Although it is not necessary to do so, it would help us to anticipate the numbers likely to attend if you could email us to say that you are intending to come to the event: iainpatt@gmail.co

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To book a ticket and to submit your menu choice, please email: iainpatt@gmail.co

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The Cherokee Nation during the American Civil War by Dr. David White

While intense civil war raged across the USA between 1861 and 1865, Native Americans were not subject to conscription by either side, although some chose to join the fight as individuals. However, there was one First-Nation people who fought as a whole – but not all on the same side. This article looks at the reasons for this, and why, perhaps surprisingly, the majority of Cherokees allied with the Confederacy despite that state’s racist ideological foundations which justified enslaving non-white people.

The Cherokee had a long history of involvement with white Americans prior to the Civil War. Not only had they fought against them, but they had fought with them. Cherokee participation in the Creek War (1813-14) and the aid given to Andrew Jackson in 1812 in the war against the British were critical for US victory. Furthermore the Cherokee were foremost among Native American tribes who adopted white culture and practices, and were designated one of the “Five Civilized Tribes”. They developed a written form of their language, adopted a constitution for their nation based on the American one, set up a judiciary and a police force, established dozens of schools, and produced the first Native American newspaper. Towards the end of the 18^th century they began to cultivate lands in individual farmsteads rather than communally, modelling their society largely on the white South, even to the extent of owning black slaves…

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Nazi Ideology and Senior Business Managers

by Dr. David White

Nazi ideology’s historical roots predate the founding of the Party in 1920, but contemporary contributions to its thought also developed outside its ranks in the interwar years, notably among Germany’s upper-middle classes. One such grouping was high-ranking managers within German business and industry. This article is an edited version of a talk given to the Open History Society in April 2022.

Much of Nazi ideology was defined by what it opposed. The list is long. National Socialism was anti-Semitic, anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, anti-liberal, anti-parliamentarian, anti-democratic, anti-Weimar Republic, anti-Versailles Treaty, anti-intellectual and anti-Christian; it was hostile to freemasons, homosexuals, Gypsies, the mentally ill and the physically handicapped. After March 1933, freedom of speech, association and expression in print and film were abolished. Furthermore, the very concepts of equality before the law and impartiality of due process were undermined. The SS, the Gestapo and the Nazi Party had their own court systems, while use of ‘preventive custody’ allowed Nazi functionaries to incarcerate people indefinitely without trial in concentration camps. At a deeper level, National Socialism distrusted the judicial system itself, viewing it as an inflexible bureaucratic structure potentially impeding the execution of political and ideological policies…

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Thin Red Line: Scottish Soldiers and Britain’s Retreat from Empire after 1945 by Ian S. Wood

From early on and throughout Northern Ireland’s Troubles, the IRA’s propaganda machine portrayed Scottish troops deployed there as sectarian. This was always an over-simplification. Religion had no part in army recruitment in Scotland and the parachute regiment, arguably the most violent unit to serve in the Troubles, were never represented as the product of a sectarian society. What was true was that in 1969 the army still had a strong nucleus of officers and NCOs with recent experience of tougher and more brutal operations during Britain’s long retreat from empire in colonies like Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus and Aden. Scottish soldiers had without any doubt been part of this.

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History Rewritten By Caption

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More of the above Satire & Irreverence lower down the page

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Lesser-Known Quotations

“Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason why it was put up.”************************************************John F. Kennedy (1917-63)

 “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities” *****************************************Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78)

“The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided.” ****************************************** **************************************Casey Stengel, US Baseball Manager (1890-1975)

“Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.” ***************************************************** *****George Carlin (1937-2008)

“If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” *********************Don Marquis (1878-1937)

“Equality is the soul of of liberty; there is in fact no liberty without it.” ************************************Fanny Wright, Scottish feminist writer (1795-1852)

“The easy confidence with which I know another man’s religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also.” **************Mark Twain (1835-1910)

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Gender Spheres and Circles of Power: How American Women Won the Vote

To get the word “male” out of the Constitution cost the women of the country 52 years of pauseless campaign… During that time they were forced to conduct 56 campaigns of referenda to male voters; 480 campaigns to get legislatures to submit suffrage amendments to voters; 47 campaigns to get State constitutional conventions to write woman suffrage into state constitutions; 277 campaigns to get State party conventions to include woman suffrage planks; 30 campaigns to get presidential party conventions to adopt woman suffrage planks; and 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses.      

