Name: Surinderpal Singh Rai by Saxby Street
Duration: 21 min 26 s
Description: Surinderpal Singh Rai talks about the effect of WW1 on his family. Grandfather's brother fighting in WW1, getting killed, pension, village in Punjab, father coming to Leicester, early days here, growth of Gurdwara and hospitality.

A lecture by Professor Guoqi Xu (Hong Kong University). Asia and the First World War.

Guoqi Xu is currently Professor of History at the University of Hong Kong, China. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University and is one of the world’s most prominent scholars in the fields of modern China and international history. Professor Xu was a fellow at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University in 2008-09 and taught from 1999-2009 at Kalamazoo College (USA) as the Wen Chao Chen Chair of History and East Asian Affairs. 

Download

Gouqi Xu - Asia and the First World War

Today marks the centenary of the outbreak of World War One and we wanted to share the stories we’ve come to know and love by our authors, about this momentous occasion in history.  From accounts by soldiers who lived in the trenches to fictional novels recreating the lives of people during that time, we’ll take you back a hundred years to give you a snapshot of those four long years at war.

The Penguin Podcast: Writing The First World War feat. Jeremy Paxman, Robert Graves and Pat Barker

Statements WeberWorldCafé "Narrating the First World War"

London’s trade unions and the Great War

From the autumn of 1914 London’s workers were thrust into an unprecedented boom economy that changed a chronic labour surplus in the capital into acute and pressing labour shortages. Full employment revolutionised living standards, despite wage rates generally lagging behind the rise in food and other prices. A united front between government and trade union leaders over British war aims co-opted trade unionists into recruitment campaigns while increasing the unions’ influence on industrial and social policy under wartime conditions. All this led to a rapid rise in union membership that continued to a peak in 1920. The constructive use of trade union influence could be seen throughout the many new arms of state administration like military tribunals and local food and pension committees; but there were problems in responding to many workers’ increasingly vocal demands for wage rises at a time of high inflation; and there are abuses of power in some unions’ hostility to women works, to antiwar campaigners, and to the recruitment of ‘coloured’ labour.

Professor Jerry White teaches history at Birkbeck and is an acclaimed social historian of modern London. His latest book is Zeppelin Nights. London in the First World War (Bodley Head 2014).

Jerry White - Trade unions and the First World War

Women, socialism, unionism and protest

Women’s trade union membership grew during the First World War, as women joined the expanding war industries, especially munitions. They became much more visible as war workers were photographed and celebrated to encourage employers and workers alike to sign up. New styles of protest built on pre-war expansion: working women demonstrated more in London streets.  Trade unionism for women, like women’s work, was still controversial.  Campaigners Mary Macarthur, Leader of the National Federation of Women Workers and Sylvia Pankhurst, of the East London Federation of Suffragettes, used the mass media but disagreed over their relationship to skilled men’s trade unions and to state power and whether the vote would improve women’s lives.  Equal pay was popular with workers but was rarely paid; equal pensions and the right to work, which were less popular, were drowned out by the needs of returning soldiers.

Dr Deborah Thom teaches history at Robinson College, Cambridge and is author of Nice Girls and Rude Girls, women workers and the First World War (IB Tauris 1998).

Deborah Thom - Trade unions and the First World War

The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation. Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. He reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent. But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis of the military conflict. With unequalled authority and insight, he recreates the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend--Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli among them--and sheds new light on the strategies and tactics employed, particularly the contributions of geography and technology. No less central to Keegan's account is the human aspect. He acquaints us with the thoughts of the intriguing personalities who oversaw the tragically unnecessary catastrophe--from heads of state like Russia's hapless tsar, Nicholas II, to renowned warmakers such as Haig, Hindenburg and Joffre. But Keegan reserves his most affecting personal sympathy for those whose individual efforts history has not recorded--&quot;the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable.&quot; By the end of the war, three great empires--the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman--had collapsed. But as Keegan shows, the devastation ex-tended over the entirety of Europe, and still profoundly informs the politics and culture of the continent today. His brilliant, panoramic account of this vast and terrible conflict is destined to take its place among the classics of world history. With 24 pages of photographs, 2 endpaper maps, and 15 maps in text Available for purchase at: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0739312499?tag=pgus-20">Amazon - Audiobook (CD format)</a><a href="http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnInquiry.asp?ISBSRC=Y&ISBN=9780739312490&cm_mmc=Random%20House-_The+First+World+War-CD-1-9780739312490-_-The+First+World+War-CD-1-9780739312490-_-The+First+World+War">Barnes & Noble - Audiobook (CD format)</a><a href="http://www.tkqlhce.com/click-2665379-10876509?SID=The+First+World+War-CD-1-9780739312490&url=http://www.booksamillion.com/p/The+First+World+War/John+Keegan/9780739312490">Books A Million - Audiobook (CD format)</a><a href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780739312490?aff=PenguinGroupUS">IndieBound - Audiobook (CD format)</a><a href="http://www.powells.com/biblio/9780739312490?utm_source=randomhouse&utm_campaign=randomhouse&utm_content=The+First+World+War-CD-1-9780739312490">Powell's - Audiobook (CD format)</a><a href="http://linksynergy.walmart.com/fs-bin/click?id=VD9*lkiWNd8&subid=&offerid=183959.1&type=10&tmpid=273&u1=The+First+World+War-CD-1-9780739312490&RD_PARM1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.walmart.com%2Fsearch%2Fsearch-ng.do%3F&RD_PARM2=search_query%3D9780739312490%2526ic%3D16_0%2526Find%3DFind%2526search_constraint%3D3920">Walmart - Audiobook (CD format)</a>

The First World War by John Keegan, read by Simon Prebble

Surinderpal Singh Rai talks about the effect of WW1 on his family. Grandfather's brother fighting in WW1, getting killed, pension, village in Punjab, father coming to Leicester, early days here, growth of Gurdwara and hospitality.

Surinderpal Singh Rai

Speaker(s): Professor Dominic Lieven | Dominic Lieven asks whether new trends in German and English language scholarship together with the opening of the Russian archives require a fundamental re-thinking of Russia’s role in the outbreak of the First World War. Dominic Lieven is senior research fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Tue, 5 Feb 2013 18:30:00 GMT

Russia And The First World War: time to think again? [Audio]

'How Saxby Street Got Its Name' is a history project about the effects of the First World War on the people who live in the Highfields area of Leicester.

Surinderpal Singh Rai

Saxby Street

Related tracks