Civil War heritage as American diplomacy, 1957–1965

This paper explores the role of Civil War heritage in U.S. public diplomacy during the Cold War era. Especially during the celebration of the Civil War’s centennial, between 1961 and 1965, the Americans endeavoured to harness the conflict’s heritage to promote U.S. interests in Europe. How they intended to do this is demonstrated primarily through an examination of Colonel Sidney Morgan’s mission to Europe to find how the commemoration of the Civil War could be used for public diplomacy. Additionally, by exploring how Civil War heritage was spread and used in the British public sphere, the paper examines and underlines the key role saved to unofficial cultural agents, such as Civil War re-enactment clubs and private people, in heritage diplomacy. The focus on unofficial agents and networks enable this study to show how heritage diplomacy works at the un-institutionalised level and to explore the interaction between the official and unofficial level in heritage diplomacy. The historical perspective and methodology cast new light on the use of history, historical memory and heritage for diplomatic ends and introduces both historians and heritage scholars with new avenues to explore, such as the role of memory and historical consciousness in shaping international relations.     

美国史学界关于内战记忆研究述评

书写内战史有助于美国人内战记忆的形成,记忆的调整又推动着内战叙事的演变。通过南部老兵与妇女的努力,“失去的事业”从一种地方记忆上升为民族记忆。从20世纪开始,这种南部记忆主导了美国史学界对内战史的书写。直到越战后期,学界才从社会文化与政治需要的角度剖析“失去的事业”记忆的兴起及其影响,其研究对象主要为群体记忆、英雄记忆,以战场旧址、军事公墓及其纪念碑为中心的有形记忆场。因服务于国家重聚与民族和解之需,存在多种面相的“联邦事业”记忆被美国人长时期遗忘。直到20世纪80年代末,为突出黑人对美国历史的贡献,学界开始重新评析这一强调联邦统一与解放黑人的内战记忆。总之,美国学界对内战记忆的探究总体遵循“失去的事业”与“联邦事业”这两种叙事路径,但其研究并未完全摆脱意识形态的干扰。从21世纪开始,内战记忆史的研究逐步走向了多元社会化的发展方向。     

Confronting a history of war loss in a Spanish family archive

The article discusses how relatives of left-wing Republicans killed and buried in mass graves by Francoist groups during the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) recompose the stories of violent death of their ancestors in connection to documentary evidence that emerges during the search for their human remains. Mass grave searches have taken place in the midst of a process of historical investigation that has brought families, historians, activists and archaeologists together in order to document and seek official recognition for these extrajudicial executions. In so doing, they have also prompted the circulation of personal papers and official Francoist files that bear poignant information about the victims. Both sets of documents converge in the family archive, eliciting different re-readings and acts of memory. The article considers how familial interactions with these material sources attempt to grasp and recreate a history of loss marked by rupture and filled with absences. It also explores how such historical and familial uncertainties marks the experience of disappearance in the Spanish context.     

Beyond the carrot and stick: the political economy of US military aid to China, 1945–1951

By applying the rent-seeking assumption and sifting through both the archival materials and published historical documents, this article revisits the US–China relationship during the Chinese Civil War (1946–1949) and the early Cold War period, when the United States was caught in the conundrum of aiding the Chinese Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek. As military aid is usually regarded as an important representation of broader economic aid, this research mainly concentrates on the US military assistance to postwar Nationalist China. This topic is important, as it signifies a direct American involvement in the Chinese Civil War, when the influence of the United States in postwar world politics was overwhelmingly predominant. As a result, postwar Chinese history might be reevaluated in a broader global postwar context. In addition, this article also tells the story about rent-seeking behaviors in the complicated US–China military relations during the early Cold War period at both micro and macro levels. When it came to US military assistance to China, the formulation of policy was perennially in the name of one's best interest.     

Why Do We Ask “What If?” Reflections on the Function of Alternate History

The new prominence of alternate history in Western popular culture has increasingly prompted scholars to historicize it as a broader phenomenon. What has largely escaped notice until now, however, has been the question of the underlying function of alternate history as a genre of speculative narrative representation. In this essay, I argue that writers and scholars have long produced "allohistorical narratives" out of fundamentally presentist motives. Allohistorical tales have assumed different typological forms depending upon how their authors have viewed the present. Nightmare scenarios, for example, have depicted the alternate past as worse than the real historical record in order to vindicate the present, while fantasy scenarios have portrayed the alternate past as superior to the real historical record in order to express dissatisfaction with the present. The presentist character of alternate histories allows them to shed light upon the evolving place of various historical events in the collective memory of a given society. In this essay, I examine American alternate histories of three popular themes—the Nazis winning World War II, the South winning the Civil War, and the American Revolution failing to occur—in order to show how present–day concerns have influenced how these events have been remembered. In the process, I hope to demonstrate that alternate histories lend themselves quite well to being studied as documents of memory. By examining accounts of what never happened, we can better understand the memory of what did.     

