Childhood in the shadow of war: filled with work and play

This study was focused on war-time childhood. The target period covers the war years 1939–1945 and the years of post-war reconstruction. The research was based on memories of 13 participants who lived in the countryside in northern Finland during the Second World War. The purpose of the study was to find out what children's everyday life was like during the war. According to the results, children did play regardless of the war situation. Children also participated in household work actively. By highlighting children's experiences and perspectives, this study provided important information about children's survival during war time. The study also helps understanding the effects of wars from children's point of view.     

Economic Consequences Of The German Occupation Of Norway, 1940–1945

Since the liberation from the German occupation of 1940–1945, the dominant national narrative has been of the far-reaching exploitation and destruction of the Norwegian economy by the occupant forces. The scholarly basis for this narrative was a book written by Odd Aukrust and Petter Jacob Bjerke in 1945. The narrative formed an important basis for the Norwegian variant of economic reconstruction following liberation and has also dominated historiography. However, Aukrust and Bjerve’s presentation of the bleak situation in 1945 was exaggerated and is, historically speaking, untenable. Another conclusion is that the German occupation initiated a 20-year period in which the Norwegian economy was less open and exposed to internal and external competition than in any other period subsequent to Norway entering the liberal age of free trade and free international capital transactions in the middle of the 19th century.     

Between Social Reformism and Conservatism: Soviet women under the Finnish occupation regime, 1941–1944

The article deals with the Finnish gender policies during the occupation of Soviet Karelia in 1941–1944. It explores the wartime occupation of Soviet Karelia as a clash of Bolshevik and Finnish visions of the woman's position in society, including the level of visual propaganda. Based on oral history interviews and former Soviet archival materials, it also demonstrates how the local population reacted to social visions imposed from above, thus combining the approaches from ‘above’ and from ‘below’.     

Visions/versions of the war: Ramón Pérez de Ayala and Juan Pujol on the Italian front

In 1915, the Spanish journalist Juan Pujol visited the Italian front. His reports appeared in ABC, and were later incorporated in his book In Galitzia and the Isonzo (1916). A few months later, the Spanish writer Ramón Pérez de Ayala visited the same territories. His reports appeared in El Imparcial (Madrid) and La Prensa (Buenos Aires), and were later published in his book Herman in Chains (1917). The poetics evident in the reports of both writers were clearly different, not only for ideological reasons (Juan Pujol supported the Central Empires; Pérez de Ayala favored the Allies), but also for discursive reasons: the reflexive and digressive culturalism of Pérez de Ayala, for example, contrasted vividly with the direct narrative of Juan Pujol. However, since both writers shared some stereotypes about war and used a common repertoire of rhetorical and stylistic strategies, there are significant similarities between their texts.     

Fighting for Trieste: nationalism and political violence at the edge of the Iron Curtain

Between 1945 and 1954, the Italian and Yugoslav governments staunchly disputed national sovereignty of Trieste and northern Istria. Although scholars have extensively studied the diplomatic dimension of what became known as the ‘Trieste question’, only a few have devoted attention to the Italian government’s aggressive strategy toward the city from 1945 to 1954. This article examines the Italian politics of nationalism in Cold War Trieste by investigating the interactions between the central government, the Allied authorities and the local political forces that either supported or opposed Italian territorial claims toward the city. Based upon the study of Italian as well as Allied governmental records, state-led propaganda and public press, this article suggests that the central government not only tolerated but also encouraged phenomena of local political violence to oppose the Communist threat and defy Allied occupation. This study ultimately proves the residual strength of nationalism as a political ideology and further elucidates the undisclosed relationship between right-wing movements and the central government during the early years of the Cold War.     

Conspiracy theories in Republican Italy: the Pellegrino Report to the Parliamentary Commission on Terrorism

This article analyses the draft of the final report prepared by Senator Giovanni Pellegrino, who from 1994 to 2001 chaired the ‘Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on terrorism in Italy and on the causes of the failure to identify those responsible for the massacres’. The document was completed in 1995 and attempted a general interpretation of the causes of the political violence that had been a major feature of the history of the Italian Republic up to that point. The report was closely connected with what is often described as the moment of the transition between Italy's ‘first’ and ‘second’ Republic and, in keeping with revisionist theories current at the time, attributed responsibility for misdeeds and occult plots (real or imagined) that occurred in Italy over a period of forty years primarily to ideological division caused by the Cold War. This paper argues that this resulted in a highly distorted narrative of Italian history in which events appear to be determined almost exclusively by external factors to the exclusion of important internal dynamics.     

Ellen Key and Rudolf Kjellén on war,peace, and the future of post-First World War Europe

During the First World War, intellectuals in both combatant and neutral nations engaged in debates on the justification for the bloodshed and in envisioning solutions for a sustainable peace. In the latter regard, the issues of democracy and future forms of government were focal. This article examines two public intellectuals from Sweden, Ellen Key and Rudolf Kjellén, and their conflicting views. A comparative and transnational perspective on their thinking about war and peace sheds light on their political backgrounds and wider worldviews. The article further reveals the international contexts in which their ideas were embedded. Using the concept of ‘the ideas of 1914 versus those of 1789’, the conservative geopolitician Kjellén spoke for the justification of German expansion and Swedish military intervention, whereas the Left-liberal pacifist Key condemned all parties involved, defending the legacy of the French Revolution and Sweden’s neutrality. Based on his geopolitical tenets, Kjellén could not envision a future with peaceful cooperation between nation states, while, for Key, the solution lay in the development of democratic decision-making. In this respect, the granting of political citizenship to women, to whom she accorded a special competence for peace-keeping, based on their maternalism, was crucial.     

‘THE FIVE ACCURSED YEARS’

The subject for this paper is the question of how the Second World War has been perceived and used since that war – in Denmark, and especially in recent years, but also with a comparative view to Norway and Sweden. In addition to an outline of the development of public history regarding the war and the Scandinavian countries and a comparison of the ways history is used, the paper examines the friction areas between history, politics and morality in relation to actual cases and raises the question of how to establish a balance between the three which will enable a reliable picture of historical events as well as secure a positive identification for future generations.     

Redressing Canada’s Second World War Narrative

In early 1942, 23,000 Japanese Canadians on the West Coast were forcibly relocated against their will to the interior of Canada after Japan entered the war against the Allies. This forced relocation left deep scars in that community. Decades later, Japanese Canadians mounted a redress campaign for an official apology and financial restitution. This provocation examines that campaign and explores how it has shaped Canada’s constructed memory of the Second World War.     

They think it’s all over. The face of victory on the British frontier

Abstract

The re-conquest of southern Scotland by the army of the Emperor Antoninus Pius was a political act intended to secure his position on the throne. For this event, he took the acclamation ‘Conqueror’. His soldiers erected large stone slabs to mark their construction of the new frontier and decorated several with triumphal scenes. In these sculptures the soldiers portrayed themselves not only as victorious conquerors but also engineers and builders, celebrating not only the success of their emperor but their own community of soldiers.