The Great War and Senegalese memory: the veterans’ legacy

National festivals. Military parades. Patriotic memorials. Such public events and tributes naturally bring to mind the idea of nationalism. But what is the cultural logic behind them? How does a country such as Israel facilitate state-related public events as enactments of nationalism?To answer these questions, renowned anthropologist Don Handelman unpacks the meaning of national ritual and symbol in Israel today. He argues that public events mirror social order, a mirror that reflects to its participants and audiences the message that the designers of such events wish to communicate. Handelman considers the meaning of Holocaust and military memorialism, and he investigates the role of holiday celebrations, especially how they affect young children first learning about their country. Analyzing state ceremonies such as Holocaust Remembrance Day for the war dead, and Independence Day, he notes the absence of minorities and examines their significance in the promotion of a national identity. He also

Social media data provide a valuable opportunity to explore the effects that Alzheimer disease (AD) has on care partners, including the aspects of providing care that have the greatest impacts on their lives and well-being and their priorities for their loved ones' treatment. The objective of this social media review was to gain insight into the impact of caring for someone with AD, focusing particularly on impacts on psychological and emotional well-being, social functioning, daily life and ability to work, health-related quality of life, social functioning, and relationships. We reviewed social media posts from 4 sources-YouTube (Google), Alzheimer's Association, Alzheimer Society of Canada, and Dementia UK-to gain insights into the impact of AD on care partners. English-language posts uploaded between May 2011 and May 2021 that discussed the impact of AD on care partners were included and analyzed thematically. Of the 279 posts identified, 55 posts, shared by 70 contributors (4 people living with AD and 66 care partners or family members), met the review criteria. The top 3 reported or observed impacts of AD discussed by contributors were psychological and emotional well-being (53/70, 76%), social life and relationships (37/70, 53%), and care partner overall health-related quality of life (27/70, 39%). An important theme that emerged was the emotional distress and sadness (24/70, 34%) associated with the care partners' experience of "living bereavement" or "anticipatory grief." Contributors also reported impacts on care partners' daily life (9/70, 13%) and work and employment (8/70, 11%). Care partners' emotional distress was also exacerbated by loved ones' AD-related symptoms (eg, altered behavior and memory loss). Caregiving had long-term consequences for care partners, including diminished personal well-being, family and personal sacrifices, loss of employment, and unanticipated financial burdens. Insights from social media emphasized the psychological, emotional, professional, and financial impacts on individuals providing informal care for a person with AD and the need for improved care partner support. A comprehensive understanding of care partners' experiences is needed to capture the true impact of AD.

Management and leadership of intensive care units for the future.