****************************************Carrie Chapman Catt, 1923

Achieving women’s suffrage in the USA involved a political movement and campaign whose main task, from its inception, involved challenging an all-encompassing ideological model which laid down the purported proper places of men and women in society, their essential natures, and the consequent activities which were deemed suitable to each. Women’s subordinate role in American society was socially constructed through a matrix of tradition, religion, prejudice, economic structures, law, political power, political ideology, and the constitution of the United States. Every one of these factors had to be confronted and either changed or interpreted in a new way before women could be enfranchised. In a situation which began with every vestige of political power in the hands of men, this was a monumental task.

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Gruppe 47 and the Post-WWII German Literary World

“Our literature has no places. The tremendous, often painstaking effort of post-war literature was in fact to find places and neighbourhoods again.”         Heinrich Böll

Gruppe 47 began in 1947 as a circle of German writers who were friends. Several had been prisoners-of-war together in Allied camps. Although never possessing a programmatic statement, from the earliest days they were motivated by political and social concerns. All were strongly anti-Nazi and pro-democratic, with most espousing either a social-democratic or democratic-socialist viewpoint. They were keen to disseminate political and social ideas to a German population which had not only been devastated by total defeat in war, widespread infrastructural devastation and socio-economic dislocation, but was also labouring with the legacy of twelve years under the extremist ideology of National Socialism. The task of recovery and breaking free from its poisonous ideological weight was a daunting prospect. The context for this rebuilding was made more difficult as the emergent Cold War pitched the occupying powers against one another. 

Just like the political, social and economic chaos of post-war Germany, its literary world was fragmented and debilitated. After 1933 most of  the nation’s major writers had been forced to cease their output, or write propagandist material for the Nazis, or emigrate like Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno and Erich Maria Remarque.

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Napoleon III – The Populist Emperor

Napoleon III, nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was a visionary, perhaps even an idealist, who had substantial support among the lower social orders because of his sympathies for the poor and working classes. However, he was also an imperial populist who appealed to both left and right political views, while his ambitions for power demonstrated opportunism and ambiguity. His victory in the 1848 election for the newly-created office of president undermined the left and prevented the reactionary Louis-Eugène Cavaignac from restoring the old constitution. The thwarting of those who had put their lives on the line in the 1848 uprising prevented more far-reaching democratisation occurring, but the comprehensive defeat of Cavaignac thwarted a rekindling of the violence of the summer. However, Napoleon’s support for democracy and republicanism was revealed as superficial in 1852 when he engineered a coup to keep himself in office. Although ostensibly aimed at the conservative-controlled National Assembly, the greatest repression was visited upon the radical left. A highly-manipulated plebiscite followed which bestowed popular approval upon Napoleon. He now reduced the power of the National Assembly which negated the restoration of universal male suffrage, instituted press censorship, and then declared himself emperor, endorsed by an improbable 97% support in another dubious plebiscite. Liberal reforms to the legislature in the 1860s were minimal and did not hamper the emperor’s powers, particularly in foreign policy. There is no doubt that in the political and constitutional realm, Napoleon was autocratic, illiberal and an impediment to French democracy – yet outside of Paris and some other cities, he remained popular until the disasters of 1870-71.

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Products Which Changed the World – Sugar and Oil

Both sugar-cane and oil are commodities which require processing before they can become useful. Historically, each has required accompanying innovations to make them practicable. They have largely needed to be transported a long way from their sources to their principal markets. Each commodity, with the exception of the United States’ domestic oil supplies and more recently Middle-Eastern output, has been controlled by businesses and nations not native to their countries of origin.

Sugar and oil had been in use for hundreds of years before their sudden take-off into major commodities. In the case of sugar, it was the discovery that it could be grown easily in the tropical regions of the New World which led to its expansion, spreading consumption wider and deeper through European society where previously it had been confined to the wealthy because of its cost. When it was combined with other newly arrived products, principally tea and coffee, demand for sugar expanded rapidly and for nearly a century it was England’s largest import. Oil in a similar fashion took off when it was required for use in new products, principally as a fuel for the internal combustion engine, but also as a source of lubrication for most other engines and machinery whatever their motive power.