On the shock of civil war: cultural trauma and national identity in Finland and Ireland

What role does national identity play after civil war? Is reconstruction possible on the basis of an existing identity, or does a new identity have to be found? Much depends on whether narratives of conflict are unifying. I use the tools of cultural sociology to explain why the Finnish Civil War of 1918 has become a unifying ‘cultural trauma’ for the Finns, whereas the Irish Civil War of 1922–23 never became the dominant referent in Irish national identity. The difference is explained by the greater shock civil war posed to Finnish national identity.     

The views of Franco's regime on the 'children's issue' during the Greek civil war

Abstract

The suggestion is made here that, as part of its effort to identify the Spanish civil war with that of Greece, Madrid adopted the view that the two cases were similar in order to identify Franco's regime with the other anti-communist regimes of Western Europe at the beginning of Cold War. During the civil wars in both Spain (1936–9) and Greece (1946–9), the 'children's issue' became an important factor for humanitarian as well as for propaganda reasons. Indeed, the correspondence between the measures taken for the care of children by the two conflicting sides in both countries is impressive, in spite of the structural differences between the two civil conflicts.     

Revolution,Reaction, Restoration: The Meanings and Uses of Seventeenth-Century English History in the Political Thinking of Benjamin Constant,c.1797–1830

Comparisons, juxtapositions or analogies between France's recent Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary history and England's experiences of Revolution, Civil War and Restoration between the 1640s and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 were a common but controversial feature of political discourse dealing with France's contemporary situation in the decades following the Revolution of 1789. The present article probes this dimension of post-Revolutionary political debate, by tracking the shifting meanings and uses of seventeenth-century English history in the published and unpublished political writings of the leading liberal thinker and politician Benjamin Constant, from the 1790s through to his death in 1830. Such an analysis reveals the sometimes striking reversals and inconsistencies to which Constant was driven in his effort to adjust his historical readings to France's rapidly changing political conditions, but it also reveals underlying continuities in his historical and political thinking. The exemplarity of England's case lay, for Constant, less in the provision of a constitutional model that France might hope to appropriate than in the historical spectacle of a nation's struggle for liberty, and the value of this spectacle lay as much in its cautionary messages—focused on the sterile brutality of the Stuart Restoration—as in its eventually progressive outcomes.     

The trauma of war rape: A comparative view on the Bosnian conflict and the Greek civil war

This paper explores the practice and the political context of war rapes in the former Yugoslavia (1992-1995) and in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). It argues that conceptions about accountability and expected gender roles may lead social actors to commit atrocities that transgress the moral codes of their own society, while condemning their victims to silence. On the other hand, a change in the political context may undermine the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators and ultimately lead war rape victims to break their silence and bear witness. This argument is illustrated by a detailed analysis of one particular interview, in which a woman raped during the Greek Civil War decided to break her silence fifty years after the event. The interview material offers the opportunity to explore the effects of trauma and the multiple ways in which war rape victims may try to cope with past trauma and give meaning to a shattered life.     

Nicosia and its municipal administration during the very early years of British rule in Cyprus

Abstract

In recent years, the trauma concept has been applied to fiction in several literary studies. This article discusses the narrative mediation of traumatic experiences in selected Civil War novels, using narratological tools and focusing on the complex relationship between trauma, memory and narration. The authors use innovative narrative and representational strategies, such as a disrupted chronological order or intertextual references, to illustrate the paradoxical character of remembering and narrating trauma. These works highlight diverse aspects of the Greek Civil War, depart from conventional narrative modes and share common characteristics with so-called 'trauma fiction'.     

Coming to Terms with Violence: Sacrifice,collective memory and reconciliation in inter-war Finland

This article connects notions of collective memory to the notion of cultural memory. Special interest is given to the role of national myths and other cultural reservoirs in organizing Finnish collective memories during the period from the Civil War of 1918 until the beginning of the Second World War. First the author seeks to uncover the ways both sides of the conflict utilized cultural reservoirs in their memory cultures. Then the author looks into ways in which the Social Democrats especially tried in the late 1930s to transform divisive and even traumatic experiences resulting from the Civil War into socially productive narratives. The transformation of the memory of the internal and reciprocal violence into unifying self-sacrifices proved to be the most crucial act in Finnish memory culture during the first half of the 20th century. This interpretation dates the first acts of public reconciliation to the late 1930s, or the time before the Winter War.     

