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Accessible handbook explaining how to record the physical legacy of the First World War on the British Home Front
From massive nuclear test sites to the more subtle material realities of everyday life, the influence of the Cold War on modern culture has been profound and global. Fearsome Legacies unites innovative work on the interpretation and management of Cold War heritage from fields including archaeology, history, art and architecture, and cultural studies. Contributors understand material culture in its broadest sense, examining objects in outer space, domestic space, landscapes, and artistic spaces. They tackle interpretive challenges and controversies, including in museum exhibits, heritage sites, archaeological sites, and other historic and public venues. With over 150 color photos and illustrations, including a photographic essay, readers can feel the profound visual impact of this material culture.
This book will present in accessible and visual form the diversity and significance of modern military wall art, largely in Britain, but set within its wider geographical and historical context.
This book comprises a national study of the explosives industry and provides a framework for identification of its industrial archaeology and social history. Few monuments of gunpowder manufacture survive in Britain from the Middle Ages, although its existence is documented. Late 17th-century water-powered works are identifiable but sparse. In the later 18th century, however, the industry was transformed by state acquisition of key factories, notably at Faversham and at Waltham Abbey.In the mid-19th century developments in Britain paralleled those in continental Europe and in America, namely a shift to production on an industrial scale related to advances in armaments technology. The urgency and large-scale demands of the two world wars brought state-directed or state-led solutions to explosives production in the 20th century. Yhe book’s concluding section looks at planning, preservation, conservation and presentation in relation to prospective future uses of these sites.
In the early 1950s, the historian Professor William Hoskins, in his pioneering work The making of the English landscape, lamented what he saw as the devastation of the countryside by scientists, the military and politicians. He saw his world as dominated by "the obscene shape of the atom-bomber, laying a trail like a filty slug upon Constable's and Gainsborough's sky. England of the Nissen hut, the "pre-fab", and the electric fence, of the high barbed wire around some unmentionable devilment". A generation later, this book reveals what lay behind the fence and how the sites are now, in dereliction, a new aspect of the complex landscape history of Britain.
RAF Upper Heyford was founded during the First World War and after a short period of abandonment was re-established during the 1920s under Trenchard's scheme to provide permanent bases for the RAF. It was the exemplary airfield and the only one completed to the original design standards. During the Second World War the most significant change to the appearance of the airfield was the laying of concrete runways in a characteristic 'A' plan configuration. In the late 1940s the airfield was identified as one of a number that might accommodate United States bombers with the capability of attacking Eastern Europe with atomic weapons. To fulfil this role the airfield was extensively reconstructed,...
The Cold War was one of the twentieth century's defining events, with long-lasting political, social, and material implications. It created a global landscape of culturally and politically significant artifacts and sites that are critical to understanding and preserving the history of that conflict. The stories of these artifacts and sites remain mostly untold, however, because so many of the facilities operated in secret. In this volume, Todd Hanson examines the Cold War's secret sites through three theoretical frameworks: conflict archaeology, the archaeology of the recent past, and the archaeology of science. He presents case studies of investigations conducted at some famous--and some no...
In the course of Europe's twentieth century, freedoms were won at the cost of terrible sacrifice. The physical remains of war, conflict and ideological struggle lie everywhere around us. The question of what to do with this common past, in which we all share an interest, lies at the centre of this important book. From a variety of professional backgrounds, the contributors consider a wide range of conflict-heritage sites in the context of international and national histories and regional and local historical narratives. Questions of who 'owns' the past, the ambiguities over how people identify with the local community or nation state, and whether or how to make moral judgements, are central....
This guidance is intended to promote the appreciation of historic military airfields and their associated buildings, so that their significance is properly recognised and conserved through appropriate management. It explains how the operational needs and development potential of these sites can be reconciled with the recognition of their special historic, architectural or archaeological significance. It is also intended to assist with the preparation of guidelines, agreements and plans for individual sites. The guidance is aimed at anyone that has a role in deciding how these sites are used and managed, including owners, their professional advisers, local planning authorities and the relevant statutory agencies. It applies to active military establishments as well as those that have been sold by the Ministry of Defence (MOD) and adapted for other uses.
This international volume draws together key research that examines visual arts of the past and contemporary indigenous societies. Placing each art style in its temporal and geographic context, the contributors show how depictions represent social mechanisms of identity construction, and how stylistic differences in product and process serve to reinforce cultural identity. Examples stretch from the Paleolithic to contemporary world and include rock art, body art, and portable arts. Ethnographic studies of contemporary art production and use, such as among contemporary Aboriginal groups, are included to help illuminate artistic practices and meanings in the past. The volume reflects the diversity of approaches used by archaeologists to incorporate visual arts into their analysis of past cultures and should be of great value to archaeologists, anthropologists, and art historians. Sponsored by the World Archaeological Congress.