tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027Fri, 25 Oct 2024 08:36:46 +0000The Anglospherethe Life of The PastPolitics of HistoryGlobalisationWilson's WarBritain and the First World WarIdle SpeculationThe Empire and Its BritainA Personal HistoryFalklands War MemoriesThe Sixtiesthe Politics of CultureMigrationPolitical EconomyWar in IraqCultural EconomicsHistorical PhiliosophyLeftismsModernityMy "To-Do" ListPop MusicRacethe Culture of Politicsthe First World WarLatin American Military HistoryNew BooksOutlines of CommandPetraeus ReportUKIPWar Between the StatesWar and Conspiracy TheoriesWarfare Sabermetricsthe FiftiesA Latin American Military HistoryAnglosphere at the MoviesAnglosphere on TelevisionBefore Rock 'n' RollDiscoDocumentariesFolk MusicLittle TutoringMiami ViceMilitary SabermetricsMuseumsMy writingOld Books ReviewedRusso-Japanese WarShots of WarThe Armed Forces and the War on DrugsThe HypernationWar and LiteratureWar in the Mediathe SeventiesBlogging from a cultural historian Follow me on Twitter @AngloAmCulturehttp://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/noreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)Blogger230125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-3759019785944510359Sat, 19 Aug 2017 17:29:00 +00002017-08-19T17:29:23.295+00:00the Politics of CultureThe SixtiesWhile researching something completely different, I came across this story in the 4 September 1965 issue of Billboard. You can find it on page 12. The most interesting thing about researching old magazines and newspapers is the discovery of these little signs that a mood is changing. The article starts: West Coast-recording companies are rushing to cut Bob Dylan songs, with his message-protest http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2017/08/signs-counterculture-was-coming.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-2559322052605820904Mon, 12 Jun 2017 15:35:00 +00002017-06-12T15:35:46.869+00:00Idle SpeculationPolitical EconomyThe AnglosphereBoth big Anglosphere countries, the United States and the United Kingdom, have held a national election within less than twelve months. The United Kingdom also conducted a national referndum within this time frame, which may have a significant bearing on the future direction of the Anglosphere. I thought it would be of interest to take stock of what these and other recent national elections mighthttp://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2017/06/how-is-anglosphere-voting.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-5434898038300115565Fri, 02 Jun 2017 17:13:00 +00002017-06-02T17:13:12.613+00:00A Personal HistoryAnglosphere at the MoviesThe Anglospherethe Fifties1956 was a bad year for the Anglosphere. The Suez Crisis brought to a head a number of troubling trends that had been going on since before the Second World War. However, on 26 November 1956, a few weeks after the Suez Debacle, one of the greatest cultural artefacts of the twentieth-century Anglosphere began production. That's the starting date the Internet Movie Data Base gives for The Bridge onhttp://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2017/06/revisiting-old-film-friend.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-5587284802774895837Tue, 30 May 2017 14:14:00 +00002017-05-30T14:14:49.217+00:00Political Economythe Culture of PoliticsLooking at an article about the recent leadership election election for the Conservative Party of Canada, it's interesting to see that a significant number of the votes for the 'social conservative' candidates came from the Greater Toronto Area, specifically the separate city of Mississauga (where the airport is) and the visible minority bastion of Scarborough, a suburban district on the oppositehttp://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2017/05/andrew-scheers-social-conservatives.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-6052366224214058778Tue, 04 Apr 2017 16:30:00 +00002017-04-04T16:30:37.039+00:00the Life of The Past 'With respect to abolitionism, then, British newspapers and periodicals published from the summer of 1783 to the spring of 1787 need to be read with caution. Historians will never know how many of the antislavery statements that appear in the British press in this period resulted from Slave Association sponsorship. What sometimes looks like an upsurge of antislavery argument and commentary in http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2017/04/fake-news-1780s-quaker-style.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-8238966822519083769Wed, 29 Mar 2017 17:11:00 +00002017-03-29T17:11:49.980+00:00GlobalisationThe AnglosphereThe Empire and Its Britainthe Life of The Past'Prince: I know my duty; you are all undutiful:/Lascivious Edward,--and thou, perjur'd George,--/And thou, misshapen Dick,--I tell ye all/I am your better, traitors as ye are:--/And thou usurp'st my father's right and mine. King Edward: Take that, the likeness of this railer here [Stabs him] Duke of Gloucester (later Richard III): Sprawl'st thou? take that, to end thy agony. [Stabs him] Duke of http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2017/03/article-50-day-bursting-balloon.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-1054137722518043678Tue, 28 Mar 2017 20:08:00 +00002017-03-28T20:08:26.679+00:00Anglosphere on TelevisionMiami Vice [A television channel available here in South Florida shows the classic 1980s television show Miami Vice in syndication every weeknight. I have been writing some commentary about the episodes I see for another audience, and I thought to provide some of those posts here, with a slightly different emphasis.] Miami Vice was relatively popular in Britain when it ran there on the BBC. I know severalhttp://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2017/03/the-anglosphere-on-television-miami-vice.