Correspondence Paper Research Articles

Conflicting Visions of War: Winston Churchill and Rudyard Kipling’s Evocation of the Boer War

Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill both covered the Boer War as newspaper correspondents, working respectively for the Friend of the Free State and the Morning Post, and in later days, both authors looked back on the Boer War in their autobiographies. Kipling devoted a chapter of his autobiography Something of Myself to his experience of the war, while Churchill described his adventures, including his spectacular escape from a Boer prison in My Early Years. Kipling also devoted several short stories to the subject, two of which (“A Sahib’s War” and “The Captive”, both published in Traffics and Discoveries in 1904) offer an interesting complement to his autobiographical account. Kipling and Churchill witnessed the war in fairly similar conditions, observing the fighting at close range and enjoying friendly contact with British soldiers. Yet this common experience resulted in opposite visions and discourse: Churchill presented the Boers as loyal enemies, to be fought but respected. Kipling, on the contrary, saw them as treacherous guerrillas who deserved due punishment, and he heavily emphasized the threat they represented to the British Empire. The purpose of this article is to analyse these conflicting accounts of a single event, taking into account the authors’ experiences and the readership they were writing for, in order to show how ideological discourse is elaborated through the rhetorical use of historical facts.

Three Years a Soldier: The Diary and Newspaper Correspondence of Private George Perkins, Sixth New York Independent Battery, 1861-1864

Three Years a Soldier: The Diary and Newspaper Correspondence of Private George Perkins, Sixth New York Independent Battery, 1861-1864

Censorship and commitment: Foreign correspondents in the Spanish Civil War

Thousands of men and women from all around the world flocked to join the International Brigades believing that to fight for the Spanish Republic was to fight for the very survival of democracy and civilisation against the assault of fascism. And alongside the regular troops sent by Hitler and Mussolini to support Franco and the military rebels, a smaller number of volunteers also went to fight for what they perceived as the cause of Catholicism and anti-Communism. A similar range of sentiments can be found among the nearly one thousand newspaper correspondents who went to Spain. Along with the hardened professional war correspondents, and others still to win their spurs, came some of the world's most prominent literary figures. This article shows how, as a result of what they saw, even some of those who arrived without commitment came to embrace the cause of the beleaguered Republic. Underlying their conversion was a deep admiration for the stoicism with which the Republican population resisted.

BRITISH JOURNALISM AND THE CAMPAIGN FOR INTERVENTION IN THE RUSSIAN CIVIL WAR, 1918–20

This article deals with the debate that took place in the British press in the years 1918–20 on the issue of Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. It looks at the editorial campaign mounted by some key newspaper editors, proprietors and correspondents in favour of intervention and identifies some common themes that recurred in their arguments. It also examines British press coverage from the fronts of the civil war and looks at some of the difficulties faced by correspondents in the field. While coverage from the fronts was patchy, the editorial campaign was highly organized and those involved did all they could to influence the decision‐making process. Although military and political decision making on intervention was more concerned with the war against Germany than with Russia, the accompanying press debate was closely focused on the nature of the Soviet regime.

Wiping the Stain Off the Field of Plassey: Mohun Bagan in 1911

Every soccer‐loving Indian, even in 2006, takes a legitimate pride in the first worthy indigenous club Mohun Bagan’s IFA Shield victory in 1911, defeating civil and military European teams. The present essay reconsiders the first momentous event in Indian soccer history, examining the varied responses to, and larger meaning of, the historic event in trying to destabilize rigidly imperialist or nationalist historical interpretations of this occasion. By focussing analysis on the varied responses to the phenomenon of Indians having defeated the British, the essay argues that in each case the writer of the report brought his (in all cases) ideological commitments to bear on his interpretation of the victory. The analysis of an entire range of newspaper reports documents how the larger meaning of Mohun Bagan’s victory came into being only through the very particular connotations football had acquired in the cultural and political schema of early twentieth‐century Bengali society. The essay also tries to reveal how received notions of modernity, tradition, race, governance and masculinity acquired significantly different and, at times, conflicting meanings in the minds of the football and Mohun Bagan crazed newspaper correspondents, and presumably, the newspaper‐reading public. It accounts for the larger significance of this event in terms of the differences and similarities both between and within nationalist (Indian) and imperialist (British) interpretations.

