Finest Hour Research Articles

Nursing's finest hour: Part 1. Queen's Nurses in South Africa

British Journal of Community NursingVol. 17, No. 5 Nursing HistoryNursing's finest hour: Part 1. Queen's Nurses in South AfricaRosemary CookRosemary CookSearch for more papers by this authorRosemary CookPublished Online:16 Aug 2013https://doi.org/10.12968/bjcn.2012.17.5.222AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissions ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail View article References Birmingham Daily Post (1900) IYH base hospital open. 22 Mar 1900 Google ScholarCross L (1902) A Concentration Camp. Nursing Notes July 1902: 82–4 Google ScholarNursing Notes (1902) Last Year, 1901. January 1902: 1 Google ScholarRolleston HD (1901) Notes on enteric fever at the Imperial Yeomanry Hospital, Pretoria. BMJ 5 Oct 1901: 976–8 Crossref, Medline, Google ScholarWatchorn L (1905) Nursing in the Boer Camps. Queen's Nurses' Magazine 2(2): 30: 59–62 Google Scholar FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails 1 May 2012Volume 17Issue 5ISSN (print): 1462-4753ISSN (online): 2052-2215 Metrics History Published online 16 August 2013 Published in print 1 May 2012 Information© MA Healthcare LimitedPDF download

BLUE GUMS FORTRESS OBSERVATION POST SIMON'S BAY FIRE COMMAND 1942-1955

The Second World War was the "finest hour" in the history of coast artillery in South Africa. It was a period of hectic activity and phenomenal growth but it was also, fortunately, a great anticlimax because South Africa was spared an attack on her coastal cities and towns by enemy warships and aircraft.

THE UNION DEFENCE FORCES' BUILDINGS OF CAPE TOWN DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR 1939-45

Recently the Cape Provincial Institute of Architects has compiled and published catalogues of the buildings of Cape Town. There can be no doubt that the Second World War was the finest hour in the Mother City's history. The Cape Fortress Location List contains details of all the buildings and sites occupied by the Union Defence Forces and certain British units in the Cape Command during this hectic period. During the War the information was classified as secret. Only six copies of the Location List were made and they had been completed by 4 August 1944. The Location list was prepared by the 'Q' Section at the Castle and updated from time to time. Since the information concerning the units occupying the buildings in Cape Town may be of considerable interest to the Cape Provincial Institute of Architects, the National Monuments Council and others and has not been published before, it is provided below. There has also been great interest in the Table Bay Docks and its buildings so details concerning these have also been included.

“A Mind-Opening Influence of Great Importance”: Arthur Raper at Agnes Scott College

Born in 1917, Winifred H. Winnie Kellersberger raised in the Belgian Congo, where her parents were prominent medical missionaries. Following in the path of her stepmother, in 1934 she matriculated at Agnes Scott College, an all-women's institution in Decatur, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. There she excelled in the classroom and played an active role in campus life. In particular, she a leader in the campus YWCA, serving as president her senior year. She belonged to the Mortar Board honor society and one of seven members of the Class of 1938 named to Who's Who Among Students in American Universities and Colleges. (1) In 1940 Kellersberger married Lachlan C. Vass, a recently ordained Presbyterian minister, and the couple moved to the Belgian Congo, where they did missionary work for the next thirty years. Among other activities, Kellersberger edited the mission's monthly publication and authored five books in the Tshiluba language. Upon returning to the States, in 1971 she received a master's degree in Journalism and Communications from the University of Florida. In 1980, a revised version of her thesis published as The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States. In its dedication she wrote: To Dr. W. E. B. Du Bois, the inspiration of my student days to intellectual fortitude; To Dr. James Weldon Johnson, the inspiration of my student days to spiritual fortitude; And to Dr. Arthur F. Raper, my esteemed professor of sociology at Agnes Scott College, who introduced me to Dr. Du Bois and Dr. Johnson, I dedicate this book. (2) That a graduate of a southern white women's college from this period would dedicate a book to two famous African American civil rights leaders highly unusual, to put it mildly. And Winifred Kellersberger Vass's trajectory extraordinary in many ways. Yet she hardly alone among her Agnes Scott classmates in her admiration for her professor Arthur Raper, one of the South's leading liberals who also part-time at the college from 1932 to 1939. Eliza King Paschall, whom the Class of 1938 selected to be its life president, later recalled that Raper was one of those persons who leaves his mark on the lives of every person he touches. Similarly, Elsie West Duval, the class testator, remembered that Raper taught me for the first time to THINK for myself. Indeed, as a measure of the high regard in which he held, the Class of 1938 dedicated the college yearbook to Raper, an unusual tribute to a part-time instructor, let alone an outspoken liberal. (3) Raper's work as research secretary for the Commission on Interracial Cooperation and as a founding member of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, his classic works on lynching and the plantation South, and his involvement with the New Deal have all been amply chronicled in the historical literature. However, in their exploration of southern liberalism, the Depression and New Deal, and the origins of the modern Civil Rights Movement, scholars have all but neglected Raper's time at Agnes Scott. Yet on fully a third of his hundreds of speaking appearances across the region, Raper identified as being from Agnes Scott rather than the Interracial Commission. An examination of Raper's sometimescontroversial tenure at Agnes Scott reveals an important though neglected dimension of his life, an experience he himself later referred to as perhaps his finest hour. It expands our treatment of southern liberals beyond their organizational activities to their experiences as teachers and students. It also complicates and challenges much of what we know about southern white women's colleges during the ferment of the 1930s. (4) Originating as the Decatur Female Seminary in 1889, the Presbyterian-affiliated school chartered as Agnes Scott College in 1906, the first accredited women's college in the state. By the early 1920s, the school offered a full academic curriculum, the professional credentials of the faculty had been upgraded, and alumnae were attending some of the nation's most prestigious graduate programs. …

