Nationalism,diaspora and ‘civilisational mission’: the case of Syrian nationalism in Latin America between World War I and World War II

Abstract. The notion of ‘civilisational mission’ (risala hadariyya) is a core concept of nationalism, particularly of Arab and Syrian nationalism. Its importance lies in the ability to bring three aspects of nationalist thought into one pattern of meaning: the projected modernisation of the nation, the nation's quest for recognition and equal participation in the international arena, and the claim to political leadership of the rising educated middle class. In the Syrian diaspora during the interwar period, the notion was additionally shaped by the refutation of the neo‐colonial aspirations of the mandate powers (mission civilisatrice) as well as by the interaction between the diaspora community and the host society. This article analyses this concept in its discursive context focusing on Dr Khalil and Antun Sa‘adeh, who were both eminent intellectuals, party founders and editors of several diasporic newspapers and magazines in Argentina and Brazil.     

The Incomplete Alliance: America and Japan after World War II

Kyoko Inoue. MacArthur's Japanese Constitution: A Linguistic and Cultural Study of its Making . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Richard B. Finn. Winners in Peace: MacArthur, Yoshida, and Postwar Japan . Berkeley
Roger Buckley. US-Japan Alliance Diplomacy, 1945–1990 .     

Digging in the Dark: The Underground War on the Western Front in World War I

Throughout the First World War, with the trenches largely static, the combatants tried to break the deadlock by tunnelling under one another’s trenches. The Tunnelling Companies of the British Royal Engineers were engaged in a bitter struggle against German Pioneers that left both sides with heavy casualties. A project to determine the location of one particular act of heroism in that underground war has resulted in the erection of a monument to the Tunnellers at Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée in northern France.     

Fixing History: Narratives of World War I in France

For nearly a century, the French have entertained an unshakable conviction that their bility to recognize themselves—to know and transmit the essence of Frenchness—depended on the teaching of the history of France. In effect, history was a discourse on France, and the teaching of history—" la pédagogie centrale du citoyen "—the means by which children were constituted as heirs and carriers of a common collective memory that made them not only citizens, but family. In this essay, I examine the rhetorical and conceptual effects on history writing that emerge out of this preoccupation with the elaboration of a continuous, coherent national identity.
Focusing on schoolbooks, I begin by looking at the dominant, nearly hegemonic model of French history created by Ernest Lavisse in the 1890s—a model informed by the dream of a unified, unitary French nation, embodied in and articulated through the history of France—and at the disruption of this paradigm in the aftermath of the Great War. I then consider a text written in the 1990s specifically to repudiate the kind of nationalist narratives that prevailed for most of this century—a new supranational history of Europe. I argue that, in their different experiments with fixing history, both Lavisse and the contemporary textbook authors did not so much repair a deficient history as produce a historical fixation, creating mythicized histories that are complete, closed, predictable, and at bottom ahistorical. Finally, I turn to a recent World War I novel, A Very Long Engagement by SébastienJaprisot, in order to suggest ways in which the narrative strategies of a fiction writer may be useful to historians in thinking about a different kind of historical project.