Contemporary History

"The period since 1939 saw more rapid and significant change than any other time in Welsh history. Wales developed a more assertive identity of its own and some of the apparatus of a nation state. Yet its economy floundered between boom and bust, its traditional communities were transformed and the Welsh language and other aspects of its distinctiveness were undermined by a globalizing world. Wales was also deeply divided by class, language, ethnicity, gender, religion and region. Its people grew wealthier, healthier and more educated but they were not always happier. This ground-breaking book examines the story of Wales since 1939, giving voice to ordinary people and the variety of experiences within the nation. It incorporates not just the traditional topics of Welsh history such as nationalism, language and mining, but also those things which mattered in people’s everyday lives. This is thus a history not just of a nation, but of its residents’ hopes and fears, their struggles and pleasures and their views of where they lived and the wider world.


“this is a truly magisterial study and analysis which deserves and will certainly achieve a wide and indeed varied readership” gwales.com (Welsh Books Council)

"Martin Johnes has written a fresh, insightful, and interesting study of Welsh history since 1939, telling the story of a small yet complicated nation in a fascinating and engaging way that will be of interest not only to Welsh historians, but to scholars in all areas of modern history. It provides another angle from which people can understand Wales as a nation, its place in the UK, and its significance concerning the debates about ‘Britishness’. Controversial and difficult issues facing Wales have been told in a balanced and measured way, with inflammatory issues, such as the miners’ strikes of the 1970s and 1980s (which have often provoked partisan assessments) being recounted dispassionately." Twentieth Century British History

“As a social history of a given corner of our world, this is a good book; scholarly, erudite, comprehensive and exciting. As an account of modern Wales, this is an important, perhaps even vital, document. Indeed, in writing it, Johnes has marked himself out as an historian fit to join the likes of Gwyn Alf Williams, Kenneth Morgan and John Davies as a great panoramic storyteller of the two western peninsulas resolutely known as Wales, but whose recent past is shaped by things that matter more.”  goodreads.com

“I’ve been reading Martin Johnes’s book Wales since 1939. And damn fine it is, too. Obviously it’s going to be your first port of call if you have any interest at all in modern Welsh history, but it’s also pretty essential if you’re serious about post-War Britain. … It’s a terrific piece of political and social history, epic in its scope, fascinating in its detail, and splendidly readable.”  Alwyn Turner (historian)

“Martin Johnes has written a meticulously informed account of our recent history, founded on prodigious data, and refreshingly enriched by the ‘evidence’ of poets and novelists.  It is a healthy corrective to idealised narratives of Welsh progress, although perhaps a milder one than he may have intended.” Agenda, 47 (Summer 2012). [Published by the Institute of Welsh Affairs]

“Probably the most complete, and objective, survey of modern Wales that I’ve had the pleasure to read.” Amazon.co.uk

"Modern Welsh history is not conveniently ‘boxed’ into categories in Wales since 1939, but instead its multifarious shades of grey of are articulated. Johnes has succeed in portraying the diversity of Wales in the second half of the 20th–century and has remedied the long-standing neglect of several topics under the microscope here. In many ways, this book does for Wales what Peter Clarke’s Hope and Glory or Dominic Sandbrook’s post-war histories do for Britain: providing an approachable history that does not forget its academic roots." Reviews in History

For further information, a full outline of the book and supporting materials please visit http://www.hanescymru.com .""

W Europie mamy trzy rodzaje państw: państwa członkowskie Unii Europejskiej, państwa aspirujące do członkowstwa  w Unii Europejskiej oraz… Bośnię i Hercegowinę (BiH). Casus BiH jest na tyle specyficzny, że „zwykła” analiza przebiegu procesu akcesyjnego i problemów z nim związanych pokazywać będzie tylko część rzeczywistego porządku rzeczy w tej byłej jugosłowiańskiej republice. Proces akcesyjny bowiem przeplatany jest problemami natury fundamentalnej – postępującej erozji instytucji państwa, ale przede wszystkim, braku konsensusu Serbów, Chorwatów i muzułmanów bośniackich – Boszniaków,  w sprawie samego istnienia państwa. Celem pracy będzie zatem próba pokazania szeregu czynników stanowiących o specyfice państwa BiH - czynników wpływających na  jej obecny instytucjonalny iegzystencjalny kryzys, ipso facto, na przebieg procesu integracji z Unią Europejską.

Maiella Brigade Operations activity in June-September 1944. Maiella Brigade was a very strange partisan unit in the Italy Campaign of 1944-1945 because recruited mostly in Abruzzo region the partisan unit dressed military uniform and used an Italian flag patch to fight together with Polish and Anglo-American units along the Italian front from Abruzzo till the end of operations in april-may 1945. The essay is based on a document presented by the Polish contingent to the Italian Army to represent what the Brigade did fighting together with Anders personnel.

Le PSU fait partie de l’histoire de l’écologie politique, plus qu’aucun autre parti de gauche. Pour mieux comprendre la relation entre le PSU et l’écologie, cet article étudie tout d'abord l’intégration des questions environnementales puis d’une approche écologiste dans l’idéologie du PSU, ensuite le rôle et l’implication du PSU dans les luttes écologistes, et enfin les réseaux et trajectoires entre le PSU et la mouvance écologiste proprement dite. Il apparait clairement qu'on peut considérer le PSU comme un laboratoire de l'écologie politique, aussi bien au niveau idéologique qu'au niveau des trajectoires militantes.

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

""The Bee Kingdom is a family memoir in progress that will be accompanied by an online visual archive focusing on the life of my maternal grandfather: scientist, beekeeper and Egyptian Romantic poet Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955). Abushady was an instrumental figure, both as a poet and as publisher and founder of the Modernist literary group “Apollo” and its eponymous journal that became the seminal organ of the Romantic poets in the Modern Arabic poetry movement in Egypt’s “Old Regime” (ca. 1920s-40s). He was also a physician and bacteriologist who is still known in certain circles for having definitively revolutionized beekeeping at an international scale. His work started in England, where he attended medical school, and later in Egypt where he returned in 1922 and raised a family. In addition to inventing the first standardized, aluminum honeycomb, which he patented in 1919, Abushady founded, designed, edited and published several early important bee research journals: The Bee World in England, and later The Bee Kingdom in Cairo. Contributors were international and ranged from local bee farmers to renowned entomologists; the latter journal was bilingual English and Arabic. Abushady’s aim in bee husbandry, as in literature, was ecological and cultural richness through selection, experimentation and hybridity.
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Twentieth-century pop culture is a well established field of academic research in the fields of cultural studies, fine arts, literature and musicology. However, scholars of German history have paid scant attention to pop culture. This paper therefore intends to explore the field of pop culture from a historical perspective and to introduce a specific concept of pop culture from a historical perspective – in dialogue with, but distinctively different from, other disciplinary approaches.