War Time Hysteria, 1917: Senator Miles Poindexter, ‘American-ness’ and the Strange Case of Colonel Carl Reichmann*

When, on 6 April 1917, the United States entered into the First World War, a wave of anti-German sentiment captured the nation. The Army was not immune from accusations of subversion. In 1917 Senator Miles Poindexter accused a high ranking officer named Carl Reichmann of being in league with Germany. Despite the support from officers such as Hugh Lennox Scott and John J. Pershing, Reichmann was not permitted a promotion to general or service in France. Although most senators supported the promotion, Poindexter was able to prevent a vote on the subject using internal Senate rules. The resulting notoriety Poindexter gained made him a viable Republican candidate in the 1920 election. Although the military did not prevail over Poindexter — thereby continuing the constitutional expectation of military subservience to the civil government — the forces sent to France were without a commander who had gained a scholarly understanding of modern warfare well before the actual conflict.     

‘And now imagine her or him as a slave,a pitiful slave with no rights’: child forced labourers in the culture of remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine

This article examines the various components of the image of Soviet children, who were deported to Nazi Germany during the Second World War to perform forced labour, within the culture of remembrance of the USSR and post-Soviet Ukraine. In her analysis, the author emphasises that throughout the Soviet period the topic of forced labour had mostly instrumental significance and was used for a variety of propaganda tasks: during the war, to mobilise the population to struggle against the enemy; in its aftermath, to underscore and contrast the essence and policies of the post-war Western ‘democracies’ and the USSR; and, from the late 1960s, to accuse capitalist countries, above all the Federal Republic of Germany, of preparing for undertakings such as a new war or an arms race. With the collapse of the USSR, the Ostarbeiters' ‘territory of memory’ enlarged dramatically. In the new climate of democratic transformation, there were socio-legal initiatives which aimed to regulate the status of forced labourers, and the first steps were taken towards institutionalising Ostarbeiter associations. This, in turn, facilitated the process of analysing the construction and presentation of the image of the child Ostarbeiter on the level of state-legal regulation, institutional support, public interest and scholarly research that is taking place in contemporary Ukraine.     

A research report on Japanese use of chemical weapons during the Second World War

This research report introduces the historical process of Japanese use of chemical weapons against the Chinese during the Second World War, which caused serious casualties and mass destruction. In addition, it also elaborates on the discarded chemical weapons' injuries to the Chinese people and their negative effects on environmental pollution. According to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which became effective in 1997, Japan should take responsibility for destroying all chemical weapons abandoned on Chinese territory.     

Commemoration in the United States: ‘The reason for fighting I never got straight’

The United States entered the First World War late, in April 1917, and so its centenary commemoration of the war will begin well after those of its former associated powers and enemies. Even in 2017, however, US commemoration will likely be muted by the past and present ramifications of the debate and confusion over the meanings and significance of the First World War to the United States that have raged since the end of the war itself.

美国参战是在1917年4月,是一战的后期了。因此它的一战纪念活动会晚于从前的那些友国和帝国。即便在2017年,过去和现在关于一战意义的争吵（战争结束以来就没停过）也会消弱纪念活动的音量。     

Homespun manhood and the war against masculinity: community leisure on the US home front, 1917–19

Between the Civil War and World War I, America saw a return to militarised, heroic, warrior forms of masculinity. When the United States entered the war in 1917, however, the demands for belligerent forms of military manhood subsided, and were replaced by a desire to reattach manhood to the domestic realm. In this article, I examine a set of government programmes designed to manage soldiers' leisure time while they were stationed in training camps across the US. I argue that these home front activities betray an anxiety about sending American soldiers to fight in an overseas war for the first time in national history. The US was a young nation state fighting its first international war against other equally statist nations. In this context, it was no longer strategically useful for military manhood to be severed from the idea of home. Rather, as soldiers would be fighting for long periods in an alien territory, it behoved the military and government to temper traditional configurations of warrior manhood, and focus instead on exposing soldiers to as much home and family as they could safely arrange.     

Cogs in the Machine: The Experiences of Female Munitions Workers and Members of the Australian Women’s Land Army in South Australia, 1940–45

Mobilisation on the Australian ‘home front’ during the Second World War enabled some women to move temporarily into employment usually reserved for men, and to earn significantly higher wages than they were accustomed to, but the benefits of this have been often overstated. Focusing on South Australian women in the city and rural areas who took up the new working opportunities — in munitions factories and the Australian Women’s Land Army in particular — this article demonstrates that relatively few women were entitled to higher wages, such wages were lower and paid later in South Australia than in other states, and that working conditions were unattractive and often dangerous. At the war’s end, the social imperative to marry and raise children, coupled with demands that they give up their place for male workers, then saw many women return to domesticity or less-rewarded and lower status ‘female occupations’.     