The People's Budget in the North and Squire Thelluson Of Brodsworth Hall

The development of the Doncaster Concealed Coalfield in South Yorkshire at the beginning of the twentieth century considerably enhanced the income of local landowners. In 1909, during the campaign in support of the People's Budget, the behaviour of one of these land and coal royalty owners, Charles Thelluson of Brodsworth Hall, came under public scrutiny first in a speech by Lloyd George and then in newspaper correspondence. The Chancellor's information was supplied by Arthur Markham, Liberal M.P. for Mansfield, and Managing Director of the Brodsworth Colliery Company which mined Thelluson's coal. A detailed consideration of Lloyd George's Newcastle speech and the ensuing newspaper correspondence between Markham and Thelluson's representatives, supported by other evidence, provides an insight into provincial landlord behaviour in this period. It is argued that in the case of Thelluson, Lloyd George was justified in his proposals for taxation of mineral royalties.

The blessed place of freedom: Europeans in Civil War America

Outlines the contributions of German, Irish, British, French, and other European immigrants to the Union and the Confederacy - Explores the impact European military observers and newspaper correspondents had on American relations with Europe - Features biographic appendixes listing notable immigrant soldiers The Blessed Place of Freedom provides a comprehensive overview of European immigrants' perspectives on the American Civil War and the reactions of immigrant participants and European observers to a wide variety of events. Dean Mahin examines each major immigrant group's population and geographic distribution; the number who served in immigrant-dominated military units, such as the famous Irish Brigade and the Louisiana Zouaves; those who became officers during the war, such as the Union's Carl Schurz (born in Germany) and the Confederacy's Patrick Clebume (born in Ireland); and significant individuals who visited America during the war as volunteers, correspondents, or observers.

Within their sphere? Women Correspondents to Aberdeen Daily Newspapers 1900-1914

This research provides an insight into the motivations and agenda of women correspondents to Aberdeen local newspapers during the period 1900-18. This was achieved by undertaking a content analysis of all printed letters to the editor identified as being by women correspondents to the Aberdeen Daily Journal and Aberdeen Free Press. Women correspondents were identified by their signatures, feminine noms de plume or the content of their letters. Whilst it is accepted that this method must of necessity have excluded some women correspondents who did not wish to reveal their gender, this research focused exclusively on correspondents who were willing to be identified as female in their correspondence to the newspapers. In this way, it was hoped to identify the issues which impelled women out of their domestic and private sphere and into the more public sphere of newspaper debate. The two Aberdeen newspapers were also well suited for this research because of their lack of editorial gatekeeping, with little censorship of letters discerned, even in wartime. However, a lack of editorial censorship did not mean that women correspondents faced no barriers to the publication of their opinions in the newspapers. Women correspondents had to overcome social conventions, including possibly the disapproval of friends and family, in order to enter the world of public debate. The research identified particular issues about which it was acceptable for women to correspond to the newspapers and particular women who were allowed to debate these issues. Middle-class women engaged in philanthropic and charitable work, especially that related to women and children or, during the First World War, the war effort, felt justified in writing to the newspapers in order to publicise such activities. Women also justified correspondence to the newspapers on certain matters by claiming that they came under woman's jurisdiction in the domestic sphere. Many women further justified their correspondence on such matters by using pen names which emphasised their domestic and maternal role, such as `Mother' or `Wife'. Such correspondence tended to be proactive rather than reactive to other material in the newspapers, which is in direct contrast to the findings of previous researchers into the motivation of newspaper correspondents. Interestingly, the research discovered that women correspondents' use of noms de plume increased from 1900 until the outbreak of the First World War. While some women used pen names to emphasise their familial role, others used them in a much more straightforward way - in order to protect their identity while writing on contentious subjects. Such subjects included controversial issues such as woman suffrage and the sexual double standards of early 2e century Britain. However, even the most militant suffragette justified her demand for a vote by emphasising woman's difference from man. Such correspondents preferred to enlarge the woman's sphere to include social commentary and electoral privilege rather than step outside it altogether. The research also investigated differences between the two newspapers and between pre-war and wartime correspondence. It is suggested that the Daily Journal attracted more letters from `domestic' women on issues related to a more narrowly defined `woman's sphere' while the Free Press's correspondents included more New Women. In addition, the Journal received more letters from women based in England or further afield, for example the colonies, while the Free Press tended to receive letters from women within Scotland. Women's wartime correspondence was dominated by the war effort, which swept most other topics of correspondence off the letters pages, although the later years of the war saw an increase in letters of complaint, usually aimed at increasing bureaucracy and again making use of familial pen names. Such findings contribute to the broader history of the media and women's studies in the northeast of Scotland, and indicate a broadening and nationalising of interest throughout the early 20th century, and the beginning of an accompanying weakening of local, regional links.

