The second half of the 18th century saw the formation of the first establishments to provide formal training to officers prior to receiving their first commission. The first school, the Royal Military Academy, was formed in 1741 by the Board of Ordnance to train Artillery and Engineer Officers. It was 1800 before the army formed a similar establishment and the building blocks were in place for the creation of the Scientific Soldier. This thesis will look at the formation of the Royal Military Academy and look at the training that officers received with a focus on those officers destined to serve during the Peninsular War. The complementary roles and training of the Royal Military Artificers and the eventual formation of the School of Military Engineering will be described. A thorough review will then be undertaken of the officers in the Royal Engineers, the numbers, their background, the locations they served in and the tasks they carried out. A new review of the sieges during the war will be completed using unpublished material. The other roles undertaken by the Royal Engineers in the Peninsular War will be fully investigated and described. These roles are more comprehensive than has been commonly understood and will demonstrate the contribution of the educated officer to the war. The thesis will conclude by looking at the impacts of the post-war peace on military education.

The US presidential election of 2008 was considered a milestone for blacks and race in the USA. However, despite the considerable attention given to the election, it has not been placed in historical and political context. In particular, contemporary assumptions about the importance of the symbolism of a black president and about how the election tested the racial outlook of whites pervade the literature. Prior vigorously contested ideas such as equality, discrimination and integration were largely unconsidered during the election and with the Obama victory. This research attempts to bring out why race, considered predominantly through representation and identity, raised considerable energies among the electorate, examining the themes of “hope” and “change”, and the online campaign. To establish exactly what the election was reacting to, the thesis attempts a historical reconstruction of race: first, by working through a critique of realignment theory as the predominant academic view of electoral processes, then through an examination of how whiteness figured as a means to resolve class and related conflicts from the late-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, and finally examining how whiteness was consolidated through post-war suburbanisation. This reconstruction moves past the idea of race as psychological phenomenon or as a legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. The thesis then analyses the turnaround on race and why race was posed without reference to equality in 2008 through looking at both the idea of white racial bases and of identity politics. We conclude that the meaning of race in its post-war sense is largely absent in the contemporary USA suggesting that a politics of suburban interests better explains post-civil rights developments than race. We show how the politics of identity, so evident in the election, has been unable to raise issues of equality to address the enormous racial divisions in the USA today.

No description available.

This thesis examines the struggles for moral, cultural and political control of the Scottish Highlands during the period, c.1918-1945. Using library and archival material it demonstrates how a range of contesting landscape narratives, each based on an amalgam of myth, ideal and reality, were constructed for a region holding a peculiarly intense significance in the Scottish and British consciousness. By dissecting four inter-related debates about where, and to whom, the Highlands belonged, the thesis considers several overarching themes; questions of nationhood, citizenship, tradition, modernity and the division of power in society are all addressed. Firstly, it examines the creation of a sophisticated landowning mythology to counter increasingly vociferous public opposition to the elite sporting industry. Secondly, it explores how this landowning hegemony was threatened by the rise of a populist outdoor movement, and asserts that only through steady institutionalisation and the discrete involvement of reactionary interests was the vibrant recreative community emasculated. Thirdly, it analyses conflicts over the conceptualisation of the Highlands as a location suitable for modern industry, infrastuctural improvement and economic development. Examples of proposed hydro-electric power schemes are used to frame key arguments of opposition and promotion. Fourthly, it investigates the campaign mounted to re-appropriate the Highland land resource as a means to inspire agrarian and cultural revival. The role of Scotland's nationalist literary community is determined as crucial to the creation of a sophisticated, if ultimately idealistic, ruralist mythology. Despite the emergence of these oppositional narratives the thesis contends that the persistence of a feudal, sporting tradition in the Highlands reflected both the immutability and ingenuity of the established landowning hegemony. Significantly, dominant cultural constructions of Highland landscape and identity originating during the inter-war period retain much of their power to the present day.

