Background
Francis, Martin was born on April 19, 1964 in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. Son of Brian and Barbara Francis.
(Between 1939 and 1945, the British public was spellbound ...)
Between 1939 and 1945, the British public was spellbound by the martial endeavours and dashing style of the young men of the RAF, especially those with silvery fabric wings sewn above the breast pocket of their glamorous slate-blue uniform. Martin Francis provides the first scholarly study of the place of 'the flyer' in British culture during the Second World War. Examining the lives of RAF personnel, and their popular representation in literary and cinematic texts, he illuminates broader issues of gender, social class, national and racial identities, emotional life, and the creation of a national myth in twentieth-century Britain. In particular, Francis argues that the flyer's relationship to fear, aggression, loss of his comrades, bodily dismemberment, and psychological breakdown reveals broader ambiguities surrounding the dominant understandings of masculinity in the middle decades of the century. Despite his star appeal, cultural representations of the flyer encompassed both the gentle, chivalrous warrior and the uncompromising agent of destruction. Paying particular attention to the romantic universe of wartime aircrew, Francis reveals the extraordinary contrasts of their daily lives: dicing with death in the sky one moment, before sitting down to lunch with wives and children in the next. Male and female experiences during the war were not polarized and antithetical, but were complementary and interrelated, a conclusion which has implications for the history of gender in modern Britain that reach well beyond either the specialized military culture of the wartime RAF or the chronological parameters of the Second World War.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199602298/?tag=2022091-20
(This book provides the first sustained examination of the...)
This book provides the first sustained examination of the relationship between socialist ideas and the policies of the 1945-51 Labour government. It has frequently been assumed that Labour was essentially opportunist, or that it embraced a cross-party consensus dictated by Keynes and Beveridge. By contrast, this study insists that Labour ministers applied specifically socialist precepts to the exercise of power. Among the areas of policy considered are economic planning, public ownership, social services, profits and taxation, and attitudes towards gender roles and the family. By restoring ideology to a central place in postwar policy-making, it is possible to achieve not merely a much fuller understanding of Labour's most successful administration, but also of the prehistory of the party's more recent issues to redefine its democratic socialist identity.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0719048338/?tag=2022091-20
Francis, Martin was born on April 19, 1964 in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. Son of Brian and Barbara Francis.
Bachelor in Modern History with honors, University Manchester, England, 1985. Doctor of Philosophy in Modern History, University Oxford, England, 1993.
Lecturer history and politics Corpus Christi College University Oxford, 1991—1993. Lecturer history University Wales, Aberystwyth, 1993—1996. Fulbright-Robertson visiting professor Westminster College, Fulton, Missouri, 1996—1997.
Lecturer history Royal Holloway, University London, 1997—2003. Henry R. Winkler associate professor history University Cincinnati, since 2003.
(Between 1939 and 1945, the British public was spellbound ...)
(This book provides the first sustained examination of the...)
Fellow: Royal History Society.
Married Brenda Assael, December 18, 2005.