British Film Policy in an Age of Austerity

Speaking to journalists after The King’s Speech (2010) won four Oscars in 2011’s ceremony, lead actor Colin Firth described the decision to axe the UK Film Council as ‘short-sighted’ (quoted in Smith 2011). Indeed, The King’s Speech makes a suitable memorial to both the strengths and weaknesses of British cinema under New Labour for several reasons. First would be the film’s transatlantic success (alongside numerous awards, £156m by February 2011), testament to the way that British talent can punch above its weight internationally. Second might be an acknowledgement that the film follows an entirely conventional strategy of selling British history abroad, in this case the Royal family and in particular the figure of the (literally) stuttering posh boy as symbol of national resolve during Britain’s ‘finest hour’. Finally we might note that in order to spin this piece of royalist/tourist propaganda together, King George VI’s enthusiastic support for appeasement has had to be expunged. As Christopher Hitchens put

Flying the flag for the En-ger-land: The Sun's (re)construction of English identity during the 2010 World Cup

The 2010 Fédération Internationale de Football Association World Cup, held in South Africa, was a mega sport tourism event. In the nation that claims to be the ‘home of football’, following the progress of the English team and their supporters during the World Cup garners exhaustive newspaper coverage and helps shape the national consciousness about English national identity. Accordingly, this study examined how English national identity was (re)constructed through newspaper narratives about the English national football team and their ‘army’ of supporters, many of whom traveled to South Africa as sport tourists, during the 2010 World Cup. Articles in England's best selling popular newspaper The Sun were examined and interpreted drawing on Guibernau's [(2007) The Identity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity)] strategies for the construction of national identity, Anderson' s [(1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and the Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso)] theory of the imagined community, and Hobsbawm's [(1983) Introduction: Inventing traditions' and mass producing traditions: Europe 1870–1914, in: E. J. Hobsbawm & T. O. Ranger (Eds.) The Invention of Tradition, pp. 1–14 and 263–307 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)] theory of invented traditions. The Sun's narratives about the English team's and supporters' performance of English identity drew on selectively favorable aspects of English history. The English team's failure to live up to the nation's ‘finest hour’, and justify the patriotic following of their supporters in South Africa and ‘back home’ was met with scathing, vitriolic criticism.

Five Suggestions for Engineering Students and Young Practitioners

organizational. Churchill saw, before almost anyone, the great difficulty the British Isles would experience during the imminent war, and he persisted in speaking about this vision, in spite of widespread skepticism, so that his nation would be prepared. Second, Churchill, like most individuals who lead, was a powerful speaker. He wrote his own speeches and practiced them. Many of his expressions are still memorable and used in the English language, including “slippery slope” and “finest hour.” You have many and varied options for continuing your studies. A major one is to seek an employer who will encourage you to continue your personal and professional development and assist you. Even if you are fortunate enough to find such an employer, take charge of your own continued development. Continued study and personal development are your responsibility.