‘Zoning’ before zoning: the regulation of apartment housing in early twentieth century Winnipeg and Toronto

‘Residential restrictions’ were widely used in North American cities prior to the development of more comprehensive zoning schemes. This paper examines the use of restrictive by-laws to control the spread of apartment housing in two Canadian cities, Toronto and Winnipeg, prior to World War II. In both cities apartment-house booms in the early 1910s and late 1920s were perceived as threatening the growth of suburban homeownership. Drawing on newspaper reports, council records and correspondence, as well as more quantitative local government records, it is argued that the apparently ‘populist’ anti-apartment regulations in Toronto were actually more flexible and more favourable to developers than less extensive, but more rigid by-laws in Winnipeg. In both cities, the application of regulations both reflected and created distinctive social geographies. The paper indicates the need to focus on how residential restrictions were implemented on the ground as much as on debates surrounding the formulation of policy or the passage of legislation.

The protection of journalists in armed conflicts

The nature of warfare has changed throughout the world and, consequently, so has the nature of the job of those reporting on it. Wars have become more violent, claiming an increasing number of lives of the journalists involved as well as of civilians. Keith Suter here describes the situation which faces journalists currently reporting on the world's troublespots. Conflicts are no longer conventional, but have often turned into guerrilla warfare and since journalists are required to be where the fighting is taking place, they are constantly under threat. The international community has done very little to keep up with these changes. The Geneva. Convention, updated in 1977, and the Hague Convention of 1907, deal with the issue of ‘newspaper correspondents’ but, Suter argues, fail to address many of the main features of the ‘new warfare state’, most notably the rise of guerrilla warfare. He calls for governments to show more concern over the fates of their citizens who care journalists reporting from war zones.

