The Italian government's response to the problem of Jewish refugees 1945–1948∗

This article deals with the fall of Palestinian-Arab Jaffa in the 1948 war. As the largest Arab city in Palestine, its accelerated social and military collapse came as a surprise to many, despite Jewish dominance in the Jaffa region. While previous research has mostly neglected this question, the present study aims at revealing the underlying causes, besides Jewish military pressure, for Jaffa's collapse and the resulting exodus of its Arab population. The article describes the precarious social and military Palestinian-Arab situation in Jaffa as a case study for Palestine as a whole during the December 1947–May 1948 inter-communal war.     

‘Barbarity more suited to Savages’: British soldiers’ views of Spanish and Portuguese violence during the Peninsular War, 1808–1814

This article explores British soldiers’ reactions to the violence that Iberian soldiers, guerrillas and civilians perpetrated against wounded French soldiers and prisoners of war during the Peninsular War. Whilst they saw this violence as retaliatory, and sympathized with the suffering of the occupied, British soldiers were shocked, disturbed and outraged, often leading them to self-identify with their very enemy — the French. On one level, this violence was seen as a fundamental violation of customary rules of war. Yet further, in British minds it revealed a deeper Iberian culture of violence and way of war, which set the Iberian peoples apart from ‘civilized’ nations.     

War is its Own Justification: What Americans Think about War

Abstract

The authors deal with the morality of war in American culture. They argue that a war ethics that was characteristic of the Cold War has given way to a warrior ethics as it has developed in post-Vietnam America, in print media, popular sentiment, and film. According to this warrior ethics, the citizenry's support for soldiers, regardless of the justice of war, is understood to create social solidarity. Wars are easily justified because, at bottom, war is understood to be its own justification. It unites a country. This popular conception of war both props up more high-minded, political rationales for war and undermines traditional just war ethics. The article uses the war in Iraq as a case study. It analyzes the Bush administration's defense of the war alongside similar accounts of the just war theory given by Richard John Neuhaus, Michael Novak, and George Weigel.

"As a moral problem, war is ultimately a problem of policy, and therefore a problem of social morality." John Courtney Murray     

The idea of global civil society

The main argument of this article is that the idea of global civil society challenges the concept of international relations. It traces the evolution of the idea of society and argues that civil society has always meant a rule-governed society where rules were based on some form of social contract among citizens. Historically, civil society was always territorially tied and contrasted with international relations between states. What changed in the 1980s and 1990s was the global dimension of civil society—a social contract is being negotiated across borders establishing a set of global rules involving states as well as international institutions. The article ends by asking whether September 11 and the war in Iraq mark a reversion to international relations.     

Europe’s mediation junction: technology and consumer society in the 20th century

This article reviews the literature on the relationship between consumption and technological development to understand the character of Europe’s 20th‐century trajectory, i.e. the hidden integration of Europe long before the formal process of unification started. Within the rich historiography, the paper focuses on the intersection between production and consumption, where a range of social actors and institutions sought to represent consumers and mediate consumption. It is at this juncture of mediation that social actors and institutions negotiated the mediated design and the appropriation of new products and technologies. The paper further historicizes the juncture of mediation by introducing the European politics of the state, marketplace, and civil society within the context of economic crises, world wars, revolutionary changes, post‐war reconstruction, and cold war. By looking at the mediation junction, a conceptual frame is offered to understand the connection, the disconnection, or the reconfiguration of technologies and consumer identities in 20th‐century Europe. In a final section, the article suggests new avenues for research to examine the hidden integration of Europe.     

About‐Face: Gender,Disfigurement and the Politics of French Reconstruction, 1918–24

This article examines the role of facially wounded soldiers and prosthetic masks in the post‐First World War reconstruction of a gendered French nation. In contextualising the work of Anna Coleman Ladd, who sculpted facial prosthetics to ‘re‐humanise’ disfigured French veterans, I aim to shed light on larger post‐war tensions between the accommodation and rejection of social and cultural change. By submitting to Ladd's efforts and donning her devices, the French mutilés who sought her help articulated, through their bodies, a conservative vision for the French nation – highlighting the resonance of the traditional masculine ideal in post‐war France and a desire to reconstruct an idealised past. The exposure of the ‘surreal’ face, conversely, signalled the futility of a return to the status quo ante and the creation of the Union des Blessés de la face et de la tête allowed veterans to renegotiate the bounds of acceptable masculinity. Collectively, the facially wounded suggest the ways in which the face serves as a site of gender work, a means by which to challenge or reify masculine norms of behaviour and appearance.     