Admiral Togo: Nelson of the East

Togo Heihachiro (1848-1934) was born into a feudal society that had lived in seclusion for 250 years. As a teenage samurai, he witnessed the destruction wrought upon his native land by British warships. As the legendary Silent Admiral, he was at the forefront of innovations in warfare, pioneering the Japanese use of modern gunnery and wireless communication. He is best known as the Nelson of the East for his resounding victory over the Tsar's navy in the Russo-Japanese War, but he also lived a remarkable life studying at a British maritime college, witnessing the Sino-French War, the Hawaiian Revolution, and the Boxer Uprising. After his retirement, he was appointed to oversee the education of the Emperor, Hirohito. This new biography spans Japan's sudden, violent leap out of its self-imposed isolation and into the 20th century. Delving beyond Togo's finest hour at the Battle of Tsushima, it portrays the life of a diffident Japanese sailor in Victorian Britain, his reluctant celebrity in America where he was laid low by Boston cooking and welcomed by his biggest fan, Theodore Roosevelt , forgotten wars over the short-lived Republics of Ezo and Formosa, and the accumulation of peacetime experience that forged a wartime hero.

Half full and half empty glass: The application of EU law in Poland (2004–2010)

Poland joined the European Union on 1 May 2004 and the first wave of EU-related litigation reached the Polish courts soon after. The question that this article tries to answer is whether Polish judges are willing and able to serve as EU judges and give EU law effect. The emerging picture is mixed. On the one hand, there is a growing volume of court decisions calling for praise, on the other hand some decisions are not exactly the finest hour of the Polish judiciary. The article starts with an overview of EU-related judgments of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal. It then turns to the application of fundamental tenets of EU law by other Polish courts. This is followed by a discussion of issues raised under the preliminary ruling procedure and an overview of selected references submitted by Polish courts, including problems of translation, and question of temporal scope of EU law.

‘[…] the best security for London is the nine Kennedy children.’ Perceptions by US Officials in Washington DC and London of Britain's Readiness for War in 1939

The London Observer was the title given to the published version of the diaries of General Raymond E. Lee, US military attaché in London in 1940–1941, edited by James R. Leutze, which appeared in 1971. Yet Lee did not arrive in London till spring 1940, as Britain's ‘Finest Hour’ sounded and the nation squared up to Luftwaffe air attack and the threat of German invasion. Compared with this phase of the Second World War, so extensively chronicled by historians, scant attention has been paid to British preparedness for war—and especially little to evaluations by America's London observers of the quality of British preparedness. This article seeks to fill that gap. Firstly, it highlights the severe organisational shortcomings and largely absent coordination that prevented the US diplomatic and intelligence apparatus forming coherent advice to President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the State Department on whether Britain's defences, and Neville Chamberlain's government, could withstand the Third Reich. Secondly, it shows that seriously divergent assessments resulted as to the likelihood of Britain withstanding a war, notably as between the pessimism of Joseph P. Kennedy, the US ambassador to the Court of St James from 1937 to 1941 and father of later President John F. Kennedy, and the measured optimism of his professional defence advisor, Brigadier-General Bradford G. Chynoweth, Lee's predecessor as US military attaché in London. Finally, it suggests the importance of personalities in international politics, as the difficulty for the State Department, the War Department and the President of accurately calibrating British war readiness in 1939 became greatly exacerbated by the personal animosity between their men on the spot.

Doctors and managers: radical thinking required

Amid the slashing sound of treasury cuts, Her Majesty's Government has raised the whisper of clinician leadership. Pragmatic medics may view this as a cynical attempt to subdue the profession in troubled times for the health service. Others will view it as an opportunity to restore rightful leadership to the NHS and banish the 20-year plague of managers. A middle road that marries the most clinically savvy managers with the most managerially skilled clinicians is probably the wisest. Invariably, the future reality of the NHS is tricky to decipher from present government rhetoric but the preparations for clinician leadership are gathering pace. Aidan Halligan believes that the financial crisis will impact on the duty of care to patients although instead of being a disaster for patient care, the emergence of a new cadre of clinical leaders could result in the NHS’ finest hour. To that end, Halligan and colleagues at University College London Hospitals have set up an NHS staff college to establish a new global standard in the development of healthcare leaders (JRSM 2010;103:387–91). Four themes of leadership will be at the heart of the NHS staff college curriculum: self-awareness, self-management, leading the team, and big leadership. But most leaders could devise their own themes within moments. The success of the NHS staff college, and other leadership initiatives, will not be in the use of terminology. It will be dependent on bridging the distance between doctors and managers, restoring a sense of vocation for healthcare professionals, and removing a culture of fear and slavish compliance. ‘If we always do what we always did,’ writes Halligan, ‘we will always get what we always got.’ And it is this challenge I wish to throw open to JRSM readers. If we accept the survey results of the Institute for Health Improvement, the American Joint Commission and the Rand Corporation that point to a rift between doctors and managers, how do we bring these protagonists closer together? What do we need to do now to improve the relationship between doctors and managers? We might need radical thinking, and I invite JRSM readers to submit their 50–100 word contributions by the end of October, the best of which will be published in the December issue of the journal. ‘Only one man in a thousand is a leader of men,’ said the management guru Groucho Marx, ‘the other nine hundred and ninety-nine follow women.’ He might have solved the crisis of the NHS with such original thinking. Now it's your turn.

