Beyond Glory: Civilians, Combatants, and Society During the Battle of Shanghai
Abstract The 1932 Sino-Japanese conflict in Shanghai was the first example of a modern war waged in a large city between two heavily equipped armies. It was also the first urban conflict during which massive destruction, especially aerial bombing, ensued with utmost disregard for the consequences to civilians. This paper looks at the damage and losses the two contending armies suffered. The group of Chinese armies involved in the conflict was not prepared either to handle the consequences of using highly lethal weapons or to provide the appropriate level of medical assistance to their soldiers involved. The result was a catastrophic level of casualties. The battle for Shanghai announced the frightening massive waves of destruction that World War II would unleash on European and Japanese cities.
A Neighbourhood under Storm Zhabei and Shanghai Wars
War was a major aspect of Shanghai history in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet, because of the particular political and territorial divisions that segmented the city, war struck only in Chinese-administered areas. In this paper, I examine the fate of the Zhabei district, a booming industrious area that came under fire on three successive occasions. Whereas Zhabei could be construed as a success story—a rag-to-riches, swamp-to-urbanity trajectory—the three instances of military conflict had an increasingly devastating impact, from shaking, to stifling, to finally erase Zhabei from the urban landscape. This area of Shanghai experienced the first large-scale modern warfare in an urban setting. The 1927 skirmish established the pattern in which the civilian population came to be exposed to extreme forms of violence, was turned overnight into a refugee population, and lost all its goods and properties to bombing and fires.
XV. Notes on the Geological Survey Memoir—“The Geology of the Glasgow District.”
Introductory. During the late summer the Geological Survey issued a map of the Glasgow district which will prove a boon not only to the members of this Society, but also to the increasing number of those who, although not members, still take an interest in geology as a branch of liberal education. The present map differs from its predecessors in that it is colour-printed, and the printing and general details are brought out more clearly than was possible in the hand-coloured maps. This fact has been taken advantage of to add an enormous amount of detail, which is often of such a minute character that after study one feels inclined to wish that he were gifted with microscopic eyes or that the map had been drawn to a larger scale. Not the least of its benefits is the low price at which it is sold (2s. on paper, and 3s. on cloth), the price of the previous maps having lately become prohibitive (19s. 3d. on paper). It will be observed that the long way of the map is from north to south. This has doubtless been adopted for good and sufficient reasons, if we only knew them; but I, at least, would have preferred that the long way should have been east and west, with Glasgow in the centre. The map is accompanied by an extensive memoir of the geology of the district, and the more one reads of it the more one is impressed with the This 250-word extract was created in the absence of an abstract