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-7597411686832477945Wed, 12 Oct 2016 15:59:00 +00002016-10-12T16:41:15.671+00:00Cultural EconomicsGlobalisationIdle SpeculationAt the outset, I have to say I wouldn't urge anyone to take this post too seriously. It's just a bit of scholarly fun that further research might confirm offers some insight -- or mean nothing at all. In his 1964 book Thought and Change, Ernest Gellner talks about how some nationalism emerges when a linguistic-cultural (or ethnic) minority contained within a larger state that is dominated by a http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2016/10/fun-with-gellner-and-trump.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-9010597411589521271Mon, 10 Oct 2016 19:34:00 +00002016-10-10T19:34:28.949+00:00GlobalisationMy "To-Do" ListThe HypernationOver the last three or four months I have been doing some reading into the historiography of the concepts of 'the nation' and 'nationalism'. Thinking about Ernest Gellner's early essay into this topic, the chapter Nationalism in Thought and Change, I find an interesting intellectual point of departure within a globalising world. Generally speaking, some historians, like the late Anthony Smith (http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2016/10/a-short-note-inspired-by-ernest-gellner.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-3022874993489016948Tue, 28 Jun 2016 21:03:00 +00002016-06-28T21:03:30.151+00:00Globalisationthe Life of The PastI found I had to write a very different post to the one I expected to write. While I dashed off a few paragraphs almost straightaway, I have also had to revise this post on an almost daily basis. 28 June was the first time in five mornings that there was not some kind of new fact to take into account when I looked at some of the British news web-sites. As the day wore on, however, some of what I http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2016/06/four-points-on-brexit-compass.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-2184565072040163172Wed, 22 Jun 2016 17:52:00 +00002016-06-22T17:52:54.394+00:00The AnglosphereTomorrow will see the British people being given the same chance as they had in 1975 to vote on membership of the European project that began life as an attempt to co-ordinate economies in order to reduce the risk of yet another European-wide war and has been transformed over two-and-a-half generations into a superstate. The thing that they voted for in 1975 has changed dramatically over the http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2016/06/why-i-am-for-brexit.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-4015643144960944318Thu, 03 Mar 2016 20:33:00 +00002016-03-03T20:33:45.760+00:00Idle SpeculationI have been watching the progress of Donald Trump with interest since August 2015, when polling piqued my curiosity about his chances of success. I have written about it at increasing length in a private corner of the Internet populated by exiles from a web site about baseball. Some of what I write here was originally written there. However, now that the phenomenon which Trump represents has http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-1st-march-of-donald-trump.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-2665016997491146586Thu, 07 Jan 2016 23:33:00 +00002016-01-07T23:33:24.433+00:00The AnglosphereThe Empire and Its BritainEric Nelson is a professor at Harvard University who has written a book that examines a neglected aspect of the ideologies underlying the American War of Independence. If you want a taster, you can listen to an interview with him that is part of a series of podcasts under the rubric 'Ben Franklin's World'. It is about an hour long. During the course of the podcast, he reminds us that the http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2016/01/did-americans-invent-commonwealth-of.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-6912363392161923779Wed, 06 Jan 2016 16:31:00 +00002016-01-06T16:31:29.011+00:00GlobalisationPolitics of HistoryRacethe Life of The PastFew things get my historical scholar's goat more than a post like this one, about Trump the Nativist. Nativism was a complex phenomenon throughout American history, and a very mutable one. In this case, I would like to look at what might be considered a Janus-faced component of the old-time Nativist like George Bourne, whose Abolitionist views were inseperable from those attitudes he shared http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2016/01/the-spectre-of-nativism.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-8056440958305440204Wed, 30 Dec 2015 16:19:00 +00002015-12-30T16:19:30.968+00:00This map, courtesy of a tweet by the ever-fascinating @LindaRegber, brought home a point I had never really considered before. Britain, the core country of the Anglosphere, allows it. It is joined by the settler colonies of Canada, New Zealand and South Africa and, as the caption on the map indicates, parts of the United States. By contrast, the Francophonie has little place for gay marriage http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/12/locating-gay-marriage.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-6833692981297216924Mon, 14 Dec 2015 17:27:00 +00002015-12-14T17:27:38.115+00:00Little TutoringWar Between the StatesMy high-school daughter asked me to help her revise for a history test, one question of which will ask her about the causes of the War Between the States. So I reproduce here the brief analysis we constructed. The immediate cause of the War Between the States was the bombardment of Fort Sumter, in the harbour of Charleston, SC, in April 1861. As a result of this, President Abraham Lincoln of thehttp://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/12/youre-welcome-high-school-students.