Sprekende cijfers - Katholieke sociaalingenieurs en de enscenering van de celibaatcrisis, 1963-1972

Rather than being the dawning of a secular age, the 1960s were also the start of religious transformation and revitalization, in which ‘those Dutch Catholics’ internationally stood out. Instead of focusing on the usual suspects (bishops or the Vatican), this article analyzes the finest hour of social scientists. These played a significant but hardly acknowledged role in the introduction of new narratives of crisis and renewal. Social engineers became trustworthy analysts within the realm of church as well as society, applying social sciences, e.g. opinion polls. The article focuses on the practices through which these engineers, among whom the Franciscan Walter Goddijn (director of the Pastoral Institute of the Dutch Church Province PINK) played a crucial role, applied the technique of social polling. It focuses in detail on the making of and the effects of the opinion poll among Dutch priests on the matter of celibacy. It shows how the aspirations of the engineers actively influenced the outcome of the polling. Furthermore, it analyzes how the interpretation of this polling staged a celibacy crisis that gained further momentum through media exposure, setting of an altering relationship between church and society.

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN

Seventy years on, it is worth revisiting the Battle of Britain. While there is rightly emphasis on the role of RAF Fighter Command, the battle was more complex. RAF Bomber Command launched spoiling raids against German airfields in occupied Europe, while the war at sea was intense as U-boats struck at Allied and neutral shipping. The ‘finest hour’ was a more complex affair than normally presented.

The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau (review)

Reviewed by: The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau Aleksandra Gruzinska Ziegler, Robert . The Nothing Machine: The Fiction of Octave Mirbeau. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. Faux-Titre 298. Pp. 252. ISBN 978-90-420-2237-9 The Nothing Machine contains three parts: The first one is entitled "The Statue." It includes three chapters, each devoted to Le Calvaire, L'Abbé Jules and Sébastien Roch. These novels mark the early works written by Mirbeau and are considered autobiographical. Part Two entitled "The Matrix" comprises four chapters, including Dans le Ciel (Chap. 4), an unfinished work recently edited by Pierre Michel, a key Mirbelian scholar who is amply recognized in this volume. Un Gentilhomme (Chap. 5) is another unfinished work which saw publication in 1920, three years after Mirbeau's death. Both Le Jardin des supplices (Chap. 6) and Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (Chap. 7) appeared during Mir-beau's lifetime, and are among his masterpieces. Entitled "The Nothing Machine," Part Three includes Les 21 Jours d'un neurasthénique (Chap. 8), La 628-E8 (Chap. 9) and Dingo (Chap. 10). The last novel in which "the animal communicates in its inhumanly accurate repertory of barks, growls, glances and postures" (207) needed a friend's [Léon Werth's] helpful intervention before completion and publication in 1913. Ziegler's "Introduction" gives a quick overview of the contents of his own book. Ziegler sees Mirbeau as an innovative writer, whose work is "an agent of transformation, a grave pullulating with growth, a site of corruption and resurrection" (8). He sees Mirbeau as different from the stale "claustrophobic Decadents immured in the impregnable sanctuary of their ornate style and obscure intrigues" (10). But Mirbeau was a man of his time – Decadence's finest hour – in search of new forms of expression, and forgotten for over half a century. After Le Calvaire appeared in 1886 the editor promptly announced that "Resurrection" would follow, but it never did. Yet every volume published by Mirbeau is an attempt at resurrection, new growth, new life, and a literature that he reinvents and renews in the finest Decadent tradition. The author of The Nothing Machine makes every effort to extirpate Mirbeau from the stale definitions that plague the much maligned Fin-de-siècle Decadent writers who still await a biographer to account for their attempt to reinvigorate, reinvent and renew literature. Yet, Mirbeau is a man deeply anchored in the second half of the nineteenth century, the Franco-Prussian war, the Dreyfus Affair and the events that led to World War I. He is a Fin-de-siècle writer, a Decadent of the finest innovative kind. Mirbeau, indeed, has been considered a Naturalist, a Decadent, a Fin-de-siècle writer, and more recently Modern and even Post-Modern. All these labels may fit Mirbeau depending on the angle from which we look at him and his work. In the end he is an explorer [End Page 309] of the present with a vision for newness, change and transformation of which Ziegler discusses many aspects, often from the dark side with the opposites of death/life domi-nating: "Manifested by death's dynamic that dissolves cadavers into fertilizer is evidence of the natural cycles of putrefaction and rebirth. Mirbeau's paradoxical affirmation of biophilic death is based on the self-replenishing energy of organisms that decompose and live. In a world governed by movement, circulation and transformation, there is no death, only the emergence of new form from the manure heap" (192). Mirbeau's fiction, for instance La 628-E8 ("the novel-as-car") is seen as a machine that contributes to "the perishing [or decomposing] of old forms" [that] "reemerge in different guises." An eighteenth-century French writer, Antoine Pecquet, once said that there is no greater fallacy than to always agree with the author. Disagreeing is looking at a writer's work from a different point of view. Without contradicting in any way the ideas presented in The Nothing Machine, a brilliant and original study of Mirbeau's fiction, I would say that there are other approaches than psychoanalytic and Freudian and they lead to different conclusions. The author...

