Uncovers how a material object - the civilian gas mask - can reveal the power and limits of the modern state facing total war.

The First World War introduced the widespread use of lethal chemical weapons. In its aftermath, the British government, like that of many states, had to prepare civilians to confront such weapons in a future war. Over the course of the interwar period, it developed individual anti-gas protection as a cornerstone of civil defence. Susan R. Grayzel traces the fascinating history of one object – the civilian gas mask – through the years 1915–1945 and, in so doing, reveals the reach of modern, total war and the limits of the state trying to safeguard civilian life in an extensive empire. Drawing on records from Britain's Colonial, Foreign, War and Home Offices and other archives alongside newspapers, journals, personal accounts and cultural sources, she connects the histories of the First and Second World Wars, combatants and civilians, men and women, metropole and colony, illuminating how new technologies of warfare shaped culture, politics, and society.

Profiles the man responsible for inventing the traffic light and gas mask, both very important elements for safety.

Although the Blitz has come to symbolize the experience of civilians under attack, Germany first launched air raids on Britain at the end of 1914 and continued them during the First World War. With the advent of air warfare, civilians far removed from traditional battle zones became a direct target of war rather than a group shielded from its impact. This is a study of how British civilians experienced and came to terms with aerial warfare during the First and Second World Wars. Memories of the World War I bombings shaped British responses to the various real and imagined war threats of the 1920s and 1930s, including the bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War and, ultimately, the Blitz itself. The processes by which different constituent bodies of the British nation responded to the arrival of air power reveal the particular role that gender played in defining civilian participation in modern war.

With more than 650 photographs, this book provides in depth information and a reference guide for identifying 53 common American military gas masks and it also includes information about another 43 uncommon military, special purpose and civilian American gas masks. The book is easily usable by a novice military collector that knows little or nothing about American military gas masks and at the same time, provides a useful quick reference book for the advanced collector. It covers American gas masks and accessories used during the Great War of 1917-1918 to the modern day M50 series Joint Service General Purpose Masks. Additional collector information is included about the quantities of masks manufactured for or procured by the United States military, manufacturing date markings on masks, fakes and reproductions, items issued with gas masks, hints for easy gas mask identification and historical information relating to collecting of American military gas masks.

In the 1960s during the Vietnam War, US forces used a chemical substance called napalm to burn away the jungle in search of enemy soldiers. But when napalm came in contact with human skin, it caused horrific injuries. Its use in war became highly controversial. Chemistry has long been at the heart of warfare. The invention of gunpowder ninth-century China led to the development of guns, grenades, and other explosives. In World War I chemists created deadly poison gas—as well as gas masks to protect soldiers from enemy gas. From Greek fire to bulletproof vests, learn how chemistry has changed how wars are fought.

Unruly Spirits connects the study of séances, telepathy, telekinesis, materializations, and other parapsychic phenomena in France during the age of Sigmund Freud to an epistemological crisis that would eventually yield the French adoption of psychoanalysis. Skillfully navigating experiments conducted by nineteenth-century French psychical researchers and the wide-ranging debates that surrounded their work, M. Brady Brower situates the institutional development of psychical research at the intersection of popular faith and the emergent discipline of psychology. Brower shows how spiritualist mediums were ignored by French academic scientists for nearly three decades. Only after the ideologues of the Third Republic turned to science to address what they took to be the excess of popular democracy would the marvels of mediumism begin to emerge as legitimate objects of scientific inquiry. Taken up by the most prominent physicists, physiologists, and psychologists of the last decades of the nineteenth century, psychical research would eventually stall in the 1920s as researchers struggled to come to terms with interpersonal phenomena (such as trust and good faith) that could not be measured within the framework of their experimental methods. In characterizing psychical research as something other than a mere echo of popular spirituality or an anomaly among the sciences, Brower argues that the questions surrounding mediums served to sustain the scientific project by forestalling the establishment of a closed and complete system of knowledge. By acknowledging persistent doubt about the intentions of its participants, psychical research would result in the realization of a subjectivity that was essentially indeterminate and would thus clear the way for the French reception of psychoanalysis and the Freudian unconscious and its more comprehensive account of subjective uncertainty.

Penwoman is the classic novel about the Swedish women's suffrage movement. Originally published in 1910, this was Elin Wägner's second novel. Having begun her career as a journalist, she went on to become one of Sweden's leading writers, her prolific output developing radical feminist and feminist-pacifist tendencies. The novel, whose central character is a young female journalist, offers exceptional insights into the dedicated work and strong sense of sisterhood uniting a group of women campaigning for suffrage. But it also explores a range of other issues affecting the situation of women in Sweden at the time, from the role of paid work to matters of morality, eroticism and love. The refreshingly disrespectful and witty style has helped make the novel one of Wägner's most enduringly popular.