Search results for ""Author Will Fowler""

When Germany occupied the originally ‘demilitarised’ Channel Islands in 1940, Hitler ordered the area to be staunchly fortified with colossal permanent structures like Battery Moltke on Jersey. As it was the only piece of the British Isles in Nazi control, he was determined that the islands should remain German forever. Churchill was equally obsessed, urging numerous commando raids and harebrained schemes for the invasion and liberation of the islands. But when France was freed in 1944, the Channel Islands were completely bypassed. German troops were cut off from their supplies and the island population began to starve. Occupied for almost the entire war, these quintessentially English islands serve as a fascinating microcosm of what Britain might have been like under Nazi rule. With one German soldier to every three islanders, resistance had to remain at a low level: possession of a radio merited a prison sentence. The Last Raid is an atmospheric account of life under German occupation, as well as the political manoeuvring behind the scenes. With the first detailed account in English of the Granville Raid, a unique German commando operation, Will Fowler combines the social experience of war with the military to form a fascinating chronicle of the fight for the Channel Islands during the Second World War.

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Unlike wars between nations, wherein the population generally comes together to defend its borders and is united by a common national goal, civil wars tear countries apart, divide families, and turn neighbors against each other. Civil wars are a form of self-harm in which a country’s people seek redemption through self-destruction, punishing or severing those parts that are seen to have made the nation ill. And yet civil wars—with their characteristically appalling violence—remain chillingly common, defying the notion that they are somehow an aberration. In The Grammar of Civil War Will Fowler examines the origin, process, and outcome of civil war. Using the Mexican Civil War of 1857–61 (or the War of the Reform, the political and military conflict that erupted between the competing liberal and conservative visions of Mexico’s future), Fowler seeks to understand how civil wars come about and, when they do, how they unfold and why. By outlining the grammatical principles that underpin a new framework for the study of civil war, Fowler stresses what is essential for one to take place and explains how, once it has erupted, it can be expected to develop and end, according to the syntax, morphology, and meanings that characterize and help understand the grammar of civil war generally.

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Behind every pronunciamiento, a formal list of grievances designed to spark political change in nineteenth-century Mexico, was a disgruntled individual, rebel, or pronunciado. Initially a role undertaken by soldiers, a pronunciado rallied military communities to petition for local, regional, and even national interests. As the popularity of these petitions grew, however, they evolved from a military-led practice to one endorsed and engaged by civilians, priests, indigenous communities, and politicians. The second in a series of books exploring the phenomenon of the pronunciamiento, this volume examines case studies of individual and collective pronunciados in regions across Mexico. Top scholars examine the motivations of individual pronunciados and the reasons they succeeded or failed; why garrisons, town councils, and communities adopted the pronunciamiento as a political tool and form of representation and used it to address local and national grievances; and whether institutions upheld corporate aims in endorsing, supporting, or launching pronunciamientos. The essays provide a better understanding of the rebel leaders behind these public acts of defiance and reveal how an insurrectionary repertoire became part of a national political culture.

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The pronunciamiento, a formal list of grievances designed to spark political change in nineteenth-century Mexico, was a problematic yet necessary practice. Although pronunciamientos rarely achieved the goals for which they were undertaken and sometimes resulted in armed rebellion, they were nonetheless both celebrated and commemorated, and the perceptions and representations of pronunciamientos themselves reflected the Mexican people’s response to these “revolutions.”The third in a series of books examining the pronunciamiento, this collection addresses the complicated legacy of pronunciamientos and their place in Mexican political culture. The essays explore the sacralization and legitimization of these revolts and of their leaders in the nation’s history and consider why these celebrations proved ultimately ineffective in consecrating the pronunciamiento as a force for good, rather than one motivated by desires for power, promotion, and plunder. Celebrating Insurrection offers readers interpretations of acts of celebration and commemoration that explain the uneasy adoption of pronunciamientos as Mexico’s preferred means of effecting political change during this turbulent period in the nation’s history.

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In mid-nineteenth-century Mexico, garrisons, town councils, state legislatures, and an array of political actors, groups, and communities began aggressively petitioning the government at both local and national levels to address their grievances. Often viewed as a revolt or a coup d’état, these pronunciamientos were actually a complex form of insurrectionary action that relied first on the proclamation and circulation of a plan that listed the petitioners’ demands and then on endorsement by copycat pronunciamientos that forced the authorities, be they national or regional, to the negotiating table. In Independent Mexico, Will Fowler provides a comprehensive overview of the pronunciamiento practice following the Plan of Iguala. This fourth and final installment in, and culmination of, a larger exploration of the pronunciamiento highlights the extent to which this model of political contestation evolved. The result of more than three decades of pronunciamiento politics was the bloody Civil War of the Reforma (1858–60) and the ensuing French Intervention (1862–67). Given the frequency and importance of the pronunciamiento, this book is also a concise political history of independent Mexico.

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