Liminal condition as constant situation,the Israeli Jerusalem municipality, 1948-1955

The capital city is the place where political entities are represented in national space. This space acts as a mediating force between society, the nation, and the outside world, and it is very important for the development of a system of visual national symbols. The political leaders, national and local, are those who shape the capital city. Therefore, examining the relationship between municipal and national political systems in Jerusalem sheds light not only on local history but on national developments and the perception of Jerusalem as the capital in the national psyche. The years 1948-1955 were a very chaotic time in the annals of Jerusalem, Jerusalem became a city divided between Israel and Jordan in a semi-state of war that turned permanent despite the armistice agreements. Israel’s national leaders remained ambivalent about Jerusalem as capital city despite the rhetoric of figures from across the political spectrum. Their ambivalent attitude influenced the relationship with the Jerusalem Municipality. The article addresses the subject of the relations between the national government and the municipal political coalition in Jerusalem from 1948 to 1955.     

War Trauma and Alcoholism in the Early Writings of Charlotte and Branwell Brontë

During and after the Napoleonic Wars, there was an outpouring of military-based biographical writing never before seen in British history. Over 200 military memoirs were published either as standalone entities or in periodicals such as Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The United Service Journal. As a result, the experiences of ordinary soldiers were brought to the forefront of Britain’s public consciousness. Although many of these memoirs glorified war, a number revealed the psychological damage war inflicted on the British male population and explicitly exposed the horrors of combat to a domestic readership. Furthermore, this explosion of life writing also exposed a connection between suffering and alcoholism, consolidating trauma as a post-war, national problem. The Brontës, typically recognized as canonical, Victorian authors, first participated in this military-based literary movement. This article attempts to reposition and establish two of the siblings – Charlotte and Branwell – as significant post-war commentators. By focussing on their military reading, it will become clear how they vicariously processed and reimagined war trauma and addiction through their Glass Town and Angrian sagas. Not only will this article argue that the introduction of military biography into British society generated wide-scale recognition of war trauma, despite its absence within contemporary medical discourse, but it will also argue that the young Brontës’ literature is an important historical source for understanding and re-evaluating the public response to post-war military masculinity.     

A Most Unmanly War: British Military Masculinity in Macedonia,Mesopotamia and Palestine, 1914–18

This article argues that the most severe crisis of masculinity among British and Dominion soldiers in the First World War did not take place on the Western Front. Instead, British and Dominion soldiers serving on the war's sideshows in Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine believed most acutely that their manliness was in question. Unlike soldiers on the Western Front, they were not battling the main German Army, they were not fighting to liberate occupied France and Belgium, and their war was not to preserve the rights of small nations and the inviolability of international law. This article explores how military masculinity played out much differently on the war's peripheral fronts in two ways. First, it suggests that where a soldier fought mattered more to military masculinity than a soldier's method of enlistment or any other variable. British and Dominion soldiers were fully aware that the home front only considered France and Flanders as the real war, and they actively argued against this misconception to loved ones and in their memoirs. Second, this article demonstrates an additional crisis of masculinity on the war's peripheral fronts: the lack, or more often effacement, of non‐white colonial (Eastern Mediterranean and Arab) women. Not only was British and Dominion military masculinity under assault on the war's peripheral fronts, heteronormative sexual relations were also being transformed in a world where few, if any, racially acceptable women were available.     