Toward a Received History of the Holocaust

In this article, I examine both the problem of so-called postmodern history as it relates to the Holocaust and suggest the ways that Saul Friedlander's recent work successfully mediates between the somewhat overly polemicized positions of “relativist” and “positivist” history. In this context, I find that in his search for an adequately self-reflexive historical narrative for the Holocaust, Hayden White's proposed notion of “middle-voicedness” may recommend itself more as a process for eyewitness writers than as a style for historians after the fact. From here, I look at the ways Saul Friedlander's reflections on the historian's voice not only mediate between White's notions of the ironic mode and middle-voicedness, but also suggest the basis for an uncanny history in its own right: an anti-redemptory narrative that works through, yet never actually bridges, the gap between a survivor's “deep memory” and historical narrative. For finally, it may be the very idea of “deep memory” and its incompatibility to narrative that constitutes one of the central challenges to Holocaust historiography. What can be done with what Friedlander has termed “deep memory” of the survivor, that which remains essentially unrepresentable? Is it possible to write a history that includes some oblique reference to such deep memory, but which leaves it essentially intact, untouched and thereby deep? In this section, I suggest, after Patrick Hutton, that “What is at issue here is not how history can recover memory, but, rather, what memory will bequeath to history.” That is, what shall we do with the living memory of survivors? How will it enter (or not enter) the historical record? Or to paraphrase Hutton again, “How will the past be remembered as it passes from living memory to history?” Will it always be regarded as so overly laden with pathos as to make it unreliable as documentary evidence? Or is there a place for the understanding of the witness, as subjective and skewed as it may be, for our larger historical understanding of events? In partial answer to these questions, I attempt to extend Friedlander's insights toward a narrow kind of history-telling I call “received history”—a double-stranded narrative that tells a survivor-historian's story and my own relationship to it. Such a narrative would chart not just the life of the survivor-historian itself but also the measurable effect of the tellings—both his telling and mine—on my own life's story. Together, they would compose a received history of the Holocaust and its afterlife in the author's mind—my “vicarious past.”     

History, Memory, and the Law: The Historian as Expert Witness

There has been a widespread recovery of public memory of the events of the Second World War since the end of the 1980s, with war crimes trials, restitution actions, monuments and memorials to the victims of Nazism appearing in many countries. This has inevitably involved historians being called upon to act as expert witnesses in legal actions, yet there has been little discussion of the problems that this poses for them. The French historian Henry Rousso has argued that this confuses memory with history. In the aftermath of the Second World War, judicial investigations unearthed a mass of historical documentation. Historians used this, and further researches, from the 1960s onwards to develop their own ideas and interpretations. But since the early 1990s there has been a judicialization of history, in which historians and their work have been forced into the service of moral and legal forms of judgment which are alien to the historical enterprise and do violence to the subleties and nuances of the historian's search for truth. This reflects Rousso's perhaps rather simplistically scientistic view of the historian's enterprise; yet his arguments are powerful and should be taken seriously by any historian considering involvement in a law case; they also have a wider implication for the moralization of the history of the Second World War, which is now dominated by categories such as "perpetrator,""victim," and "bystander" that are legal rather than historical in origin. The article concludes by suggesting that while historians who testify in war crimes trials should confine themselves to elucidating the historical context, and not become involved in judging whether an individual was guilty or otherwise of a crime, it remains legitimate to offer expert opinion, as the author of the article has done, in a legal action that turns on the research and writing of history itself.     

Zambrano’s poetic reason in the light of Frankfurtian Critical Theory

ABSTRACT

María Zambrano's biggest contribution to intellectual history is, without a doubt, her poetic reason; her unique attempt to overcome the limiting coordinates of the framework of rationality established by the Enlightenment. Having spent forty-five years in exile, the relevance of this Republican thinker has only been acknowledged in recent decades. Since then, the political content of her early work, as well as her engagement with the Republic's cause prior to and during the Spanish Civil War are well known. Nevertheless, although Zambrano still wrote some political books after the Civil War, most notably, Persona y democracia (1958), the political component of her thought after this period has passed largely unnoticed. This article intends to take a wider approach to Zambrano's political engagement by exploring the political significance of her poetic reason. Here I contend, first, that poetic reason, far from being an isolated attempt at developing an alternative rationality, is actually in line with the critique of instrumental reason proposed by the Frankfurt School and, second, that, in fact, there are meaningful parallels between poetic reason and Frankfurtian Critical Theory. Thus, the purpose of this article is to explore such parallels and their significance in revealing the political dimension of Zambrano's thought.     

Crossing the Border from Slavery to Freedom: The Building of a Community at Buxton,Upper Canada

In November 1849, the first settlers arrived at what was to become the Buxton Settlement, the most successful all-black community established in Canada prior to the U.S. Civil War. A community soon had been established, a community based on freedom and hope for the future. In the late 1850s, Buxton's population reached close to 700 inhabitants. Three schools and four churches of differing denominations served the community's needs. Several graduates from Buxton's schools attended various colleges to study law, medicine, or for the ministry. A lumber mill and brick-making facility promoted community industry. The settlement boasted a two-story brick hotel, a general store, and a post office. Buxton's rich history lends itself to the study of several topics vital to the social history of both Canada and the United States, particularly the development and strength of a true community: Buxton became an interactive community based on self-reliance and independency.     