London's Finest Hour

London's Finest Hour Phillip Parotti (bio) The First Day of the Blitz by Peter Stansky (Yale University Press, 2008. xii + 212 pages. Illustrated. $15 pb) On September 7, 1940, Adolf Hitler and Field Marshal Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, made a significant strategic blunder, perhaps one of the worst German blunders of the entire Second World War. Prior to that fateful Saturday, in an attempt to establish air superiority over English skies so that Operation Sea Lion, Hitler's intended invasion of the United Kingdom, could proceed, the Luftwaffe had so pummeled the airdromes, support facilities, and radar installations of the Royal Air [End Page xl] Force that Fighter Command, the raf authority charged with defending the U.K. and fighting the Battle of Britain, was nearly on its knees. To make matters worse, although the raf never experienced a shortage of Hurricanes or the relatively fewer Spitfires with which it was fighting the battle, pilots—regardless of the fact that they were shooting down large numbers of Germans—were being lost faster than the raf could replace them. Had such losses continued, the raf could not have sustained the battle, and the German divisions assembled on the French coast might well have invaded the south of England and forced the British government to sue for peace. Impatience, Hitler's impatience, may have saved England and saved what became the Allied cause. At the critical moment in the battle, the frustrated Hitler suddenly changed strategy. Rather than continue to accept high Luftwaffe losses and achieve his aim by reducing the raf on the ground and in the air, Hitler attempted to terrorize England into submission by unleashing the Blitz. Peter Stansky's well-documented and well-written The First Day of the Blitz shows why Hitler's strategy was doomed to failure and how the experience of the Blitz changed the United Kingdom forever. As soon as the Luftwaffe shifted its focus and commenced the terror bombing of London and other English cities, the recovery Fighter Command was assured; thereafter the raf gained strength because civilians rather than military objectives became the primary targets. Goering appears to have assumed that, in the same way that he terrorized Guernica, Warsaw, and Rotterdam, he could so shock London and a few other British cities that he would drive the country into submission. The degree of his miscalculation cannot be measured. Guernica, when it was bombed, was a town of approximately seven thousand people; Warsaw and Rotterdam were much larger. But London was an immense city of nine million souls, and while damage on that first day was extensive, including more than 400 dead and 1600 injured, the percentage of the total population was so small as to be collectively (never individually) negligible. Londoners were far from submitting, and the expression London can take it quickly gained worldwide currency. Professor Stansky is at his best when he explores the myths and realities associated with what it meant to take it. London on that first Saturday of the Blitz was struck by two successive waves of air attack. The first, consisting of 348 bombers, struck at 4:14 p.m., the all-clear sounding at 6:10 p.m.; the second wave, a stream of 318 bombers, commenced its attack at 8:10 p.m. and continued to drop bombs until 4:30 a.m. the next morning. Hardest hit, the East End around the docks went up in flames. At one point, for example, in addition to oil tanks, warehouses, homes, ships, and barges, two hundred and fifty acres of stacked lumber exploded into a conflagration that dwarfed the Great Fire of London and defied effective firefighting. London—indeed the British government—should have been better prepared for the results, but it was not. Given the government's assumptions about what total war from the air would be [End Page xli] like—not a few of them taken from such books as H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come and The War in the Air—thousands upon thousands of dead were anticipated, and mortuarial services were far more plentiful than necessary. But unfortunately relief services for treating the...