Savage Journalists and Civilized Indians

Mark Twain was a funny man, but not always. When he encountered what he called the Goshoot Indians of Utah and Nevada during his overland trip west in 1861, he admitted it made him reevaluate his opinion of Indians. say that the nausea which the Goshoots gave me, an Indian worshipper, he wrote in Roughing It, set me to examining authorities, to see if perchance I had been overestimating the Red Man while viewing him through the mellow moonshine of romance. It was curious to see how quickly the paint and tinsel fell away from him and left him treacherous, filthy, and repulsive. ... They deserve pity, poor creatures; and they can have mine-at a distance. Nearer by, they never get anybody's.(1) Like many of the travel writers and newspaper correspondents who wrote on the West in the nineteenth century, Twain directed a portion of his commentary toward one of the region's most characteristic features--its native peoples. The image we have of what such writers said about Indians is not a pretty one. Typically, their approach to Indian affairs has seemed careless and insensitive at best. Western journalists especially have appeared as unsympathetic, even hateful, and their reports marked by an absence of theoretical speculation on a just and appropriate Indian policy. Instead, such writers, especially western newspaper correspondents, have been thought opportunistic, racist, arrogant, and culturally imperialistic, subscribing more often than not what Roy Harvey Pearce has identified as savagism, an intellectual construct that reduced native peoples to symbols, thereby making them non-human. Ironically, twentieth-century sensibilities have turned the tables. To the minds of a number of historians, western correspondents themselves have become symbols for hostile attitudes toward Indians. Such correspondents, the reasoning holds, were somehow immune to viewing native peoples humanely. Instead, they encouraged apathy at best and needlessly exacerbated tensions between the races. At worst, they championed extermination, as if Indians were wild animals or pestiferous insects.(2) Such views of western journalists are not without foundation. Among-the more tragic instances of their abuse, one need only consider the rabid anti-Indian reporting of Denver's Rocky Mountain News prior to the brutal attack on Black Kettle's sleeping village at Sand Creek, Colorado, in 1864 or the exaggerated newspaper reports and call to arms that preceded the wanton slaughter of at least four score Apache Indians, mostly women and children, at Camp Grant, Arizona, in 1871. Even the tragic confrontation between the frontier military and the Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee almost twenty years later in 1890 was laced before and after with sensationalistic newspaper reports. Exceptions in which western newspaper editors campaigned on behalf of Indians, such as Thomas H. Tibbles's defense of the Ponca Indians in Nebraska, are notable because they are so few.(3) The reporting on conditions in Indian Territory in the early 1870s by two newspaper journalists, Frederic E. Lockley and John Hanson Beadle, helps counter this either/or estimate of newswriting on Indians and largely refutes Mark Twain's notion that sympathy came only with distance. For Lockley and Beadle there was a middle ground in which newspapermen could work as disinterested professionals and write of Native Americans with fairness and even sympathy. Lockley and Beadle may not have been unique. One suspects that man western journalists were more sensitive to equitable treatment of native peoples than we have come to believe, but historians have rarely credited them with any such compassion. As a consequence, reporting such as that of Lockley and Beadle appears uncommon. Unique or not, the significance here is to provide a corrective to historical interpretation, to show that at least some western journalists defied the Indian-hating stereotype.(4) Lockley and Beadle wrote at a critical time. …

Popular Voices in Print: The Local Newspaper Correspondents of an Extended Scots-Canadian Community, 1894

By the late nineteenth century assimilation and emigration were threatening the survival of the Highland Scots community of Quebec’s upper St. Francis district. One manifestation of the social crisis was popular resistance to legal authority during the famous Megantic Outlaw case of 1888-89. Another less dramatic response was the emergence of a network of local newspaper correspondents, among whom were a number of exiles in American urban centres. To a degree, their columns conformed to what are generally known as newspaper’s “social notes” by recording community events arid the movement of individuals to and from the district. They also fulfilled an economic function by providing readers with information on agricultural and employment markets. Perhaps most striking, however, were the anecdotes and the bantering interaction between the correspondents, two features which in some respects reflect how a community could adapt the “individualizing" medium of print to preserve some of the functions and characteristics of an oral culture.

Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents among the Indian Campaigners

Following the Indian Wars: The Story of the Newspaper Correspondents among the Indian Campaigners