Reviewed by: Soldier of Southwestern Virginia: The Civil War Letters of Captain John Preston Sheffey, and: Lone Star Confederate: A Gallant and Good Soldier of the Fifth Texas Infantry Joseph G. Dawson III Soldier of Southwestern Virginia: The Civil War Letters of Captain John Preston Sheffey. Edited by James I. Robertson Jr. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. Pp. 239. $39.95.) Lone Star Confederate: A Gallant and Good Soldier of the Fifth Texas Infantry. Edited by George Skoch and Mark W. Perkins. Foreword by Robert K. Krick. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2003. Pp. 163. $27.50.) Civil War soldier memoirs, diaries, and letters abound. Historians continue to find them in archives and attics, and readers and libraries continue to buy them. These two accounts from Confederate veterans, one a Virginian and the other a Texan, provide additional valuable personal glimpses into wartime service. John Sheffey served as a captain in the 8th Virginia Cavalry, riding in the Shenandoah Valley and other western counties of the state. Routinely on the periphery of the war's major campaigns, Sheffey wrote more than ninety letters, mostly to his fiancée, whom he married in 1863. While not involved in recounting strategic battles, Sheffey provided other worthwhile points, ranging from support for secession in 1861 to his experience as a prisoner of war at Camp Chase, Ohio, beginning in August 1864. Captain Sheffey was not bashful about giving his opinions of leaders, people, and circumstances of his day. For instance, he characterized Virginia governor Henry Wise as "tyrannical" (44) and President Abraham Lincoln as "vested with absolute dictatorial powers" (148). By 1861 it appeared to Sheffey that Northerners and Southerners were "two separate and distinct peoples" and thus he would not support a "reconstruction" of the sections (15). He found ways to compliment Confederate general John B. Floyd as an "able" (86) aggressive commander feared by northerners (72–73), but he also criticized Floyd for pushing this troops too hard (86). Sheffey disparaged Union general William S. Rosecrans, misspelling his name "Rosecrantz" (43). The captain had nothing good to write about German immigrants; they were to him "the villainous Dutch with their outlandish lingo!" (218). Sheffey's letters are a pleasure to read and demonstrate how a well-educated Southerner infused his writing with his knowledge. Sheffey made numerous references to poetry and literature. He found connections with the Bible and with events and figures from ancient times. He also observed potential links between his war and the American Revolution, characterizing his unit's winter hardships with the Continental army at Valley Forge and their crossing of a river with George Washington's famous crossing of the Delaware. In an excellent editing job, James Robertson's informative footnotes explain Sheffey's references to readers from another century. In contrast to Sheffey, Texan Robert Campbell served with one of the Confederacy's most famous units, the Texas Brigade, commanded by John Bell Hood. [End Page 211] Campbell's regiment, the 5th Texas Infantry, fought in major battles, including Second Manassas, Gaines's Mill, and Chickamauga. A few years after the war ended, Campbell put pen to paper to recount his wartime experiences, including being wounded six times. Some of those wounds took him out of action for weeks. The memoir stresses events from his enlistment at the age of seventeen through 1862 and so editors George Skoch and Mark Perkins supplement it with wartime letters. Campbell received part of his education in Louisiana and his travels (often by rail) took him from Texas to Virginia. The editors support Campbell's writings with good maps and helpful endnotes, identifying most people, places, and events, but one deficiency is the editors' failure to include in the index Campbell's references to Louisiana and some of its towns, including New Orleans (7), Baton Rouge (87), and Shreveport (87–88). Campbell included many worthwhile observations in his memoir and letters. He made numerous references to the tremendous vocal enthusiasm of his regiment's soldiers, emphasizing the physical release that "fierce yells and shouts" gave the Texans (67) in contrast to the Yankees' "tame 'huza' 'huza'" (68). Desertion was mentioned only a few times, but...

Every major American conflict includes studies examining the experience of the common soldier. Within those many experiences, notions of manhood often provided the impetus for a soldier to enlist, fight, and continue to endure the brutal realities of combat and war. Additionally, the primary documents left behind from the soldiers themselves in the form of letters, diaries, memoirs, and regimental histories offer historians and the general public glimpses into both the wartime experiences and the important but often nebulous centrality of manhood within those individual experiences. Using the incredible document-rich source-base of World War One soldier Corporal Francis Webster, housed in the Gold Star Museum in Johnston, Iowa, this thesis seeks to distill the dynamics of a soldier’s understanding of his own manhood and masculinity from the larger collective experiences of men in war. Since the Francis Webster papers are so extensive, and the man himself a candid documenter and highly introspective, Webster’s struggle to define his masculinity and manhood are fully apparent and seemingly resolved during his wartime service. More importantly, however, Webster also clearly recorded his manly struggles in the years before he put on the uniform. The results of such documentation allow this thesis to narratively explore Webster the man first, and the soldier second. Ultimately, the Webster story provides readers a stronger sense of how manhood and masculinity related to a soldier’s motivations during war, while also shedding light on the ubiquitous “testing”of mahood that war offered those soldiers who fought.

