Alan Kramer

Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (The Making of the Modern World)

Dynamic of Destruction

The Crow Tree is the first in the Magical Midland Forest series of contemporary novels for young adult readers. It's set in a mysterious forest with talking animals and a secret passage to another time and in a tense and fractured American town next door. The story is told by a ninth grader named Marcus. He and his marching band friends usually stay to themselves. But with loggers clear-cutting the forest, Marcus is losing his only place of refuge from his parents' divorce and his struggles at school. Now a new virus has appeared, and the few Black students at Midland High are being blamed for it. Marcus and his friends join forces with a pair of talking crows and a stranger from another time to try to save their friends, the forest, and the school. A kind of cross between Stand by Me (Stephen King) and Lord of the Flies, this coming-of-age novel is set against life in America today--bullying, racial tensions, rising heat, and polarized adults--seen through the eyes of our young narrator.

Book 1 in the Magical Midland Forest Series

The Crow Tree

Ruth Romer

The wizard of fairy-tale kingdom Wherever has accidentally turned the king into a toad! To break the spell the prince and queen must solve a geometry riddle involving such shapes as squares circles triangles cones and octagons found in the real world.

The Wizard of Wherever

Miguel Alonso

Javier Rodrigo

This groundbreaking book explores the interpretative potential and analytical capacity of the concept ‘fascist warfare’. Was there a specific type of war waged by fascist states? The concept encompasses not only the practice of violence at the front, but also war culture, the relationship between war and the fascist project, and the construction of the national community. Starting with the legacy of the First World War and using a transnational approach, this collection presents case studies of fascist regimes at war, spanning Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, Croatia, and Imperial Japan. Themes include the idea of rapid warfare as a symbol of fascism, total war, the role of modern technology, the transfer of war cultures between regimes, anti-partisan warfare as a key feature, and the contingent nature and limits of fascist warfare.

Aggression, Occupation, Annihilation

Fascist Warfare, 1922–1945

Perform this script about the lives of Ramses the Great and Queen Nefertari.

Ramses and Nefertari

John Horne

Is it true that the German army, invading Belgium and France in August 1914, perpetrated brutal atrocities? Or are accounts of the deaths of thousands of unarmed civilians mere fabrications constructed by fanatically anti-German Allied propagandists? Based on research in the archives of Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy, this pathbreaking book uncovers the truth of the events of autumn 1914 and explains how the politics of propaganda and memory have shaped radically different versions of that truth. John Horne and Alan Kramer mine military reports, official and private records, witness evidence, and war diaries to document the crimes that scholars have long denied: a campaign of brutality that led to the deaths of some 6500 Belgian and French civilians. Contemporary German accounts insisted that the civilians were guerrillas, executed for illegal resistance. In reality this claim originated in a vast collective delusion on the part of German soldiers. The authors establish how this myth originated and operated, and how opposed Allied and German views of events were used in the propaganda war. They trace the memory and forgetting of the atrocities on both sides up to and beyond World War II. Meticulously researched and convincingly argued, this book reopens a painful chapter in European history while contributing to broader debates about myth, propaganda, memory, war crimes, and the nature of the First World War.

A History of Denial

German Atrocities, 1914

On 26 August 1914 the world-famous university library in the Belgian town of Louvain was looted and destroyed by German troops. The international community reacted in horror - 'Holocaust at Louvain' proclaimed the Daily Mail - and the behaviour of the Germans at Louvain came to be seen as the beginning of a different style of war, without the rules that had governed military conflict up to that point - a more total war, in which enemy civilians and their entire culture were now 'legitimate' targets. Yet the destruction at Louvain was simply one symbolic moment in a wider wave of cultural destruction and mass killing that swept Europe in the era of the First World War. Using a wide range of examples and eye-witness accounts from across Europe at this time, award-winning historian Alan Kramer paints a picture of an entire continent plunging into a chilling new world of mass mobilization, total warfare, and the celebration of nationalist or ethnic violence - often directed expressly at the enemy's civilian population.

Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War

Sold only in sets of 6 copies each of 1 Reader's Theater Script with Teacher Guide. This Script contains 13 parts.

Alan Kramer

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