. These reports provide a fresh perspective on Hitler's regime and the Second World War, and a fascinating window on Frankfurt School critical theory. They develop a detailed analysis of Nazism as a social and economic system and the role of anti-Semitism in Nazism, as well as a coherent plan for the reconstruction of postwar Germany as a democratic political system with a socialist economy. These reports played a significant role in the development of postwar Allied policy, including denazification and the preparation of the Nuremberg Trials. They also reveal how wartime intelligence analysis shaped the intellectual agendas of these three important German-Jewish scholars who fled Nazi persecution prior to the war. Secret Reports on Nazi Germany features a foreword by Raymond Geuss as well as a comprehensive general introduction by Raffaele Laudani that puts these writings in historical and intellectual context.

Phenomenology of Spirit

Phenomenology of Spirit PDF Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
ISBN: 9788120814738
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 648

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Book Description
wide criticism both from Western and Eastern scholars.

Germany: A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000

Germany: A Nation in Its Time: Before, During, and After Nationalism, 1500-2000 PDF Author: Helmut Walser Smith
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 1631491784
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 610

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Book Description
The first major history of Germany in a generation, a work that presents a five-hundred-year narrative that challenges our traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past. For nearly a century, historians have depicted Germany as a rabidly nationalist land, born in a sea of aggression. Not so, says Helmut Walser Smith, who, in this groundbreaking 500-year history—the first comprehensive volume to go well beyond World War II—challenges traditional perceptions of Germany’s conflicted past, revealing a nation far more thematically complicated than twentieth-century historians have imagined. Smith’s dramatic narrative begins with the earliest glimmers of a nation in the 1500s, when visionary mapmakers and adventuresome travelers struggled to delineate and define this embryonic nation. Contrary to widespread perception, the people who first described Germany were pacific in temperament, and the pernicious ideology of German nationalism would only enter into the nation’s history centuries later. Tracing the significant tension between the idea of the nation and the ideology of its nationalism, Smith shows a nation constantly reinventing itself and explains how radical nationalism ultimately turned Germany into a genocidal nation. Smith’s aim, then, is nothing less than to redefine our understanding of Germany: Is it essentially a bellicose nation that murdered over six million people? Or a pacific, twenty-first-century model of tolerant democracy? And was it inevitable that the land that produced Goethe and Schiller, Heinrich Heine and Käthe Kollwitz, would also carry out genocide on an unprecedented scale? Combining poignant prose with an historian’s rigor, Smith recreates the national euphoria that accompanied the beginning of World War I, followed by the existential despair caused by Germany’s shattering defeat. This psychic devastation would simultaneously produce both the modernist glories of the Bauhaus and the meteoric rise of the Nazi party. Nowhere is Smith’s mastery on greater display than in his chapter on the Holocaust, which looks at the killing not only through the tragedies of Western Europe but, significantly, also through the lens of the rural hamlets and ghettos of Poland and Eastern Europe, where more than 80% of all the Jews murdered originated. He thus broadens the extent of culpability well beyond the high echelons of Hitler’s circle all the way to the local level. Throughout its pages, Germany also examines the indispensable yet overlooked role played by German women throughout the nation’s history, highlighting great artists and revolutionaries, and the horrific, rarely acknowledged violence that war wrought on women. Richly illustrated, with original maps created by the author, Germany: A Nation in Its Time is a sweeping account that does nothing less than redefine our understanding of Germany for the twenty-first century.

The Spirit of 1914

The Spirit of 1914 PDF Author: Jeffrey Verhey
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521026369
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 284

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Book Description
This is the first systematic analysis of German public opinion at the outbreak of the Great War. Jeffrey Verhey's powerful study demonstrates that the myth of war enthusiasm was historically inaccurate. He also examines the development of the myth in newspapers, politics and propaganda, and the propagation and appropriation of this myth after the war. His innovative analysis sheds new light on German experience of the Great War and on the role of political myths in modern German political culture.

Forgotten Land

Forgotten Land PDF Author: Max Egremont
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429969334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386

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Book Description
Until the end of World War II, East Prussia was the German empire's farthest eastern redoubt, a thriving and beautiful land on the southeastern coast of the Baltic Sea. Now it lives only in history and in myth. Since 1945, the territory has been divided between Poland and Russia, stretching from the border between Russia and Lithuania in the east and south, and through Poland in the west. In Forgotten Land, Max Egremont offers a vivid account of this region and its people through the stories of individuals who were intimately involved in and transformed by its tumultuous history, as well as accounts of his own travels and interviews he conducted along the way. Forgotten Land is a story of historical identity and character, told through intimate portraits of people and places. It is a unique examination of the layers of history, of the changing perceptions and myths of homeland, of virtue and of wickedness, and of how a place can still overwhelm those who left it years before.

Iron Kingdom

Iron Kingdom PDF Author: Christopher Clark
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014190402X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 816

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Book Description
'Of the "Great Powers" that dominated Europe from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, Prussia is the only one to have vanished ... Iron Kingdom is not just good: it is everything a history book ought to be ... The nemesis of Prussia has cast such a long shadow that German historians have tiptoed around the subject. Thus it was left to an Englishman to write what is surely the best history of Prussia in any language' Sunday Telegraph

Prussia in the Historical Culture of the German Democratic Republic

Prussia in the Historical Culture of the German Democratic Republic PDF Author: Marcus Colla
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192865900
Category : Germany
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
No example demonstrates the fluidity of the past within the German Democratic Republic more powerfully than the history of the Prussian state. Initially attacked in East German official histories as the historical engine of German militarism and reaction, Prussia underwent a remarkabletransformation in official and public memory from around the end of the 1970s. This was the so-called 'Prussia-Renaissance', in which, for the first time, the East German state began to recognise and even celebrate figures from Prussian history who had not served a 'progressive' agenda. But the'Prussia-Renaissance' was also a political and cultural phenomenon with a wide public resonance. The 'Prussia-Renaissance' may have been a relatively short-lived phenomenon, but it evidently opened a deep vein in the historical memory of the German Democratic Republic that defied reduction to 'highpolitics' alone. This book asks why.Using the case study of Prussia, Marcus Colla presents a multi-perspective approach to the way that a distinctive 'historical culture' was constructed in the German Democratic Republic. It not only evaluates the roles played by political figures, historians, and cultural elites, but also heritagepreservationists, exhibition curators, heimat museums, television producers, novelists and playwrights, and singers - the purveyors of what we might more generally term 'popular culture'. In essence, Colla poses four fundamental questions for our understanding of life, politics and culture incommunist East Germany: how was history there made? How was it understood? How was it contested? And how was it used?