‘Unparalleled Opportunities’: The Indian Y.M.C.A.'s Army Work Schemes for Imperial Troops During the Great War (1914–1920)

The present article aims to contribute to the global history of the First World War and the history of ‘imperial humanitarianism’ by taking stock of the Indian Young Men's Christian Association's Army Work schemes in South Asia, Europe and the Middle East. The outbreak of the war was hailed by some American secretaries of the Y.M.C.A. working in India as presenting overwhelming opportunities for their proselytising agenda. Indeed, the global conflict massively enlarged the organisation's range of activities among European soldiers stationed in South Asia and for the first time extended it to the ‘Sepoys’, i.e. Indian and Nepalese soldiers serving in the imperial army. Financially supported by the Indian public as well as by the governments of Britain and British India, the US-dominated Indian Y.M.C.A. embarked on large-scale ‘army work’ programmes in the Indian subcontinent as well as in several theatres of war almost from the outset, a fact that clearly boosted its general popularity. This article addresses the question of the effects the Y.M.C.A.'s army work schemes had for the imperial war effort and tries to assess their deeper societal and political impact as a means of educating better citizens, both British and Indian. In doing so, the article places particular emphasis on the activities of American Y-workers, scrutinising to what extent pre-existing imperial racial and cultural stereotypes influenced their perception of and engagement with the European and South Asian soldiers they wanted to transform into ‘better civilians’.     

‘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.     

RAF Ein Shemer: A Forgotten Case of Jewish and Arab Work in a British Army Camp in Palestine during the Second World War

This article explores lingering recollections of a marginalised sphere of participation by Jewish and Arab citizens of Mandatory Palestine in the Allied war effort. During the war, Palestine became a major staging ground for Allied troops in the Middle East. Some 15,000 Jewish and 35,000 Arab workers worked in administrative, construction, catering, and maintenances roles within the newly built army bases. The story of civilian labour in RAF Ein Shemer reveals previously neglected normative and non-normative patterns of inter-communal relations between British soldiers and Jewish and Arab workers on the social, economic, ideological, and romantic levels within the context of a colonial-era military installation.     

Mythologising the Dominion Fighting Man: Australian and Canadian Narratives of the First World War Soldier, 1914–39

A stereotypical image of the nation's First World War soldiers—and a conventional understanding of their war experience and its meaning—is not a concept unique to the British Empire's former Pacific Dominions, but is also promulgated in other parts of the Empire. During the First World War and interwar period, Canada also saw the emergence of a ‘Myth of the Soldier’ that paralleled the Anzac legend in many ways. This article focuses on some of the similarities and differences in Australia and Canada's mythologising of their First World War soldiers, proposing that this process reflects aspects of identity formation common to settler societies within the British world.     

Khalsa: The Town with a ‘Golden Fountain’: The Rise and Fall of an Arab Town North of the Huleh Valley

This article deals with the history of a frontier Arab town—Khalsa—which was the centre of the Huleh Valley and the connection between Galilee, Southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights during the British Mandate in Palestine (1918–48). This article aims to explore the changes and transformations that occurred in the town and the Huleh Valley in general, and tries to show that, during that period, this remote and peripheral area underwent many social and economic changes. It also demonstrates that these changes not only occurred in the central areas in Palestine but also reached the northern parts. In addition, this article tells the ‘story’ of how this Arab town, which has not been addressed in earlier studies, grew rapidly, and why it collapsed quickly in the 1948 war. It examines what the role of its leader, Kamil Hussein, was and how his relationship with the Bedouin tribes and the Jewish settlements and leaders in the valley affected the results of the war. The story of Khalsa is, to some extent, a case study on the macro-level of what was happening in the Holy Land in the three decades of British rule.     

‘Mucho malo for fascisti’: Languages and Transnational Soldiers in the Spanish Civil War

This article explores the linguistic experiences of transnational soldiers, using the Spanish Civil War as a case study. It argues that communication difficulties provoked by linguistic diversity within the Republican war effort and particularly within the International Brigades, caused the high command to move from a utopian, internationalist policy to a more pragmatic approach. The article evaluates the role played by language intermediaries in this evolving policy and in the wider Republican war effort. Finally, it argues that soldiers grassroots experiences of language contact forged new linguistic forms which underlined a strong sense of shared purpose and identity.     

