Sometimes album sleeves reveal little about the music. Instead they illuminate the society it came from, exposing unexpected stories of people, art forms and struggles.
Des van Rooyen, cooperative governance minister and new treasurer-general of the MK Military Veterans Association.
eNCA.com
MK, the army of the then banned ANC, electrified millions of oppressed people to rise against the apartheid regime. Today, its veterans are being used in factional battles within the ruling party.
Rand Paul’s amendment is rooted in the Constitution.
REUTERS/Brian Frank
Congress is debating the power of government to use a military draft. An Ole Miss historian explains how this power is rooted in our nation’s founding document.
Thinking about Australia’s war experience in comparison with others will soften some of the hyperbole surrounding Anzac.
AAP/Jake Sims
Armistice Day provides a moment to reflect on Australia’s self-identity in comparison to other nations that experienced the first world war and commemorate it to this day.
SA Defence Force conscripts return to their base at Ruacana, northern Namibia, in 1988.
John Liebenberg
The impact that the system of conscription had on the roughly 600,000 white men who became both pawns and agents of the apartheid state has seldom been publicly acknowledged.
The conscription ballot was conducted via a lottery, which was supposed to be unbiased towards any particular date.
Jeremy Brooks/Flickr
A little mathematics reveals whether the government really did ‘play god’ with the Vietnam draft, as suggested by former deputy Prime Minister Tim Fisher.
Activists trying to bring attention to the issue of rape in war were arrested for protesting at Anzac Day services in the 1980s.
ACT Heritage Library
Protests on Anzac Day, rather than being ‘utterly alien to Australians’, have a long tradition and embody the democratic right to dissent for which the troops fought.
Protesters attend a huge anti-conscription rally at Yarra Bank in Melbourne, 1916.
National Library of Australia, n6487142
The democratic freedoms Australians hold dear today – freedom of the press, assembly and speech – were won on home soil by courageous women and men who sacrificed much, but rarely recognised for it.
August 1914: London volunteers await their pay at St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
On the first day of the war in 1914, British newspapers published appeals for young men to join the colours, and to fight against Germany. Following the advice of the new Secretary for War, Lord Kitchener…