Reviewed by: Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American Writer by Christopher Kiernan Coleman John Casey Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American Writer. By Christopher Kiernan Coleman. ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 296. $49.95, ISBN 978–1-62190–179-2.) Ambrose Bierce has remained an enigmatic figure for generations of scholars. They have generally felt it is safe to assume that Bierce's participation in the Civil War shaped his life and writings and fueled his cynical view of the world and his biting wit. Despite this scholarly assurance, not much is known about Bierce's wartime service, and even less is known about how specific events during the war might have changed his attitude toward himself and the world. Bierce did not leave behind a rich collection of Civil War–era letters and diaries, or even a war memoir. Those attempting to understand Bierce and his relationship to the war are thus compelled to piece together a narrative from his published fiction and nonfiction writings along with whatever fragments of unpublished materials they find in the archives. Literary scholars such as David M. Owens, in The Devil's Topographer: Ambrose Bierce and the American War Story (Knoxville, 2006), have used fragmentary evidence of Bierce's war service to demonstrate how it shaped his fiction. Christopher Kiernan Coleman attempts something similar in his biography of Bierce, piecing together a book resembling a war memoir that Bierce was unwilling or unable to write. Along with the writings we would expect Coleman to discuss in the book, such as "What I Saw of Shiloh" and "Killed at Resaca," he adds the reminiscences of soldiers who fought with Bierce in the Ninth Indiana Volunteer Infantry and the Army of the Cumberland. He also includes the remembrances of Bierce's family and friends, particularly those of his brother Albert Bierce. Blending these narratives allows Coleman to create a plausible account of Ambrose Bierce's war service and to complicate our understanding of how it affected him later in life. The examination of Bierce's early life and the last years of his military service raises tantalizing questions for Bierce scholars. Coleman's choice to make Bierce's life part of the history of the Ninth Indiana better situates Bierce within his community. We see Bierce not as "'Bitter Bierce'" but rather as "Brose" and view his wartime experiences through the eyes of his peers rather than simply his own (p. 27). The author's decision to place Bierce's life in the context of his peers raises the question for readers of whether Bierce's oft-commented-on cynicism was a sign of the war's effect on his character or a persona he consciously designed after the war to market his writings. Coleman also includes in an appendix a transcription of a diary Bierce kept during General William Tecumseh Sherman's Carolina campaign. This transcription not only is of great value to scholars unable to view the original but also complicates our knowledge of Bierce's demobilization. Though he supposedly mustered out in January 1865, Bierce's diary suggests that he did not [End Page 175] leave the army until March of that year. Given Bierce's obsession with details, the omission of an explanation for this discrepancy seems odd. It does, however, present a more accurate picture of the often confusing process of Civil War demobilization than the one commonly assumed by contemporary readers. Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American Writer does not quite achieve the status of a posthumous war memoir for Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce to which it aspires, but it has much to offer in its portrait of the Ninth Indiana and of the Army of the Cumberland during the Civil War. It also offers some fresh glimpses into Bierce's service as a small piece in that big war. John Casey University of Illinois at Chicago Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Reviewed by: The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich: A Son’s Memoir Robert Melson The First and Final Nightmare of Sonia Reich: A Son’s Memoir, by Howard Reich. New York: Public Affairs, 2006. 200 pp. $22.95. For the most part survivors of the Holocaust have proved to be remarkably resilient. If they were young and physically fit, they were able to emigrate from the Displaced Persons’ camps where they wound up after liberation. In the new countries of emigration—usually the United States, Israel, Australia, Canada, and Latin America—they were able to find jobs or found new businesses, to marry and to raise new families. Nevertheless war and genocide did not leave them unscathed. Even the strongest among them suffered from heart-breaking and terrifying memories and nightmares. In the privacy of their thoughts and dreams they returned to the ghettoes and the camps where they saw their loved ones killed. If they survived in hiding, they experienced the recurrent terror of an abandoned, hunted animal. However they survived, they felt the irrational guilt of the survivor—“ I don’t deserve to live”—or the realistic guilt of having abandoned loved ones who had depended on them in order to save themselves. If anything, such memories, anxieties, and nightmares—what psychologists have labeled PTSD: “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders”—became worse as the survivors grew older. When they were relatively young and trying to make it in their new homes they were so preoccupied with quotidian matters that their memories were kept at bay by the daily post-war struggles of work and family. When the demands of work eased a bit, and the children grew up and left home to make it on their own, survivors started to have time on their hands, but it was a dangerous period in their lives. Time left them open to invasion by unwanted memories and anxieties. They were especially in danger when they had lost a beloved mate, another survivor with whom they had established a life after the war. With his or her death they lost the only person [End Page 195] who truly understood them and could share their current anxieties and past memories. Howard Reich is a jazz critic for the Chicago Tribune and a writer for DownBeat magazine. He is also the son of Sonia and Robert Reich, Holocaust survivors, who had made a home for themselves and their two children after the war in Skokie, near Chicago. Years after Howard and his sister had left home and had established separate lives from their parents, Robert died and Sonia suffered a severe mental breakdown. She thought that she was being followed by unknown assailants who wanted to kill her: “I heard his voice in the house. He said, ‘I’m going to put a bullet in your head.’” And so she fled her home, wandering the streets until she was picked up by the police and brought to the emergency room of a local hospital. Ever the loving and dutiful son, Howard tried to help his mother and to understand her illness. However, it wasn’t until a psychiatrist suggested PTSD that it occurred to him that her symptoms were related to her wartime experiences. He knew her story in outline: When she was ten years old, Sonia had fled the Dubno ghetto as it was being liquidated and had lived in hiding among Polish peasants for four years. After the war she had met Robert, a survivor of the camps; they married and emigrated to the United States. What had happened to her while she was in hiding Howard didn’t know. Except for some cousins left in Poland, most of her family had been killed. Believing that by piecing together her story he might help his mother recover, and driven too by a reporter’s inquisitiveness, Howard set out to discover Sonia’s remaining relatives in Poland. In Warsaw he met Leon, Sonia’s first cousin—an attractive and accomplished retired military officer—who had grown up with her in Dubno and who like her had fled the ghetto and survived in hiding. Together with Leon, Howard traveled to Dubno and there...