因应与完善——论山东抗日根据地优抚工作

全面抗战时期,为解决抗日军人及其家属的优抚保障问题,山东抗日根据地初步建立起以保障基本生活需要为目的的优抚工作框架。在其实施过程中,因为干部认知偏差、优抚制度不完善和群众参与程度等原因,优抚效果一般。山东根据地及时进行了调适与因应,通过明确优抚对象与标准、干部反思与拥军、参军运动结合等方式进行了调整,形成了以根据地政府为主导、社会各阶层广泛参与的良性互动局面,既做到了保障优抚对象得到优待、社会地位得到尊重,又实现了“动员起来”,以优抚促进社会动员,巩固根据地政权,完成了从保障性到动员性优抚体系的构建。     

Communists and the 1948 War: PCP,Maki, and the National Liberation League

This paper analyzes the way in which Palestine's Jewish and Arab communist parties, the PCP-Maki and the National Liberation League, acted during the 1948 war. Both groups made separate and different efforts to make the two-state solution a reality as originally conceived in the UN partition plan. Ironically, the decisive Jewish victory in the war resulted in an asymmetry between the Jewish Communists the Palestinian Communists when they were unified toward the end of the 1948 war. Despite Maki's labors for an Israeli victory, its standing in the nascent Israeli political system toward the end of the war remained marginal. The concept of Jewish–Arab cooperation under the aegis of the USSR was seen by the Zionist establishment as dangerous and subversive.     

南京粤军阵亡将士墓九十年祭

民国元年广东北伐军为主体的东线北伐的胜利,对于捍卫南京临时政府、促使清帝退位,起了重要的作用。今年3月,是南京粤军阵亡将士墓建墓90周年。为了存史,本就粤军的兴建、征战、墓冢、勋绩,分别作了考证,藉以缅怀革命先烈。     

From Civil War to ‘Civil Society’: Has the End of the Cold War Brought Peace to Central America?

Revisiting one arena of the Cold War—Central America—which dominated international headlines in the 1980s, this article explores its legacy on the region. It asks whether the ending of the Cold War and the peace accords which concluded the internal wars of Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala in 1990, 1992 and 1996, respectively, have brought sustainable peace, development and democracy. In particular, it explores the changing agenda of international financial and development agencies which have supported the postwar reconstruction of the region. The experiences of Nicaragua and El Salvador have shown that failure to coordinate the efforts at economic adjustment with those of peace-building compromised the possibilities of development and democratization, particularly for the poorest sectors of the population. Conservative elites who emerged intact from the war were able to consolidate their economic power, and resist and limit political reform, while handing responsibility for the poor and the former war zones to international agencies. The latter have shifted their agenda in the Guatemalan peace process, incorporating a strategy of 'civil society strengthening' in order to build capacity within society to create more accountable and democratic states.
The conclusion of the article explores the ambiguities of this strategy. On the positive side it legitimizes and protects the newly won but fragile freedoms of speech and association in the region; on the negative side, it risks turning a historical social and political dynamic into externally funded 'projects' with limited sustainability, whose outcome many international agencies tend to assume they can shape to their own expectations.     

Imagining the absent dead: rituals of bereavement and the place of the war dead in German women's art during the First World War

Drawing on women's visual responses to the First World War, this article examines female mourning in wartime Germany. The unprecedented death toll on the battlefronts, military burial practices and the physical distance from the remains of the war dead disrupted traditional rituals of bereavement, hindered closure and compounded women's grief on the home front. In response to these novel circumstances, a number of female artists used their images to reimagine funerary customs, overcome the separation from the fallen and express acute emotional distress. This article analyses three images produced during the conflict by the artists Katharina Heise, Martha Schrag and Sella Hasse, and places their work within the civilian experience of bereavement in war. By depicting the pain of loss, female artists contested the historical tradition of proud female mourning in German society and countered wartime codes of conduct that prohibited the public display of emotional pain in response to soldiers’ deaths. As a largely overlooked body of sources, women's art adds to our understanding of the tensions in wartime cultures of mourning that emerged between 1914 and 1918.