The Newspaper Axis: Six Bress Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn J. Olmstead - 2022 - 401 Pages

The Newspaper Axis: Six Bress Barons Who Enabled Hitler by Kathryn J. Olmstead is a very valuable highly interesting account of how powerful English and American Newspaper Publishers did all they could to keep England and America from entering what they saw as "continental entanglements" involving the ambitious of Adolf Hitler.

The Press Barons published articles praising Hitler for revitalising Germany, advocating appeasement and trivialising his Anti-Semitic rants. They insisted Hitler did not want a war even as Germany began to rearm in violation of the Versailes Treaty.  Some personally admired Hitler and were thrilled to meet him.

As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views. Meanwhile in England, Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail extolled Hitler’s leadership and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express insisted that Britain had no interest in defending Hitler’s victims on the continent.

 

Kathryn S. Olmsted shows how these media titans worked in concert—including sharing editorial pieces and coordinating their responses to events—to influence public opinion in a right-wing populist direction, how they echoed fascist and anti-Semitic propaganda, and how they weakened and delayed both Britain’s and America’s response to Nazi aggression.

She does also feature how the press Barons began to alter their views once the war started.  They were from the start strong believers in white supremacy, hated Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. However Lord Beaverbrook went to work for Churchill to build up England's airforce and was highly dedicated and successful.  Even as America entered the war the American publishers tried to convince their readers, about 30 percent of Adults that Roosevelt was under the control of a world Jewish cabal and wanted to  become a dictator.

Olmstead tells us as authoritarian style leaders seek power there

 is a warning in her book. Press figures, TV News Networks seek above all profits and will pander to these leaders.

For bio data on Kathryn J. Olmstead check the website of the history department of the University of California at Davis

Mel Ulm

A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century by Jerry White - 2012 - 729 Pages

A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century by Jerry White is an excellent through account of life in London in the Eighteenth Century.  White takes us from the magnificent homes of the rich to stories of people living on the street. 

He includes famous people like Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Joshua Reynolds and lots of infamous courtesans.  Long ago I did a literary tourist type visit to London and White's book took me back.

London in the 18th Century was a powerful draw for ambitious people from the provinces, Scotland and Ireland. Some became famous, others were tradesmen, servants and lots of the women became prostitutes.

There are chapters on just about every aspect of London life. London was full of prostitutes, many doubled as petty Thieves. Simple crimes could get you hung. He goes in detail into crime, publishing, hack writers and geniuses (not mutually exclusive categories), taverns, inns, different kind of servants, and much more.

if you are interested in Eighteenth Century English history this is a perfect book for you,

There is an extensive bibliography, numerous illustrations and maps.

It is currently on sale for  $4.95 as a Kindle 

I suggest you consult the author's website for bio data 

https://www.jerrywhite.co.uk/about.html

Mel Ulm

 

Insurgent Empire : Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopa - 2019 - 628 Pages

 Insurgent Empire : Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent by Priyamvada Gopa - 2019 - 628 Pages

I first became aware of this book on a broadcast at Democracy Now- The War and Peace Report.

"Priyamvada Gopal is an astonishing writer and thinker, one who is fearless in how she uses history to explain where we are now. Her work is essential to showing how empire and colonialism pervades every nook and cranny of the British establishment today and why we should all continue to speak truth to power, like she does every damn day.”

—Nikesh Shukla, editor of The Good Immigrant

“This impressive book challenges the assumptions that underpin many academic and journalistic understandings of the British empire; it restores the idea of resistance and dissent, placing anti-colonial struggle from the 1857 uprising in India, to Mau Mau in Kenya, at the heart of historical change. It argues convincingly that, when it did occur, British anti-colonialism in the metropole was forged through exposure to imperial insurgency. By doing so, it tackles the whole premise of British liberal imperial progress and benevolence which remains so pervasive to this day. It’s also a hopeful book, indicating ways out of mythological cul-de-sacs. Erudite, but highly readable, this book will be definitely be on my reading lists for students.”

—Yasmin Khan, Associate Professor of History at Kellogg College, Oxford

“A tremendous book that deserves the widest possible readership … one of the most important books on the British Empire of the last Decade.”

—Race & Class

Insurgent Empire covers a vast geographical range (sub-Saharan and north Africa, Afghanistan and India, the Caribbean and the Americas) It begins it history from the 1857 uprising in North India (in which she largely bebunks the as taught in school idea of it being caused by "greased bullets" and proceeds to 

through to the ‘Mau Mau’ insurgency in Kenya a century later in the 1950s.The book contributes something altogether new and exciting to the existing critical literature in its suggestion that the ‘internal’ opposition to imperial policies and polities was from the outset a dialogical exercise, premised on an active learning from the anti-colonial movements. Gopal shows that the ideas of freedom, justice and common humanity, in the name of which the metropolitan dissenters against imperialism raised their standard, had themselves taken shape in the struggle against imperialism.”

She details the work of writers and philosophers residents in the colonies of the Empire and their influence on those in England opposed to colonial rule. The main stream idea in England was that by establishing colonies " natives", not capable of ruling themselves were being prepared for the day when the benevolent Empire gives them their freedom. (In India millions died during British rule and more after independence in 1947. I highly reccomend Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis for details.)

Here is a central tenant of the book:

"Confronting Gladstone’s argument that the mode of acquisition of India mattered less now than the ‘obligations … contracted towards the nearly 200 millions of people under our rule in India’, Congreve noted that the rebellion had made one thing abundantly clear in relation to the former’s claim that the ‘the condition of trustees’ between God and the Indians: this ‘trusteeship has not hitherto been recognised’.176 Rebellion is thus a forceful reminder that the colonized share the right to recognize and be recognized – but also, crucially, to refuse recognition. Given the importance of the act of ‘recognition’ to international law, to which Congreve explicitly alludes in his questioning of the British right to hold India down by force, his insistence on the right of Indians to recognize or refuse recognition of the colonial presence is of no small import: ‘Is there in the East Indies a different international law from what exists in England?’177 Thus, rather than call for reforms, ‘solutions which to me are incoherent and immoral’, his questioning of the British right to hold India down by force, his insistence on the right of Indians to recognize or refuse recognition of the colonial presence is of no small import: ‘Is there in the East Indies a different international law from what exists in England?’177 Thus, rather than call for reforms, ‘solutions which to me are incoherent and immoral’, he preferred to pose the question that he believed the revolt itself was posing of England: ‘Shall we set to work to re-conquer India?’178 It is the basis on which he offers his resounding negative that is most significant: the ruled did not wish to be ruled."

I will give her the last words 

"My hope is that this study, along with others, will be able to contribute towards what will have to be a sustained unlearning, a monumental process but a necessary one in a heterogeneous twenty-first-century Britain. In the wake of Brexit, the imperial myth, ‘whenever it is torn apart’, shows itself to rest on deep foundations and is repeatedly mended,confusion, catastrophes and disasters.’29 As the sociologist and cultural historian Paul Gilroy puts it, despite the ‘continued citation of the anti-Nazi war’, it is in fact colonial history that provides a better explanatory context for contemporary British culture and its preoccupations – race, identity, multiculturalism, patriotism, religion, social cohesion, migration – providing ‘a store of unlikely connections’ and shaping political life.30 Yet, he points out, that story remains ‘marginal and largely unacknowledged, surfacing only in the interests of nostalgia and melancholia’ in inflated imperial myths which then further entrench ‘deluded patterns of historical reflection and self- understanding"

Priyamvada Gopal is University Reader in Anglophone and Related Literatures in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge and Fellow Churchill College. She is the author of Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence and The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration

Mel Ulm