The First Three Months of War: A Journalist's Reminiscences of Korea

On a sultry July day early in the afternoon, three U.S. Army jeeps drove up to the crest of a hill, overlooking a small cluster of houses in South Korea. Along each side of the road there was a column of infantrymen marching ahead, not too cautiously. The first jeep contained the company commander, the battalion S-2 (intelligence officer), and staff officer from the regiment; the third vehicle, with some headquarters personnel, had its machine gun mounted. The second jeep was full of newspaper correspondents. Carl Mydans from Life, Keyes Beech from the Chicago Daily News, Roy McCartney from Australian Associated Press/Reuters, Tom Lambert from the Associated Press, and myself, then the Tokyo bureau chief of Time and Life magazines. There was almost a feeling of expectation among us the troops heading toward what looked like a reconnaissance oper ation in the valley below. The officers, fresh from service in Europe, thought that it would not take very long to secure the village we were looking down on. But there was an odd quiet to things; and the correspondents did not like the look of it. All five of us had been through World War II in the Pacific. Beech and Lambert had been combat correspondents; McCartney was an Australian infantry officer. As a U.S. Navy lieu tenant in intelligence, had served myself through the island hopping battles in the Pacific. asked the company commander to stop and suggested that he wait a while; perhaps he might send a small patrol ahead to explore the terrain. The North Koreans, it seemed to us, were given to ambushes and this was a very good place for one. The company commander and his superiors listened to us, but politely turned down our offer. We are just going right on ahead boys, he said, I don't see much trouble around here. You're wel come to follow us. The more we looked down at that all-too-still

"Broke by the War": Letters of a Slave Trader (review)

book reviews265 "Broke by the War": Letters of a Slave Trader. Edited by Edmund L. Drago. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Pp. xi, 152. $24.95.) In February 1865, the Union army at last forced its way into Charleston, quickly followed by a flood of newspaper correspondents. Among them was James Redpath, an ardent abolitionist who must have taken particular delight in expropriating some 652 letters from the offices of Z. B. Oakes, an extremely successful slave broker and auctioneer. Several weeks later Redpath presented the correspondence to William Lloyd Garrison during his visit to South Carolina. The letters, however, remained generally unknown until the Garrison family presented them to the Boston Public Library in 1891. From this superb collection, Edmund L. Drago of the College of Charleston has selected 135 letters written to Oakes between 1852 and 1857 by his agent A. J. McElveen from rural Sumter County. Six additional letters concern the agent himself. Although McElveen frequently kept his employer informed about various investment opportunities in the South Carolina backcountry, his main task was to find, evaluate, and purchase suitable slaves for shipment to Charleston and profitable sale. Like so many itinerant slave traders that crisscrossed the South, McElveen hoped to please his employer and perhaps one day strike out on his own. It was a hard road: he constantly remarked on his absences from home, fretted about his fiscal responsibilities, worried about transporting his human inventory, and second-guessed his own purchases. "The fact is," he wrote in October 1853, "I cant find negros for Sale that will pay a profit" (58). Still, he labored on, thereby leaving us with a remarkable record of the slave trade. Several recurring themes stand out. First, the slave traders and their agents saw themselves as practical businessmen engaged in the sale of a commodity. Thus McElveen remarked of an eighteen-year-old female that she "never was abused" and carried "no Surplus flesh" (52); that he "could not Get one dollar nocked off" (44) the price of a young male who had lost a toe; and that although a sixteen-year-old girl was "cross Eyed" she was nevertheless "likely otherways" (121). Occasionally , however, McElveen was affected by his African-American charges. In August 1853, for example, he remarked of a frequent runaway that despite his rebellious nature he should not be punished "if you can help it" as he "is very Easy fritened." "If you can sell Edward in the city," he added, "do So . . . his wife is there" (48). Second, like so many others', McElveen's employment and fate were dependent on the peculiar institution. But he enjoyed no independent sphere of action. He was not a merchant, certainly not a planter, not even a farmer. His letters thus provide glimpses into the dependent and deferential relationship between white wage-employee and employer. 266civil war history McElveen's regular correspondence is peppered with such reassurances as "I never wish to deceive" (81) or admissions that "I am troubled very much a bout this matter" as "I have never failed before" (142). Finally, McElveen was unusual, seemingly an honest man in a fraternity of connivers. "They are," he wrote in 1854, "very few men you can rely on" (96). His own forthrightness allows us to see something of the African-Americans themselves. The barely literate trader who never used the word "slave" had to admit some of the laborers were smarter. Many resisted; McElveen seems constantly distracted by their clever deceptions; there were always runaways. Many, he observed, had suffered the lash, and others were to be sold only to distant buyers. The outbreak of the Civil War sealed McElveen's fate. By 1863 he was serving in the state militia; he reenlisted the next year but by the autumn was absent without leave. After the war he attempted farming but never succeeded. Simply put, he was, as a credit investigator reported in 1871, "Broke by the war—old man" (22). With Edmund Drago's superb introduction and careful editing, the collection deservedly emerges as a fascinating addition to the history of slavery. Edward D. C. Campbell, Jr. Virginia State Library and Archives Republicans and Reconstruction in...