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Hamish Henderson and the Spanish Connection by Mario Relich

As Timothy Neat documents in the first volume of his Hamish Henderson biography, The Making of the Poet (1939-1953), published in 2007, part of his war experience in Italy was to serve as an ‘informal liaison officer’ with the Partisans, and Allied interrogator of German prisoners-of-war, but he had not been a volunteer, either in the International Brigade or other military formations, in the earlier anti-Fascist conflict, the Spanish Civil War. However, Neat shows that the Spanish tragedy very much impinged on his mind and imagination, and documents prominent instances in Volume 2,  Poetry Becomes People (1952-2002),published in 2009. First, there was the genesis of his anthem devoted to the struggle against apartheid, Rivonia. The immediate circumstances which led to Henderson composing the lyrics were described by the poet himself in unpublished lecture notes, quoted by Neat…

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Is Donald Trump a Jacksonian?

Donald Trump has presented himself as a populist figure, a champion of the common man, and a scourge of the established elite. In this respect he mirrors the campaigning style of Andrew Jackson, the seventh US President who was in office from 1829 to 1837. Indeed Trump and his supporters have frequently drawn the comparison, while the 45^th president displays a portrait of Jackson in his office in the White House. However, many have contended that Trump’s self-portrayal as man-of-the-people is a sham, a fabrication designed wholly to lubricate his path to political power and to maintain him in that position. While Jackson was a flawed individual who failed to live up to his will-of-the-people message, he was largely sincere in believing what he was broadcasting. Trump, by contrast, exhibits sociopathic traits, appearing to hold no principles, ideals or aims beyond adopting whatever he thinks will benefit his thirst for power. Ultimately the question of whether Trump is a Jacksonian depends upon whether it is the myth or the historical reality of Jackson against which Trump is compared…

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The Edinburgh & Glasgow Railway and Sunday Travel by Dr John McGregor

In 1837 Sir Andrew Agnew, a loudly Sabbatarian MP, sought to insert into the Glasgow, Paisley, Kilmarnock & Ayr Railway Bill a general clause prohibiting Sunday trains. When the Whig Government bestirred themselves to have Agnew’s clause deleted at Third Reading, 80 members nevertheless stood by him. A dozen years later Joseph Locke, eminent railway engineer and MP, attacked Scotland’s anti-Sunday travel lobby. “The religious”, Locke alleged, had conducted an unscrupulous campaign by hinting at enhanced dividends for Sabbatarians who purchased shares in the Scottish Central Railway so as to influence the directors. He told how the Duchess of Sutherland, hastening south to her dying father, had been left in tears on the platform at Perth when Scottish Central officials barred her from the Sunday mail train prescribed by the Post Office. But the campaigners remained righteously resolute – while the Postmaster General must answer for himself, as he would answer on Judgement Day, it was their bounden duty to deter prospective passengers…

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Alasdair Gray on the Declaration of Arbroath: A Personal View

Alasdair Gray, who died at the end of December 2019, just missed the 700th anniversary year of the Declaration of Arbroath. However, this significant historical event was of great importance to him, and he had a few words to say about it in chapter 3, “A Kind of Freedom”, in his polemical booklet, Why Scots Should Rule Scotland (Canongate, 1992), with a bit more elaboration in the 1997 edition. He put it in a quote taken directly from the Declaration itself, on behalf of “the barons and freeholders and the whole community of Scotland” which declared to Pope John XXII “the sovereignty of the Scottish people and independence from English overlordship.” I would argue that Gray saw more clearly than most the Declaration’s implications about the nature of Scottish identity in its political dimension, even to this day. Some historians have tried to relativize what the Declaration actually means in the present-day context. They do so in a manner not dissimilar to how some historians have relativized the Magna Carta, claiming that it had no relevance to advancing the freedoms of what we now call ‘ordinary people’, or ‘commoners’ at the time. According to such historians, its relevance to advancing political freedom today has been highly exaggerated, particularly no doubt by discredited ‘Whig’ historians. But Gray thought otherwise, certainly in the case of the Declaration of Arbroath…

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Monitoring Morale: The History of Home Intelligence 1939-1944   by Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang

During the Second World War the British government undertook a unique experiment in the monitoring of public opinion. It was organised in secret by Home Intelligence, a unit of the Ministry of Information (MOI) that kept a close watch on the home front, observing the behaviour and eavesdropping on the conversations of the general public. Evidence gathered from all parts of the United Kingdom was sifted and compiled into reports that were issued daily between May and September 1940, and then in weekly form until December 1944, when Home Intelligence was closed down. Initially the circulation of the reports was restricted mainly to a handful of officials in the Ministry of Information itself, but over time the circulation list expanded to include Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, the Cabinet Office, the leading ministries on the home front, and the three service ministries – the Admiralty, War Office and Air Ministry.

The Home Intelligence reports, which covered almost every aspect of life on the home front, have become in recent years a major source for social, cultural and political historians…

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How Churchill’s Mind Worked by Paul Addison

When David Lloyd George succeeded Asquith as Prime Minister, in December 1916, Winston Churchill was out of office and in disgrace.  Almost everyone, Lloyd George included, blamed him for the tragedy of the Gallipoli campaign in which 132,000 British and allied troops had been killed or injured. Lloyd George, however, understood that although Churchill was down he was far from out. Recognising him as a politician of exceptional drive and ability, and potentially a dangerous opponent if he were excluded from office, he decided in July 1917 to bring Churchill into the government as Minister of Munitions. As he describes in his memoirs, it was a decision that provoked howls of protest:

For days I discussed with one or other of my colleagues Churchill, his gifts, his shortcomings, his mistakes, especially the latter. Some of them were more excited about his appointment than about the war. It was a serious crisis. It was interesting to observe in a concentrated form every phase of the distrust and trepidation with which mediocrity views genius at close quarters.

They admitted he was a man of dazzling talents, that he possessed a forceful and a fascinating personality. They recognised his courage and that he was an indefatigable worker. But they asked why, in spite of that, although he had more admirers, he had fewer followers than any prominent public man in Britain?…

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The Dresden Triangle by Paul Addison

At a conference of allied air commanders on 1 March 1945, the Commander-in-chief of RAF Bomber Command, Sir Arthur Harris, remarked that Bomber Command had so far destroyed 63 German cities. He made no specific reference to the bombing of Dresden, which had taken place on 13-14 February, but he probably knew that it was already causing rumblings of controversy. Of all the 63 cities devastated by Bomber Command, Dresden has become the most deeply ingrained in our collective memory of the war.  References are often made to the fate of Cologne, Hamburg or Berlin, but Dresden remains the most powerful symbol and the most controversial instance of the issues involved in the strategic air offensive against Germany.

Why of all the cities attacked by Bomber Command did it come to acquire such exceptional significance?…

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Stalin, the ‘Red Tsar’?

At the June 2019 G20 Summit, Vladimir Putin condemned liberal democracy as obsolete, declared that a homogenous nationalism was preferable to multiculturalism, and added that immigrants and refugees from Syria and Central America were rapists and murderers. This chilling worldview merely confirmed and amplified the widely-held perception of the Russian president as a narrow-minded authoritarian. Moreover, when he condemned secularism and claimed that the world lives by biblical values, the claim that he has been gradually assuming the mantle of the pre-1917 tsars crystalised a little more. Yet Putin is also on record declaring that Joseph Stalin was no different from Oliver Cromwell and has praised the communist tyrant for his patriotism. The rehabilitation of Uncle Joe inches forward daily in Russia it seems. How can we reconcile this admiration for two historical regimes apparently diametrically opposed to each other? Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that Stalin and the tsars were not really so very different in some major respects. Putin’s policies and actions are nothing like the murderous, paranoid rule of Stalin, and he is a populist rather than an autocrat. However, he aspires to a type of rule and embodies a variety of  narrow nationalism which were evident in both tsarist and Stalinist Russia.

The term ‘Red Tsar’ was used in the title of Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (2004), its intention being to portray him as autocrat and blood-soaked villain. This article does not disagree with that. Stalin’s regime was as undemocratic as the one overthrown in 1917. It relied upon central control, terror and murder for its existence and to carry out its goals…

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Chroniclers, Detectives or Judges – Just What Are Historians? 