This thesis employs critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995) to unpick the discourses surrounding British widows of men who died as a result of the First World War. The war widows’ pension scheme, as implemented under the Royal Warrant of 1916, was the first (financially) non-contributory pension, and the first specifically directed towards women in Britain. Implemented against a backdrop of the first mass, industrialised war of the modern era, the discourses and ideologies underpinning it are firmly rooted in those of the previous century. At a time when the State was intervening in the life of its citizens in more extensive way than at any previous time, it also sought to distance itself from these citizens through the use of an impersonal style of communication. This was used to present war widows’ pension legislation that was framed around discourses of morality and nationalism that masks underlying parsimony and patriarchy. This thesis draws on a wide range of resources such as charitable records, media sources and Hansard reports, concentrating on a selection of 200 individual case files relating to claims for a war widow’s pension, held in the National Archive, Kew. Two case files are analysed in detail using discourse-historical analysis (Wodak, 2001) as a framework for a linguistic analysis. The two case files chosen represent widows whose experiences are typical of those found in the corpus. One widow is representative of the sizeable group of women who had their pensions stopped because of ‘improper’ behaviour, the correspondence in her file revealing how discourses of morality, social welfare and national identity are employed interdiscursively to deny her State funds. The second case study is more diachronic, showing how one widow, in common with thousands of others, was denied a pension on grounds on ineligibility. She employs discourses of social welfare and nationalism to support her claim over a period of nearly 40 years. Over the course of the 20th century, the relationship between the State and the public altered, and this case file offers an opportunity to explore this in some detail.

No description available.

This thesis analysed the representation of women as voters, politicians and relatives of politicians in the newspaper coverage of every elections from 1918 until 2010; in order to offer historical context to the existing literature about women, media and politics. Content analysis and feminist critical discourse analysis were employed to track the changes and continuities in their mediated representations across the twenty five elections studied. The study shows that across time, the representation of voters changed the least. Voters tended to be constructed as mothers and thrifty housewives whose political views stemmed from their familial roles and domestic responsibilities. The extent to which they were depicted as politically engaged and were quoted did increase over time however they continued to be predominantly written about rather than allowed to speak for themselves. Contrary to the results of previous studies, politicians were not associated with stereotypically feminine policy areas, but were instead gendered through their construction as important representatives for women voters and their campaign styles. Over time the proportion of items offering negative evaluations increased. The proportion which made personalised references to their appearance or age, and included their voices peaked during the 1960s and 1970s and then declined so that contemporary politicians are as likely to experience both as their interwar forebears. The results from 2010 however suggested that personalisation may once again be increasing. The role of relatives in electoral coverage changed the most of the three groups. During the interwar years they were depicted as active political campaigners whose contribution was largely welcomed, after war their role became more focused on their personal lives. The coverage also became increasingly focused on the wives of party leaders. By the late 1980s, leaders wives were once again constructed taking an active role in the campaign but these interventions were portrayed as illegitimate and threatening to democracy. The coverage of relatives became increasingly personalised over time focusing on their appearance and its appeal to the electorate. The newspaper coverage of women in electoral campaigns has always been, and continues to be gendered in specific ways. Women have consistently had their level of political activity trivialised and their voices marginalised. They were domesticated through the construction of their political priorities and campaign styles and they received personalised coverage which was undeniably gendered. In effect women were routinely linked to the private sphere, rendering their political participation in the public domain problematic.

Few themes of modern Indian history could be as important as the history of the Indian National Congress. It has been truly said that "The history of the Indian national Congress is the history of the origin and development of national life in India." The history of the Congress is also the history of the Indian people in their struggle for freedom. As a result of the introduction of British rule over India and the influences which accompanied it, new social forces were generated which profoundly affected Indian society. As a result of the development of new professions and the growth of education and the press, a new class of persons had come into existence by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, whose interests clashed with those of the British bureaucracy in India. In their political outlook the members of this class were pro-British, and in their social outlook generally European. They did not contemplate the end of the British rule, but wanted a share in the Government of the country so that they might learn the British art of government and benefit from the blessings of the British Constitution.

Thesis (M. Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [152-159]).

Thesis (M.Ed.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves [152]-[159]). Also available in print.