二战与美国黑人民权运动的兴起

美国黑人民权运动是非洲裔美国人为争取政治、经济和社会的平等权利而发动的一场声势浩大的群众性社会运动。这场社会运动的发生绝不是偶然的,而第二次世界大战的爆发则起到了十分关键的刺激和推动作用。二战使美国黑人有机会更加深刻地认识到美国所宣扬的民主信条同其在国内极力维护的种族主义实践之间的强烈反差,并进一步激发r他们的种族意识、政治参与热情和寻求变革的勇气。向华盛顿进军运动则为美国黑人展示自己的力量与锻炼自已的意志提供了历史舞台。这场没有发生的示威运动大大地增强了黑人的斗争信心。这些因素为美国黑人民权运动的发生做好了最后的思想和组织准备。     

Transatlantic Generosity: Canada's ‘Billion Dollar Gift’ to the United Kingdom in the Second World War

On the basis of research in Canadian, British, and US records, this article examines the development and implementation of the most generous financial act in the Second World War: Canada's billion dollar gift to the United Kingdom in 1942. The origins of this extraordinary measure, the political and economic factors that influenced its introduction, and the reasons why its replacement differed so markedly in format even as it replicated the fundamental purposes of the gift, are all assessed within the context of Canada's economic relations with Britain and the United States. As this analysis demonstrates, the gift advanced Canada's enlightened self-interest and bolstered the war effort of its oldest and closest ally. It was an economic success but a political failure; how it was perceived and depicted in Canada ensured that it would not be repeated, even though the conditions and requirements that necessitated the gift had not changed and equivalent measures had to be implemented.     

The World Bank–United States–Latin American Triangle: The Negotiations with Socialist Chile, 1970–1973

This paper sheds light on the largely unknown negotiations between Chile and the World Bank (WB) during the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970–1973). The prevalent understanding of the WB's involvement in Latin America portrays the Bank as a loyal ally of the U.S. government and as an institution with the power to impose its views on its borrowers. Yet, an in-depth analysis of previously unexamined primary sources demonstrates that rather than reflecting a dynamic in which the relationship was between Washington and the WB on the one hand, and Chile on the other hand, these relations constituted a WB–U.S.–Chile asymmetric triangle. Despite profound ideological discrepancies, multiple pressures, and constraints, Allende's government and the WB conducted high-ranking negotiations that challenged the U.S.-promoted economic embargo against Chile. The examination of this counterintuitive relationship sheds new light on Allende's positioning in the international arena and on the functioning of the World Bank, thereby providing a unique prism through which to reconsider dichotomist perceptions of the Cold War in Latin America.     

The Tannenberg myth in history and literature, 1914–1945

ABSTRACT

The Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914 has been described as the ‘most powerful German myth’ of the First World War. This essay analyses the role of the battle in German collective memory up to the end of the Third Reich. During the war, the victory in East Prussia was celebrated widely and greatly contributed to the personality cult surrounding Paul von Hindenburg. After 1918, Tannenberg served right-wing circles as a political argument against the post-war order, evoked to underscore the notion of German victimhood against Slav ‘encirclement’, the ‘war guilt lie’ and the territorial provisions of the Treaty of Versailles. However, it never really captured the attention or imagination of writers and artists. Linked primarily to national-conservative groups and ideals, Tannenberg was also of no major significance in National Socialist propaganda.     

Breaking the Monopoly System: American Influence on the British Decision to Prohibit Opium Smoking and End its Asian Monopolies, 1939–1945

The colonial opium monopoly systems remained a major point of international contention in the decades prior to World War II, driving a major wedge between British and US drug diplomats in particular. The issue typified the deeper divide between Anglo-American drug diplomacy in Asia. The British approach stemmed from imperial realities and a self-perception of pragmatism aiming for gradual suppression of opium consumption via regulation. In contrast, the US approach remained grounded in a disdain for British (and broader European) imperialism in Asia and a moralistic, self-interested zeal driving towards absolute and immediate prohibition in the region. After decades of dispute, in 1942/1943, the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics initiated a campaign to force a change in British and Dutch colonial opium policies in Asia. The British were reluctant to pursue prohibitionist policies, which they feared would be politically destabilising, fiscally detrimental and difficult to implement. However, they eventually acquiesced. This paper systematically examines the US policy advocacy campaign, the British response and Britain's reasons for agreeing to a major shift in colonial opium policy in the region. In so doing, it aims to develop a new and deeper understanding of determinants of this policy change.     

A neglected chapter in Italy's transition from Fascism to the Republic: The Kingdom of the South (1943–1944)

Gallerano's paper examines the reasons why Italian historians have paid little attention to the political events that followed the liberation of the Italian Mezzogiorno and the brief life of the government established under the auspices of the monarchy during the period of what was termed the Kingdom of the South. He argues that this neglect derives in part from the brevity of the period of civil government in the south, but mainly from the fact that historians have been attracted above all by the history of the Resistance which has led them to consider events in the south to be of secondary importance. Gallerano argues that such a view is quite unjustified and shows how some historians ‐ from Chabod in the early 1950s ‐ have understood that events in the south bore very directly on the broader transition from Fascism to the Republic. Challenging Renzo De Felice's recent claims that Italy's defeat on 8 September 1943 marked the beginning of a crisis of national identity, Gallerano argues that the circumstances that obtained in the months that followed made the south an exceptionally rich terrain for exploring the very contradictory feelings and expectations that were aroused in Italy by the experience of military defeat and political reconstruction.     

