Browse

Allied Encounters: The Gendered Redemption of World War II Italy is the first-ever monograph to analyze cultural representations of Allied-occupied Italy, one of the war’s most unstable spaces. While the U.S. military viewed itself as a redemptive force, competing narratives emerged in the Italian imaginary. Both national paradigms, however, are deeply entangled with the gendering of redemption long operative in Anglo-American and Italian discourse, emerging from a Dantean topos that depicts Italy as a whore in need of redemption. Tracing the formation of these gendered paradigms and pointing to their intersection with sexualized and racialized identities, this book examines literary, cinematic, and military representations of the soldier-civilian encounter, by Anglo-Americans and Italians, set in two major occupied cities, Naples and Rome. Informed by the historical context as well as their respective representational traditions, these texts—produced during and in the immediate aftermath—become more than mirrors of the intercultural encounter or generic allegories about U.S.–Italian relations. Instead, they are sites in which to explore other repressed traumas—including the Holocaust, the American Civil War, and European colonialism, as well as individual traumatic events like the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine and the mass civilian rape near Rome by colonial soldiers— that inform how the occupation unfolded and is remembered. In addition to challenging canonical interpretations of emblematic texts, this book introduces several little-known diaries, novels, and guidebooks.

This book (originally published in 1887) remains a classic text in African American literature and Civil War history. In it, George Washington Williams, who served in the U. S. Colored Troops, tells the battle experiences of the almost 200,000 black men who fought for the Union cause. Determined to document the contributions of his fellow black soldiers, and to underscore the valor and manhood of his race, Williams gathered his material from the official records of U. S. and foreign governments, and from the orderly books and personal recollections of officers commanding Negro troops during the American Civil War. The new edition of this text includes an introductory essay that narrates and evaluates the book's contents, analyzes its reception by contemporary critics, and evaluates Williams's work within the context of its day and its place in current historiography.

The story of Hungary's participation in World War II is part of a much larger story—one that has never before been fully recounted for a non-Hungarian readership. The dismemberment of the Hungarian Kingdom after its defeat in World War I resulted in the loss of two-thirds of its territory and three-fourths of its population. The loss, confirmed by the Treaty of Trianon, was never fully accepted by the Hungarian population, and the movement for revision of the treaty continued to dominate Hungarian political, social, and economic life. Hungary's geopolitical situation in Central Europe, surrounded by countries either occupied by or allied with Germany, determined that Hungary would become involved in the war, but the attempts to regain lost territories drew it into its alliance with Nazi Germany. With an economic boom and recovery of territory early in the war Hungarians deluded themselves that they had won their long-sought objective. Instead, in the final year of the war the country became a battleground between Nazi and Soviet forces, bringing widespread destruction and a genocidal war against Hungarian Jews, with further devastation under Soviet occupation. The 1947 Peace Treaty of Paris not only returned Hungary to its pre 1937 boundaries, but permitted Soviet troops to remain in the country. The troops were not withdrawn until June 16, 1990.

This book examines the social, political, economic, and military history of New Bedford, Massachusetts, in the nineteenth century, with a focus on the Civil War homefront from 1861 to 1865 and on the city's black community, soldiers, and veterans. It contributes to the growing body of Civil War studies that analyzes the “war at home” by focusing on the bustling center of the world's whaling industry in the nineteenth century. Using a broad chronological framework of the 1840s through the 1890s, the book contextualizes the rise and fall of New Bedford's whaling enterprise and details the war's multifaceted impacts between 1861 and 1865. One of its major goals is to explore the war's social history by examining how the conflict touched the city's residents—both white and black. Known before the war for both its wealth and its antislavery fervor, New Bedford offered a congenial home for a sizeable black community that experienced a “different Civil War” than did native-born whites. Drawing upon military pension files, published accounts, and welfare records, the book pays particular attention to soldiers and families connected with the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, the “brave black regiment” (made famous by the Academy Award-winning 1989 film Glory) that helped shape national debates over black military enlistment, equal pay, and notions of citizenship. New Bedford's enlightened white leaders, many of them wealthy whaling merchants with Quaker roots, actively promoted the military enlistment that pulled 2,000 local citizen-soldiers into the Union ranks.

This book looks at the boundary of military history and disability history. Rather than looking at veterans, it looks at case studies of how armies have defined standard and substandard, and have utilized ‘substandard’ personnel. Standard has both physical and cultural components; both change depending on the period and the nation, and change during wars as manpower becomes scarce. The book takes case studies ranging from the American Civil War through the Vietnam War from the US, Britain, France, Germany, and the USSR.

This study explores the planning considerations of the United States military in formulating and implementing policy for the occupation of Okinawa from April 1945 to July 1946. American soldiers, Marines, and sailors on Okinawa encountered not only a Japanese enemy, but a large local population. The Okinawans were ethically different from the Japanese, yet Okinawa shared politics with Japan as a legal prefecture. When devising occupation policies, the United States military analyzed practical military considerations such as resources, weapons capability and terrain, as well as attempted to ascertain a conclusive definition of Okinawa’s relation to Japan through conscious, open, rational analysis of racial and ethnic identity. While the Marines held steadfast to the image of the enemy civilian, soldiers’ ideas about the race, ethnicity, and identity of the Okinawans evolved through their interactions with the civilians on the battlefield. As the population exhibited obedience and cooperation, the Army expressed feelings of kinship toward the civilians and reshaped its military government policies toward leniency. With the exception of the Marines, the U.S. military recognized the Okinawans as competent and civilized: a group that formed a distinct, separate, unique ethnic community that was neither American nor Japanese in its likeness. Considerations of race, ethnicity, and identity by the Americans deeply influenced the conduct of the occupation beyond practical concerns of resources and battlefield conditions. The mercurial nature of the identity of the Okinawans displays both the malleability of race and ethnicity and its centrality in occupation planning.