It might seem a truism, even if a slightly pious one, that historians should be dispassionate and objective practitioners of their craft. Yet is that actually possible? Or even desirable? The debate on the role of historians and how they should approach their subject goes back a long way. In the early nineteenth century Leopold von Ranke, widely regarded as the founder of modern source-based history, contended that before you committed anything to paper, you should be sure you had the evidence to show that what you were writing was not just accurate, but also provable.^[1] This brought an early forensic approach to history writing.

However, even forensic detectives are not solely concerned with gathering facts. They don’t go into a crime scene and simply record everything they see. They are selective. They are unlikely to be interested in the titles of the books on the shelves, the colour of the carpet or the age of the rococo plasterwork in the library where Colonel Mustard was killed; murder weapon, fingerprints and the smashed window are more likely to yield information which aids their work. Similarly, historians make choices about what to include in their studies, and how much emphasis each factor should be given. Indeed, while detectives have their task clearly assigned – the solving of a particular crime – historians more often than not have to define for themselves what their aim is in the midst of a mountain of factors and facts…

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For several years, at each monthly talk of the society, a historical quiz has featured. We are reproducing these quizzes periodically here several years after their first airing. The subject matter ranges across more than 2,000 years, covers most of the globe, and can deal with anything from wars to religion to popular culture, so the pass-mark out of twelve is just three. Scoring six or above is outstanding. 

 

No.22 (from March 2017)

 

  1)    Which 20th-century revolutionary  political leader, activist, author and military organiser said, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you”?

  2)   “Rise up/ No longer be a slave people/ With our own flesh and blood/ Build a new great wall.”  Written in 1934, these are the opening words to the present-day  national anthem of which country?

  3)   Which hugely popular American singer, stage actor and film star was born Asa Yoelson  in 1896 in a Yiddish community in Kaunas, Lithuania?   He was America’s highest-paid entertainer in the 1930s.

  4)   Who was British Prime Minister when decimal coinage was introduced?

  5)  How many American presidents have died in office?

  6)    In what year did all of the following occur: the first printing of the Pentateuch (first five books of the Bible), completion of the Christian Reconquista of Spain, the European discovery of the West Indies and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain?

  7)   What was the name of the battleship aboard which the Japanese surrendered in 1945?

  8)  What substance was originally marketed in 1895 by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer as an over-the-counter cough remedy and as a means of alleviating addiction to morphine?

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Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Dutch Hostility

In 1585 Queen Elizabeth I of England agreed the Treaty of Nonsuch with her Protestant co-religionists, the Dutch, in their fight against Catholic Spain. A century later in 1689, William of Orange, Stadholder of Holland, became king of England, guaranteeing an alliance of the two nations against the French. Yet in between these dates, a Dutch fleet sailed up the River Medway in Kent in 1667, burned the royal dockyards and made off with the flagship of the Royal Navy, while in 1672 Charles II  went to war with the Netherlands to aid Louis XIV of France, a seemingly highly unlikely alliance in view of the continual warfare which would soon prevail between these two nations until the early 19^th century. What was it which led to twenty years of armed hostility between England and the Netherlands, with fighting taking place from the Caribbean to New York, from West Africa to Indonesia, and repeated naval battles in the seas between the two nations?

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The 1707 Window of Opportunity

For the last several years as the case for Scottish independence has lodged itself at or near the top of the political agenda in Scotland with support for secession hovering steadily between 45% and 51% since 2014, there has been increased interest in how the union between England and Scotland came about in the first place. Why did it happen in 1707 and not earlier? Was it inevitable? Was it a popular event? Or was it all down to the “parcel of rogues in a nation” in the words of Robert Burns? The following article attempts to place the Treaty of Union in its historical context, a context of war, royal succession, religious anxieties, political self-interest and economic imperialism. It also suggests that the contingencies of war and a very particular alignment of political-dynastic conditions coincided to create an opportunity which had not occurred before and was unlikely afterwards to have been as conducive to union as it was in 1707.