The Political,Social and Scientific Contexts of Archaeological Investigations of Mass Graves in Spain

The recovery of historic memory of the Spanish Civil War is a multilayered initiative to escape both the romanticism of the Franco era, in which only the glory of the victors was celebrated while their past atrocities were ignored, and the cautiousness of the post-Franco democracy, for which forced amnesia of the Civil War was considered a sacrifice for the greater good. In the past five years the efforts to recover historic memory have gained empirical footing by employing archaeological methods to locate, enumerate and identify the victims of extrajudicial executions. The ultimate goals of such work include the production of a more accurate historical statement of past events, the repatriation of missing persons to their families, and the documentation of physical evidence that may allow families to seek civil restitutions. While the scientific methodology is fairly straightforward, the process is nonetheless inherently political in that various government bodies can and do impede recovery efforts. This paper contextualizes the current political and social climate of human rights investigations in Spain by illustrating some of the recent recovery efforts in Catalonia and Andalucia.     

Partisan politics and the public sphere: The civil war north

The Civil War North presents an interesting case study of the relationship between a highly politicized public sphere and partisan electoral politics. Although the two‐party system remained intact throughout the war, the concept and practice of partisanship was challenged by the social experience of Northerners who ‘acted politically’ when they took part in the war effort. The creation of a mass citizen army and the mobilization of women and men on the home front meant that parties lost their function as the crucial mediating channel between citizen and government. The more that politics mattered, the less partisanship seemed to be relevant. The war exposed the latent non‐partisan political energies of Northern society. These conclusions bolster the arguments of those scholars who, questioning whether partisanship was as deep or as widespread as previously supposed, have begun to suggest that the ‘party period paradigm’ does not capture the entirety of the nineteenth‐century political experience.     

Sites of memory in the Holy Land: the design of the British war cemeteries in Mandate Palestine

British war cemeteries of WW1 form a world embracing system of cemeteries, scattered over a wide range of sites and landscapes wherever Imperial soldiers died during the war. Although recent interest in memory and commemoration has made the British war cemeteries of the Great War a much-studied subject, the spatial dimension of this enormous undertaking remains somewhat out of focus. The geographical context, however, is an important factor in shaping the meanings for each cemetery. In each, the memory of the war intersects and interacts with the historical memory carried by the site. Nowhere is this more evident than in the cemeteries of the Palestine campaign, above all in Jerusalem. The paper follows the history of the design of war cemeteries of the Palestine campaign, and examines the ways the cemeteries and their design relate to their particular geographical context, and the impact this context may have on their interpretation     

‘My Body was Aflame with His Memory’: War,Gender and Colonial Ghosts in Hiroshima mon amour (1959)

This article argues that historicising the iconic 1959 French film Hiroshima mon amour reveals a different set of meanings that most scholars have overlooked. As France found itself embroiled in the brutal and bloody Algerian War of Independence, many started reflecting on the meaning and aftereffects of the Second World War. Despite its anti‐colonial universalist humanism, Hiroshima remains haunted by colonial ghosts and fantasies of post‐war ‘Asia’ where Asian female bodies are passive and Asian male bodies only echo other European male bodies. Ultimately, sexual and racial differences organise the film's narrative of war and canonises a Eurocentric version of ‘history’. The film's melodramatic love story renders invisible the ways gender and sexuality shape understandings of violence, wars, and violated bodies. Against Marguerite Duras's and Alain Resnais's intentions, the love story allows the remembering and forgetting of a (French) national history that only the female character embodies. Only the French woman stands in for subjectivity, memory and trauma, rendering everything else secondary. Once read as a historical text, the film illustrates the limits and ambivalences of post‐war anti‐colonial humanist political imagination.     

Reading Federico Chabod's Storia dell'idea d'Europa half a century later

Federico Chabod was one of Italy's most respected historians in a period that ran from the late 1920s down to the 1950s, and hence was an important intellectual protagonist in the intellectual culture of both Fascist and post-Second World War Italy. In this article Stuart Woolf re-examines Chabod's intellectual itinerary in both these periods, and focuses in particular on the course of lectures on the idea of Europe that Chabod gave in 1943-4 and 1958-9 (the latter were published in 1961 as the Storia dell'idea d'Europa). Like Marc Bloch's Etrange défaite, Woolf argues that Chabod's reflections on the idea of Europe and the role of Europe in world history were symptomatic of the response of a minority of committed intellectuals to the disasters of two world wars. The author sets Chabod's arguments in the context of debates on the nature of Europe and its historical role both before and after the Second World War, and offers a critical retrospective evaluation of Chabod's conclusions.