Reviewed by: Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita Simon Partner (bio) Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945. By Samuel Hideo Yamashita. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2015. xii, 238 pages. $29.95, cloth; $29.95, E-book. Samuel Hideo Yamashita’s Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 offers many insights into the wartime experiences of Japanese housewives and children, city dwellers and farmers, civilians and servicemen. Yamashita draws on his long experience with wartime diaries and letters: he has collected 160 diaries, translated (according to his website) 65 of them, and included several in a fine anthology, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005). Many more are featured in this book. However, the reader who is looking for a comprehensive account of daily life in wartime Japan—if we understand daily life as the everyday experiences of a broad cross-section of the population—will be disappointed. The book contains three interesting chapters on the broader picture of daily life in wartime Japan (these chapters—1, 2, and 7—would have made more sense grouped together in my opinion). However, the remaining five chapters focus on two special groups—450,000 evacuee children sent with their teachers into the provinces, and a small group of kamikaze pilots—and one special day: August 15, 1945. These are fascinating topics which certainly involved “ordinary” people (if such a category actually exists—one of the strengths of this book is its vivid portrayal of unique personalities). But they [End Page 189] by no means represent the range of daily life experiences of Japan’s 70 million people during the eight years from the “China Incident” to Japan’s surrender, or even during the five years explicitly covered by the book. There is by now a considerable body of work in English (and much more in Japanese) on civilian Japanese experiences of World War II. Yama shita has drawn liberally on some of the classic works in English (e.g., Thomas Havens’s Valley of Darkness and John Dower’s essay “Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police”1), though without actively engaging with (or even mentioning) these influential works in his text. But he could also have drawn on an extensive historiography that encompasses some of the complexity of wartime experience in a modern society. These include works on art and music; boys’ and girls’ education; men’s and women’s labor; consumption and saving; clothing; rural life; women and childrearing; military conscription; and government propaganda and censorship; not to mention the experiences of almost three million Japanese civilians living in Japan’s formal and informal empire.2 That said, the three topics covered by Yamashita’s chapters on daily life—neighborhood mobilization, food security, and modes of resistance—are all interesting, albeit limited by his heavy reliance on diaries and his limited use of other available primary and secondary sources. The basic outlines of the stories of mass mobilization, neighborhood associations, food rationing, and food scarcity are well documented, and Yamashita does little more than summarize existing research. But his diaries offer vivid illustration of what these conditions meant in practice for urban Japanese [End Page 190] families. For most, their enthusiastic embrace of the war effort bumped up against the harsh realities of burdensome obligations, stress and exhaustion, shortage and hunger, fear for their own and loved ones’ safety, and, eventually, the prospect of invasion and defeat. The diaries also illustrate the diversity of responses to the war situation, from the protected comfort of a wealthy journalist, to the wholehearted efforts of middle-class housewives, to outright defeatism. Indeed, the chapter on popular resistance is to me the most interesting in the whole book, revealing as it does the determination of many people to preserve a private space in their lives separate from their country’s “total war,” even as they collaborated outwardly with the war effort. It is fascinating to me that the same diary genre that for some was a coercive space in which they felt obliged to represent themselves as aspiring “splendid citizens” was...

