Name: Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission: Bulgaria 1944
Price: 90.95 EUR
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Author: E. P. Thompson
ISBN: 9780804728966

portada Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission: Bulgaria 1944

Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission: Bulgaria 1944

Type

Physical Book

Author

E. P. Thompson

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Year

1997

Language

English

Pages

120

Format

Hardcover

ISBN13

9780804728966

Edition No.

Synopsis "Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission: Bulgaria 1944 "

E. P. Thompson (1924-1993) was one of the preeminent British historians of the second half of the twentieth century; his The Making of the English Working Class (1964) is arguably the most influential work of British history published during that period. In the present work, originally presented as a set of lectures at Stanford University, Thompson returned to a question that had been on his mind since the war years, the circumstances surrounding the death of his older brother Frank as a British Liaison Officer with the Bulgarian partisans in 1944.Though these events, Thompson admitted, constituted only a historical footnote, they afforded him an opportunity to engage larger intellectual and political matters that we now associate with the early beginnings of the Cold War and to illustrate certain elements of historical method. Thompson was here concerned not so much with what is fact and what is interpretation as with "the activities of anti-historians, how sensitive evidence is destroyed or screened, how myths originate, how historical anecdote may simply be a code for ideology, how the reasons of state are eternally at war with historical knowledge."Early in 1944, a British Special Operations mission was parachuted into Serbia to make contact with a group of Bulgarian partisans operating in the area. Their aim was to arrange air drops of supplies for the partisans and to assist them in extending guerrilla warfare across the frontier into Bulgaria itself. Frank Thompson was head of the British mission when it entered Bulgaria with the partisan forces. By the end of May, the entire group had been killed or captured. After a show trial, Frank (though a British officer in uniform) was executed by a firing squad together with the remaining leaders of the partisans and the villagers who had aided them.The book shows how the status of the actors in this drama―and the respect accorded to them in the decades that followed―varied with changes in the political climate of Europe and the world. It does not simply examine the events themselves, although these are clarified, but also analyzes the politics that lay behind the events, notably the conflicting interests of the "western" and "eastern" allies in supporting the partisans and the British liaison mission.

E. P. Thompson

(Author)

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E. P. Thompson, full name (seldom used) Edward Palmer Thompson (1924-1993). British historian and intellectual. He decisively influenced British Marxist thought, distinguishing it from European Marxism and giving it a unique character, within what is known as humanist socialism. Born in Oxford to Methodist missionary parents. Fought in World War II, in a tank company in Italy. Studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Politically committed to the left and pacifism, in 1946 he formed the Communist Party Historians Group or Cambridge Group, with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawn, Rodney Hilton, Dona Torr, and others. In 1948 he married Dorothy Towers, also a historian of the same trend. The group was centered around the journal Past and Present from 1952, and survived his departure from the Communist Party (1956, following the Soviet invasion of Hungary). Played a key role in the early days of the movement known as the New Left in the late 1950s. He was noted for his critical stance from the left against the Labour governments of 1964-1970 and 1974-1979. During the 1980s he led the movement of intellectuals against nuclear weapons in Europe. He intervened in opening dialogue between the Western European pacifist movement and dissidents from Eastern Europe dominated by the Soviet Union, for which he was accused by the latter of acting in the service of American imperialism. Professor at various universities in England and the United States, his loud departure from the University of Warwick in protest against its commercialization (which he recounts in his book Warwick University Limited, 1971) was notable. He attacked the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and his British followers from the New Left Review (a magazine and movement from which Thompson had distanced himself from its second period, which included elements close to Trotskyism). This episode sparked a juicy historiographical debate, with cross-contributions between himself (The Poverty of Theory, 1978) and New Left, with Perry Anderson at the forefront (Discussions/arguments within English Marxism, playing with the word Arguments). His historiographical production focuses on social history, especially on the working-class movement of industrial revolution England. Prolific essayist and columnist, he also published influential biographies of William Morris and William Blake. His essential work is The Making of the English Working Class (1963), where he revises the traditional Marxist interpretation from a non-dogmatic historical materialism.

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