Over the period 1704-06 during the War of the Spanish Succession, the fortunes of the allied armies in their war against Louis XIV of France soared. The Duke of Marlborough won an overwhelming victory at Blenheim…

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The Japanese Occupation of China 1937-45: The Divided Opposition and Its Consequences

During the eight years of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-45), China suffered continual crushing and humiliating defeats at the hands of Japan and was subject to a devastating, brutal occupation of much of the nation. Japanese behaviour in the conflict was the principal factor which distinguished the occupation from other wars of recent memory. Not since medieval times had such barbarity and brutality been witnessed. Most significantly, it was the deliberate targeting of the civilian population for murder, rape and terror which made this episode so different and so shocking. The Nazis would repeat this in Eastern Europe and Russia, but the Japanese preceded them by several years.

Japanese attitudes towards China governed Japanese behaviour towards the Chinese. Belief in their own racial and cultural superiority and the influence of the Bushido code of conduct allowed the invaders to justify their treatment of Chinese people…

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What was the Nazi Volksgemeinschaft and how successful was propaganda in creating a racially exclusive society?

 

The term Volksgemeinschaft translates, as near as is possible, to “people’s ethnic community”. National Socialism envisaged this as a racially exclusive organic society of unequals which nevertheless was somehow going to be classless and harmonious, or at least class position was to be regarded as irrelevant. “Equality of blood” or “equality of race” rather than economic equality was both an ideal and a putative key to creating social harmony, and was instrumental in the issuing of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws outlawing marriage or relations between Jews and non-Jews.

National Socialism’s apparently sociopathic tendencies were a modern pseudo-scientific variant of the religious certainties of earlier ages…

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Masculinity, Public Schools and British Imperial Rule

What was this masculinity that was so highly regarded in middle and later nineteenth-century Britain, those characteristics described approvingly by Rudyard Kipling, E.M. Forster, Alfred Lord Tennyson and Henry Rider Haggard, and mercilessly lampooned in the Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser? It can be observed in a famous work of literature – Tom Brown’s Schooldays, written by Thomas Hughes in 1857 and based on his own experiences at Rugby Public School, one of the nine “ancient” elite schools of the time where so many colonial administrators were educated. Team spirit and Muscular Christianity (mens sana in corpore sano – a healthy mind in a healthy body ) were the underlying principles informing the ethos of their education which was as much geared to character-building as gaining knowledge. This was manifested in the central importance of team sport, regarded as a small-scale version of what boys would face later in life…

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Chiang Kai-Shek and the USA – puppet and puppeteer, but which was which?

Forty years ago, Chiang Kai-Shek died after a half-century on the international stage. For the last 26 years of his life, Chiang ruled over a domain which had shrunk from the most populous country in the world to the offshore island of Taiwan. Sustained in power by the United States, this apparent client-dependency relationship was not at all straightforward. Almost every strategy and policy considered or enacted by either party was influenced by the perceived effect upon, or reaction of, the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC). Furthermore, in the case of the USA the repercussions upon her relationship with the Soviet Union, and upon Sino-Soviet relations, played a part in decision-making. Although both the United States and Chiang Kai-Shek’s Republic of China (ROC) embodied solidly and stridently anti-communist doctrines throughout the period 1949-1975, they often did so for very different reasons. Among the most fundamental of these was the very question of whether one China or two should exist on the world stage. For the USA this was a political and geostrategic issue, but for Chiang and the Kuomintang it was an existential one, defining their very raison d’être. They had absolutely no desire for genuine de jure independence from mainland China, thus creating the peculiar situation of being a state which was not a nation, yet was not only a member of the United Nations, but also had a permanent seat on the Security Council until 1971…

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150 years ago, Leopold II was crowned King of the Belgians and embarked upon one of the most barbaric imperial projects undertaken by any European state. 

How did the king of a small nation with no colonial possessions whatsoever come to control the single largest colony in Africa in the later 19th century? In a remarkable series of diplomatic, political and business coups, Leopold II skilfully achieved his aim of imperial grandeur while outwitting and outmanoeuvring some of the most astute statesmen of his age. However, behind a high-minded façade of liberal aspirations was concealed exceptional brutality, exploitation and an indifference to the fate of millions of Africans…

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No.22

 1)    Leon Trotsky                   

 2)   The People’s Republic of China

 3)   Al Jolson

 4)   Edward Heath, 1971

 5)   Eight:   Four were assassinated – John Kennedy, Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield , William McKinley; Four died of natural causes – William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt 

 6)   1492

 7)   USS Missouri

 8)   Heroin

                                   

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