Private Lives--Public Events

2021 ACOMS Elaine A. Stuebner Scholars Award winning essay

Housework is hard work. Keeping our homes clean, tidy and comfortable takes effort and every moment we spend on housework (that we would prefer to avoid) means we have less time to devote to our private lives. Over the past two decades, numerous companies have created robots designed to relieve their owners of housework. Having robots take care of housework for us, it seems, would enable us to focus our energy at home on private pursuits we find valuable, such as spending quality time with our loved ones, recreation, and relaxation. Although this line of reasoning helps explain why domestic robots are in high demand, this article will contest its validity throughout. By drawing from historical accounts of older, ostensibly labour-saving domestic technologies, it will argue that we should expect domestic robots to alter the nature of housework rather than reduce the need for it. Overall, it will argue that domestic robots change what needs to be done for their owners to enjoy their private lives.

In “Telling Lives, Staging Silences: Dacia Maraini’s ‘Biographical’ Theater,” Alex Standen investigates Maraini’s adaptation of canonical plays by Friedrich Schiller (Mary Stuart) and Peter Weiss (Marat/Sade), and depiction of historical female figures. Standen argues that in rewriting the canon, Maraini subverts traditional discourse by evincing what has been absent from the reading of history, namely, women’s voices and points of view and their interpretations of both inner self and public events. For those historical figures known in the public sphere, Standen shows how Maraini’s plays bring to the stage the women’s inner and private lives, rather than their well-known public biographies. As a result, Standen concludes, Maraini’s plays exhibit those parts that have been silenced by history and public representation.

This article presents an empirical and theoretical analysis of the relationship between the experience of a loved one’s political disappearance at a personal level and as a public and political problem in Chile. It discusses two ways of generalizing disappearance into a problem that goes beyond those directly involved or affected. First, using the concepts of “public problem” and “montée en généralité” (generalization process), it analyzes the relationship between individual and collective action in order to describe how the families of the disappeared transform it into a public issue. This is referred to as “generic generalization” since it draws individual cases together into one general category of denunciation. Second, based on Wittgenstein’s metaphor of “family resemblances,” the article examines other ways of publicizing the disappearance in which the political aspect of the problem does not necessarily obliterate its personal nature for the families but juxtaposes the personal and the public. The article defines these as “sense generality.” The research upon which this theoretical article is based includes ethnographic interviews and analysis of the discourse found in historical documents.

Holding Still: The Private Life of an Air Raid

Earlier, when something like the maligned bourgeois division between professional and private life still existed – a division whose passing one almost now regrets – anyone who pursued practical aims in the private sphere was eyed mistrustfully as an uncouth interloper. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia , p. 23 Introduction Henry Fielding's Amelia represents the relation between the public and private spheres, notably the effects of the public sphere on private happiness. Taking their cue from the novel's Preface in which Fielding declares his intention to “disclose some of the most glaring Evils, as well public as private, which at present infest the Country,” many commentators have discussed the interrelations of public and private events in the novel. George Sherburn identifies one of the novel's two main themes as an indictment of corrupt elites, who refuse to recognize and promote individual merit. Leo Braudy writes that “[t]he reader is … invited to look through personal affairs into the public issues. Public and private life are not separated in Amelia ; we are shown instead the analogy between them.” In this chapter I will argue that analogy is not precise enough; rather, public events create the need for a new kind of domestic sphere, governed by a sentimental husband, himself chastised by law and thus enabled to defend his family against both corrupt elites in the public sphere and pursuers of practical – that is, distinctly unsentimental – aims in the private.