A New Kind of War: America's Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece (review)

Reviews 167 Any attempt at national reconciliation at the time was doomed to fail. The stakes were too high on both sides. Procopis Papastratis Panteion University of Political and Social Sciences, Athens Howard Jones, A New Kind of War: America's Global Strategy and the Truman Doctrine in Greece. New York: Oxford University Press. 1989. pp. xi + 327. $34.50. The book under review offers a painstaking, pedestrian record of what American officials had to say about their effort to contain Communism in Greece between 1947 and 1949. Jones has read widely in recently declassified documents. He took careful notes, with the result that his chapters offer a pastiche of quotes from reports written by the principal American representatives in Greece, supplemented with other quotes from high Washington-based officials and remarks by congressmen, newspaper correspondents and other shapers of opinion. He seldom offers opinions of his own: even his title is borrowed from a despatch by Anne O'Hare McCormick. Yet Jones' general tone is up-beat, endorsing the moral and practical worth of official U.S. actions, as his summation makes clear in the very last sentence of the book: "America's strategy in Greece exemplified the wisdom of pursuing a flexible and restrained policy in meeting challenges posed by a new kind of war" (p. 236). In view of the criticism of American intervention that has recently prevailed, especially in Greece itself, it is perhaps appropriate to have a book that restates and reaffirms the initial intentions, hopes and fears that pervaded American officialdom at the time. Certainly, MacVeagh, Griswold, Rankin, Nuveen, Van Fleet and the rest do not seem particularly wicked when allowed to speak for themselves, as Jones' way of writing history permits them to do. Jones also offers scattered information about the frictions and personal antipathies that racked the official American community in Athens from the start. But because he relies almost exclusively upon official documents, his account is broken and fragmented. What the quarreling Americans chose to write down, usually in reports to superiors whom they were trying to win over to their view, is what gets into Jones' pages. As anyone who has ever written a self-justifying report will agree, this means that only part of the human reality was recorded; and since Jones made little effort to supplement official documentation, his book offers only fractionated insight into the individual personalities and group dynamics behind the quarrels. 168 Reviews The same must be said for Jones' account of the war itself. The dynamics of the time, both within Greece and the United States and in the world at large, are scarcely hinted at. Jones does, repeatedly, suggest that the American belief that Stalin and the Russians controlled Communist policy in Greece and the Balkans was (he cautiously says "probably") mistaken, but he does not explore the social and intellectual traditions and circumstances that did control that policy. He explains the awkwardness Americans felt in supporting a reactionary Greek Right; but does not say anything about how that segment of Greek society had come into being. And the internal dynamic of American opinion that developed around the venture into Greece remains completely outside Jones' purview. One may hazard the guess that what inspired this book was the different way American interventions turned out in Greece and Viet Nam. That, I suspect, is why Jones pays special attention to recurrent official debates over sending U.S. troops to Greece. The upshot was repeated refusal to commit U.S. combat units to the field; and this constitute, in Jones' view, the keystone arch of the "flexible and restrained policy in meeting the challenges posed by this new kind of war." But by the time the struggle in Viet Nam heated up, this sort of flexible restraint was missing, and success turned to failure. Connections between U.S. military policy in Greece and Viet Nam are real and would be worth careful exploration, for as Jones remarks: "Indeed, some Greek veterans of the guerrilla war took their expertise to Viet Nam" (p. 235). The fact is that the American military representatives in Greece, General Van Fleet first and foremost, entirely misunderstood how victory had been...