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-2157423728986277937Wed, 02 Dec 2015 20:01:00 +00002015-12-02T20:01:37.301+00:00Old Books ReviewedPolitics of HistoryThe Sixties(I don't normally blog such extensive commentary about a book, but I wrote it up somewhere else and decided that an edited version could continue the current Canadian theme on this blog.) The Strange Demise of British Canada describes itself as a response to Igartura's The Other 'Quiet Revolution', a book I have not read, but which I have known about for many years. The issue both books grapple http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/12/talk-about-past.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-898553138089081070Mon, 30 Nov 2015 22:04:00 +00002015-11-30T22:04:56.645+00:00Politics of HistoryThe AnglosphereWar Between the StatesI may have never before seen a statement quite so misleading in a quasi-official publication subsidised by a national government as the following from thecanadianencyclopedia.ca Although officially neutral, Britain had supported the Confederate states in the American Civil War The context of the statement is the cancellation in 1866 of a trade treaty between Britain and the United States signed http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/11/false-facts.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-3179044352317312793Wed, 25 Nov 2015 23:22:00 +00002015-11-25T23:22:27.306+00:00Politics of HistoryThe AnglosphereThe Empire and Its BritainNew Zealand has begun a process to decide whether to keep the old 'blue ensign' or to substitute another design. The voting will be a two-step exercise, first to select from a set of alternative designs, and then to have a run-off between the winner and the current flag. There has been some controversy over a consultation exercise about alternative designs that received many submissions opposed http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/11/in-hoc-vexillo-vinces.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-5151162140145073406Wed, 18 Nov 2015 23:14:00 +00002015-11-18T23:14:16.851+00:00the SeventiesMonty Python and the Holy Grail is one of my favourite comedy films. It conveys some sense of mediæval life. ('He's not covered in [muck] like the rest of us.' '...married to a girl whose father owns the biggest tracts of open land in Britain'.) And it also has the kind of surreal humour that I love. ('You've got two empty halves of coconut and you're bangin' 'em together.') However, my http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-british-face-of-god.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-6301788709349425957Tue, 17 Nov 2015 17:55:00 +00002015-11-17T17:55:28.497+00:00GlobalisationHistorical PhiliosophyPolitics of Historythe Life of The PastKevin Gannon, who blogs under the pen-name 'The Tattooed Professor', recently wrote a post suggesting that, at least as far as the teaching of US history went, we should think about framing it in a 'continental approach'. He contrasted this with the traditional narrative describing the advance of the frontier from the east coast, which disregards such useful facts as the settlement of St http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/11/framing-history.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-6117221241207535860Mon, 16 Nov 2015 19:22:00 +00002015-11-16T19:22:52.409+00:00Idle SpeculationMigrationThe AnglosphereIan Bremmer, a professor at New York University, posted a link to a graphic using Brookings Institution data, and graphically credited to The Independent (a British newspaper) and Statista, showing the top locations claimed byTwitter users supporting ISIL. I thought it was interesting that the two leading Anglosphere countries stand out on a list of Near Eastern ones. I haven't done the exact http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/11/araby-calling.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-7315100404910741871Thu, 05 Nov 2015 19:05:00 +00002015-11-05T19:05:52.103+00:00GlobalisationNew BooksPolitics of HistoryA while ago I made a post at the end of which I suggested: London is already a key member of a network of global cities which are the organisational centres of the global economy. These metropolitan areas include New York, the Bay Area in California, Tokyo and Toronto. What would be interesting would be to establish whether, like London, these all are developing a politics that to a greater or http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/11/the-future-is-nodal.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-316517698465367132Fri, 18 Sep 2015 15:43:00 +00002015-09-18T15:43:14.751+00:00Before Rock 'n' RollDocumentariesGlobalisationThe Anglospherethe Fiftiesthe Politics of CultureThe other day I caught Simon Heffer's televised essay on British war films of the 1950s. Although originally from 2013, it had been rebroadcast in August and showed up on the BBC's iPlayer for about a month. In the way of these televised essays about culture, it was a bit superficial in that Heffer would show us a clip from a film, followed by an interview with a personage associated with it, andhttp://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/09/before-teds.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31299027.post-3529007956465148960Tue, 08 Sep 2015 14:51:00 +00002015-09-08T14:51:52.480+00:00A Personal Historythe Life of The PastThe SixtiesYou have about a week left to catch a radio dramatisation of Keith Waterhouse's famous play Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. It has an amusing moment or two, but more in the nature of tragi-comedy than side-splitting slapstick. I strongly recommend giving it a listen if you want gain an idea of an eccentric corner of London Life during the postwar era. It could be considered a sort of parody of the http://warreadingroom.blogspot.com/2015/09/a-last-call-for-bit-of-old-soho.htmlnoreply@blogger.com (Paul Brewer)0