"Now the struggle is for all" (Aeschylus's Persians 405): What a Difference a Few Years Make When Interpreting a Classic

They [the Greeks] recognize at once that this is a fight independence, the survival of small nations. --Anon., Hour of editorial in the New York Times, 29 October 1940 I. The Glory That Is Greece: Celebrating the Events of Winter and Spring 1940-1941 In anticipation of 28 October 1941, Louis MacNeice wrote a short play a BBC radio broadcast on this anniversary date. Which anniversary? One year earlier to the day, the Greek dictator Ioannes Metaxas (who ruled 1936-41) had made history with his resolute answer to a humiliating Italian ultimatum that directly challenged Greek sovereignty: Ochi (No!). With this--perhaps apocryphal--response, Metaxas gave the starting signal to the Greek defense against the Italian Fascist invasion on the front. Whether or not Metaxas actually spoke the emphatic No! is far less important than the point that he finally rebuffed Mussolini after his country had suffered a series of Italian provocations. In perhaps his finest hour of his final months, Metaxas galvanized the Greek army and the civilian resistance and led them to the first land victory of World War II over the Fascist Axis of Mussolini and Hitler. The Greek troops routed Mussolini's army and even advanced into southern Albania. The Albanian epic, as it has been called in common Greek parlance, drew the attention of the rest of the world (see fig. 1). (1) [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] While Europe was being rushed into a most frightening war, BBC radio and, in particular, the Features Department, broadcast its share of morale-boosting feature programs. (2) Among these was MacNeice's The Glory That Is Greece, one of his first radio scripts. Laurence Gilliam produced it broadcast on the Home Service on 28 October 1941. (3) By the time of the first anniversary of Metaxas's Ochi however, and through 1944, Greece was occupied by the Axis forces and was suffering many hardships, which the harsh winters exacerbated. But the Greeks continued to make active contributions to the Allied war effort. MacNeice's play sheds light on a historical moment in European as well as Greek history. It offers vivid dialogues set in contemporary Italian and Greek homes and also on the front, which alternate with Greek historical scenes from the Persian Wars (490-480 BCE), which are derived from Herodotus's Histories and from Aeschylus's Persians. (4) The parallel structure of the comparison between the Italian and the Greek domestic reactions to Mussolini's invasion of northwest Greece is enhanced by the analogical structure of flashbacks to the glory days of the classical past: in the radio play, the Greek characters compare their army campaign of 1940-41 with the defense that the ancient Greeks mustered against the Persian leaders Darius and Xerxes in the early fifth century BCE. The odds in 1940 were small, but the power of Greek history and the somewhat strained use of the classical sources revived Greek bravery and foretold ultimate victory broad Western audiences. MacNeice presented the Greeks as rallying around the battle cry from Aeschylus's Persians 405: Now the struggle is all The Greeks received both moral support and military aid from Greek-friendly Britain, where anxious citizens and politicians followed the onset of World War II closely and affirmed that Greece was indeed fighting the battle for all. (5) MacNeice gave his play the title of The Glory That Is Greece, with the emphatic present tense insisting on what had transpired in Greece in the months prior: the country is, in 1940 and 1941, earning its old glory over again. publicity line on the first page of MacNeice's script is telling, too: A programme to celebrate the spirit of the Greek Army and the Greek people on the first anniversary of the entry of Greece into the war. The theme of revived ancient Greek glory was popular in broader and international circles as well. …

Symposium: Carson Holloway, The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity

In the twentieth century, liberal modernity survived attacks from two forms of illiberal modernity, Stalinism and Nazism. In 1940, at the beginning of the war to the death with Nazism, the statesman most responsible for its survival in that war, described thusly what was at stake: “Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. . . . Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour’.”1 Substantially through his efforts, “liberal modernity,” “the West,” and “Christian civilization” survived that threat. But its survival was almost immediately again threatened by the rise in the East of a danger at least as great. The last half of the twentieth century was a protracted conflict between “the free world” and Soviet communism, although the growing influence of relativism in “the West” as the century wore on eventually made it controversial to speak there of “the free world.” The conflict ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the subsequent liberation of the countries of Eastern Europe, and the relaxing of communist rule in what became once again Russia rather than the Soviet Union. However, by that time, no European statesman would speak publicly of “Christian civilization,” let alone summon it to defend itself. The Cold War coincided with a secularization of the West that rendered such a description and summons anachronistic. By 2004, European political elites would publicly refuse, and make a virtue of refusing, to acknowledge Europe’s Christian heritage in the proposed EU Constitution;2 they would also refuse to accept Italy’s representative to the EU as its commissioner for justice, apparently because he was a Catholic who agreed with the Church on certain moral questions concerning which the Church is in conflict with the liberal secularism

1883 Vienna in the Turkish Mirror

In his 1883 playDie Türken vor Wien, Richard von Kralik, the Catholic writer and later doyen of Christian Socialism, recounts the story of the 1683 siege of Vienna. Habsburg military heroes, ordinary VienneseBürger, and the Ottoman grand vizier Kara Mustafa appear on stage in Kralik's retelling of what had become a foundational moment in Austrian historiography. The defeat of the Turks at Vienna in 1683 has been hailed as Austria's finest hour, the Habsburgs' greatest service to Europe, and as the moment when Austria defended all of Western civilization from, among other things, the East, Asian barbarism, and Muslim infidels. Kralik may be the playwright here; but in a preface to the play, he introduces the two figures who are the true sources for his tale of 1683: Lady History and Lady Legend. They work together, each playing her part. Lady History and Lady Legend, he explains, sing in beautiful duet, “both accurate and truthful, neither lying nor inventing.” Kralik's juxtaposition of history and legend was astute. Any historian looking back to the events of 1683 and the stories that have since accumulated about Austria's “saving the occident” encounters a multi-century work in progress, a story under revision, a tale in which “legends” about coffee (said to be introduced to Europe by Turks fleeing Vienna) and croissants (a bun shaped, suspiciously, like a crescent) persist alongside themes more properly in the domain of “history”: class tensions, national conflict, and church-state relations.

The Cuban Missile Crisis revisited

On 14 October 1962, a US surveillance plane, the U-2, photographed mediumrange (approximately 1000 miles) missile sites under construction in Cuba. The revelation marked the beginning of a thirteen-day crisis that saw the United States deliver a public ultimatum to the Soviet Union, saw Soviet and US warships come close to tangling on the high seas and, indeed, saw the world verge on a nuclear holocaust. The British historian A.J.P. Taylor characterised the Cuban missile crisis as the two most important weeks in human history. Taylor may have overstated, but he reminded us that this was the closest we have come to extinguishing human civilisation. This crisis, which saw the Soviet Union accede to US demands, has been called President John F. Kennedy's and America's finest hour. It has also been described as a sobering experience for the president and the superpowers, leading to d6tente. But, in current historical revision, the missile crisis has also been called a reckless display of power that had some unfortunate repercussions. Almost everyone over the age of forty or so remembers the events of the thirteen days in October. This paper reviews the causes of the crisis, the conduct of the crisis and the significant results.

Britain can take it: British cinema in the Second World War

At the outbreak of the Second World War, all cinemas in were closed. Ten days later, they were opened again as a valuable way of boosting morale and a principal source of recreation for the nation at war. Feature films were not just escapist entertainment; they provided instruction and information, and over the next six years, some 300 feature films and thousands of short films and news reels were produced in what is now seen as British cinema's 'finest hour'. Britain Can Take charts this momentous period through the eyes of thirteen key films. Aldgate and Richards make use of key resources, from scripts and box-office returns to official Home Office documents and censorship archives, to bring these films to vivid life. In telling their stories, the authors also recreate the society, the politics and war-time conditions in which they appeared and flourished. This new edition of Britain Can Take features a new chapter on Launder and Gilliat's 1943 film on women factory workers, Millions Like Us. It will be welcomed back by film scholars and historians, students and film lovers as essential reading.