Black Spirituals: Their Emergence into Public Knowledge

Before the Civil War, people outside the black community were only dimly aware that a body of song called spirituals existed. To most whites in the United States and Europe, the music of the blacks was the music of the minstrel theater, songs like Black Joe or My Old Kentucky Home. European travelers who visited the South expected to find the slaves singing such songs, and sometimes that's what they heard, for minstrel songs were universally popular and some of them entered the oral tradition (Bremer 1924, 141-142; White 1928). That an Afro-American folk music existed was reported by some travelers, but its existence was not widely known. With the outbreak of the war, the closed society that had existed in the South was shattered. For the first time people sympathetic to the plight of the slaves from the North were able to go south. Newspaper correspondents, missionaries, teachers, and army officers came into contact with the black population of the South, and reports of the slaves' singing and dancing were very newsworthy. An area that received much attention was the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and

The Siege of Makapansgat: A Massacre? and A Trekker Victory?

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is not Christian dealing, but it is the dealing with which fair unbiased history proves to have been in the end most productive of good and least productive of evil, when communities of white men have coterminous frontiers with tribes of blacks.In November of 1854 a particularly violent clash between Dutch farmers and Ndebele tribesmen took place in the Waterberg district of the Transvaal, resulting in a spiral of killings which ultimately -- and apparently -- led to the massacre of an entire tribe. The standard account, by Theal, may be summarized briefly as follows. Hermanus Potgieter, a man of “violent temper and rough demeanour”, entered Makapan's capital with a party of men, intending to trade some ivory. This Makapan was of a ferocious disposition” and had the reputation, among the surrounding tribes, of being “a man of blood.” Unfriendly newspaper correspondents claimed that Hermanus Potgieter and his men made demands, without payment, for sheep and oxen. They also demanded gifts of African children. This seems improbable, for white men would hardly have ventured thus. Tribesmen are easily irritable and it is possible that some banal act excited “the Africans to frenzy.” Potgieter was “flayed alive,” and his skin, prepared in the same way as that of a wild animal. Makapan's forces then attacked neighboring settlements. The Farmers in Zoutpansberg and Rustenberg abandoned their homes and formed laagers. P.G. Potgieter led a force to the troubled area, where he found that the hostile tribesmen had sought refuge in a nearby cave.

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?: the Case of Nkrumah's National Security Service

From the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta to twentiethcentury Bolivia and Zaïre, from theories of development and underdevelopment to models of civil-military relations, one is struck by the enormous literature on armed intervention in the domestic political arena. In recent years, a veritable rash of material on the subject of military politics has appeared – as much from newspaper correspondents reporting pre-dawn coups from third-world capitals as from the more rarefied towers of academe. Yet looking at the subject from the perspective of how régimes mobilise resources and mechanisms to protect themselves from their own security forces, one is struck by the paucity of empirically-based evidence on the subject.1

British Military and Naval Observers in the Spanish-American War

The American expeditionary force against Santiago, which sailed from Tampa, Florida, on 14 June 1898, comprised some 800 officers and 16,000 men, plus a number of civilian clerks and stenographers, teamsters, packers and stevedores. The troops were honoured by the presence of eighty-nine newspaper correspondents, and eleven foreign military observers. The colourful exploits of the correspondents are well known, but the activities and opinions of the foreign attachés were by their very nature strictly confidential. Happily, the reports of the British military and naval representatives who accompanied the Santiago expedition have survived the intervening years, and when viewed in conjunction with the observations of the British military attaché with the Spanish forces in Cuba they shed interesting light on the conduct of the war.