Commemoration in Germany: Rediscovering history

In Germany a common narrative of the First World War could never be established. In the post-1918 period, explanations of Germany's defeat were highly contested between the political factions of the Weimar Republic. The subsequent Nazi tyranny, the Second World War and the Holocaust came – and continue – to overshadow any other event in German history. During the Cold War, the First World War was largely a forgotten conflict. In recent years, the federal government has remained hesitant about embracing the centenary, but countless exhibitions, seminars, books and other media productions have brought this aspect of history back to public attention from late 2013, and with it has come a renewed public debate on war guilt.

在德国是不会有共同的一战叙事的。1918年以后,对德国战败的解释成为魏玛共和国不同的政治派别的战场。接下来的纳粹独裁、二战以及大屠杀,则让德国历史上的任何其他事件黯然失色。在冷战期间,一战差不多被遗忘了。近些年联邦政府一直对庆祝百年的事犹犹豫豫。不过2013年底以来,无数的展览、研讨会、图书以及其他媒体产品使得这段历史成为公众关注的对象,关于战争的罪孽问题又起纷争。     

Catholic students at war: the Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana, 1940–43

Abstract

This article deals with the religious experience of the Federazione Universitaria Cattolica Italiana during the Second World War. Since many of the future Christian Democrat leaders that would rule the country after the conflict were formed in the ranks of the organization, most of the existing literature has tended to focus on the formation of this ruling class and their political trajectory and, has tended to overstate the origins and character of their anti-fascist departure, neglecting the initial support for many aspects of the Regime's war effort. This article contends, instead, that the most salient features of the war experience of the university students are to be located in the spiritual dimension and in their effort to contrive a religiosity adapted to warfare and modernity in general, interlaced with the powerful myth of a Catholic Italy that, at least in the early stages of the conflict, fuelled the expectations of many in the federation of a primordial role to be played by Italy in a new world order.     

Liberation and literature: Naples 1944

The arrival of Anglo‐American forces in Naples on 1 October 1943 precipitated the structural crisis which had beset the capital of the south since its integration into the Italian nation‐state in 1860. This crisis had been masked by the reassuringly engaging ethos of napoletanità, encoded in the urban dialect and crystallized in its literary culture from Matilde Serao and Salvatore Di Giacomo onwards. The myth of napoletanità had been frozen under Fascism, but was shattered by the experience of the war years and after, and only factitiously restored under the political hegemony of the monarchist ship owner Achille Lauro during the 1950s. Young literary Americans such as John Home Burns and William Weaver, who found themselves in Naples with the occupying Allied forces, fell under its spell, while the equally young British military intelligence officer Norman Lewis maintained a detached, but sympathetic, objectivity. The older Tuscan writer, Curzio Malaparte, so provocatively transformed the image of Naples as to earn furious rejection by the city's dominant postwar political circles and by Italy's literary circles. Yet, despite brilliant attempts at restoration by the departed Neapolitan, Giuseppe Marotta, and the much‐loved actor‐playwright Eduardo De Filippo, napoletanità was systematically undermined and demolished by younger Neapolitan writers from Domenico Rea and Anna Maria Ortese to Raffaele La Capria as the city's urban fabric was transformed by appallingly irresponsible property speculators. This article focuses on the literary anthropology of Naples in the 1940s. It explores literary texts and contexts, and the way they problematize Naples as a unified subject or object. It addresses the paradoxical issue of the city's need for liberation from itself, and the time scale of a liberation that perhaps has always been and always will be in fieri.     

近十年来美英两国学术界冷战史研究述评

冷战主宰了20世纪后半期的国际政治。在后冷战时期,许多国家的学者利用新获得的档案资料来仔细考察和重新评估冷战史。自从冷战国际史项目于1991年在伍德罗.威尔逊国际学者中心建立以来,冷战国际史这一概念,已经被广为接受。根据相关英文文献,对过去十年美英两国冷战史研究新发展、新动向以及冷战史研究现状,做一总结归纳。主要涉及以下几个方面:美国的主要冷战研究中心、研究冷战的资料来源和新的研究方法、学者们关注的热点问题及最新研究成果的介绍、英国冷战研究概况等。     

‘Dead dads’: memory narratives of war-related fatherlessness in Germany

After the Second World War, there were estimated to be around 20 million half-orphans in Europe. In Germany alone, 5.3 million soldiers killed in action left behind approximately 1.2 million widows, nearly 2.5 million half-orphans and about 100,000 complete orphans. This article examines how men and women from various social strata in western and eastern Germany remember their fathers who died in the war and in what way he has been stored in the family's collective memory. The analysis focuses on 30 life-history interviews with men and women from eastern and western Germany with various social and religious backgrounds, all of whom were born between 1935 and 1945 and had little or no memory of their fathers. The following questions are relevant: what memories did children have of their fathers, and what images of them were related by mothers and relatives? What individual, political, social and memory-cultural factors characterise a child's memory of her or his father? The article also analyses trans-generational transmissions and conflicts of how the father's past is remembered.