War Battle Research Articles

Blood and Germs: The Civil War Battle against Wounds and Disease by Gail Jarrow

Reviewed by: Blood and Germs: The Civil War Battle against Wounds and Disease by Gail Jarrow Elizabeth Bush Jarrow, Gail Blood and Germs: The Civil War Battle against Wounds and Disease. Calkins Creek, 2020 [176p] illus. with photographs Trade ed. ISBN 9781684371761 $18.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 5-8 Of the more than 600,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War, around 400,000 succumbed to disease, and here Jarrow relates the mind-boggling number of paths to the grave. Lax enlistment exams, a nursing profession in its often disdained infancy, hasty recruitment of poorly trained doctors, and a prevailing theory on disease that focused on "miasma" rather than microbes set the grim stage for this particular conflict, and battlefield conditions—crowding, poor sanitation, malnutrition, slow transport of the wounded—were stock players. Jarrow focuses primarily on Union soldiers, since the bulk of Confederate medical records were destroyed in a Richmond fire, but she often redresses the gap with doctors' case notes (and their accompanying photo illustrations) of Southern soldiers. Although the overall medical tale is necessarily appalling, she also indicates areas in which medical knowledge and practice advanced, from improved and expanded ambulance service and nursing, to enhanced hospital ventilation which, although introduced to clear mythical "miasma," often helped stop the spread of disease. Clearly captioned period photos give human faces to the statistics and helpfully comment on the circumstances in which the photos were taken. A timeline, glossary, author's note, lists of resources and citations, bibliography, and index are included. [End Page 88] Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Академическая психология Германии в период Первой мировой войны

<p>В статье представлен обзор основных, значимых для мировой психологической практики, идей по реализации психологических знаний в обеспечении военных потребностей государства, предложенных и разработанных представителями академической психологии Германии в период Первой мировой войны: В. Вундтом, М. Дессуаром, Э. Крепелином, К. Левином, О. Липманном, К. Штумпфом.</p><p>Анализ критических высказываний в классических работах психологов Германии начала ХХ в., манифестов, а также военных мемуаров ученых-психологов, принимавших непосредственное участие в сражениях Первой мировой войны, позволяет судить о том, что характер оценки причин мировой войны, а также отношение к войне и воюющим сторонам связаны с идеологической позицией этих ученых и вовлеченностью их в политические процессы. Участие Германии в Первой мировой войне породило необходимость разработки современных, более эффективных методов психологического сопровождения индустриального развития империи, военной пропаганды, профессионального обучения и военной медицины.</p><p> </p>

At Least Something: The UN Special Committee on the Problem of Hungary, 1957–1958

Abstract In late 1956, the United Nations (UN) faced a remarkable test, as the Soviet Union invaded and crushed a burgeoning rebellion in Hungary, then a Soviet satellite. After the Soviet Union disregarded repeated UN calls to withdraw, the UN General Assembly established, in January 1957, a Commission of Inquiry (COI) to investigate the crisis. This article explores the forgotten story of the Special Committee on Hungary as a case study for the effects of COIs. This commission is of special interest for several reasons. Namely, it was one of the first mandated by a UN body to investigate a specific conflict, not least a Cold War struggle, in which a superpower was directly involved. Furthermore, it was clear from the beginning that the Committee was not likely to compel, in itself, the Soviet Union to change its behaviour. Moreover, 1956 was a time of global political transformation, as the non-aligned movement emerged as a key player in UN politics and, accordingly, became a target in the Cold War battle for influence. Under such circumstances, the effects of COIs are complex and difficult to gauge. While the Committee did not lead to the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Hungary, it had many unforeseen and conflicting effects. These are grouped into two categories – effects relating mainly to times of ideological conflict and political transformation and effects that relate to parallel multilateral efforts and institutional dynamics. Among other effects, the article demonstrates how, under such political circumstances, COIs can create new points of contention and cause backlash precisely from those that they seek to influence. Having cascading and conflicting effects, the central conclusion is that COIs do not lend themselves easily to clean and linear theories. Recognition of the field’s inherent complexity is therefore needed in any attempt to study this international phenomenon.

Battle Diffusion Matters: Examining the Impact of Microdynamics of Fighting on Conflict Termination

How does diffusion of civil war battles influence conflict termination? Recent advances in civil war literature have found that battle dynamics shape conflict termination by affecting the intra-conflict bargaining between disputants. This article extends the theoretical perspective and argues that how battles diffuse matters in determining conflict termination. While battlefield dynamics should in principle reveal previously unavailable private information, the relevance of information-revealing effect depends on the diffusion patterns of battles. The persistent, and possibly battle-exacerbated, commitment problem can also alter the prospects of conflict termination. We test the argument by distinguishing two distinct diffusion patterns of battles: distant and proximate. The empirical results reveal that distant diffusion, but not proximate diffusion, of battles makes civil conflicts less likely to terminate. The analysis also demonstrates that incorporating diffusion dynamics significantly improves our ability to predict conflict termination.

ХУДОЖЕСТВЕННАЯ КОНЦЕПЦИЯ ЧЕЧЕНСКИХ СОБЫТИЙ РУБЕЖА ХХ-ХХI ВЕКОВ В РОМАНЕ А. ПРОХАНОВА «ЧЕЧЕНСКИЙ БЛЮЗ»

The article considers the artistic conception of war suggested by A. Prokhanov in one of his war novels of the dilogy (“Those Marching through the Night” and “The Chechen Blues”) about the Chechen events of the turn of the XX-XXI centuries. This conception differs cardinally from the vision of war in the Soviet literature, and these differences indicate the formation of a “new conception of war” in the modern war prose. By the example of one particular novel, the authors try to formulate and justify a radically different perception of war typical of the current war literature usually associated with the Chechen events. The term “new conception of war” acquires new characteristics associated with religious perception of the Chechen war battles.

An American Voice on the Air: Mediated US Public Diplomacy in Danish State Broadcasting, 1945–1953

For US policymakers, the ideological war for ‘hearts and minds’ after World War II transcended the scope of traditional diplomacy. The American strategy sought to exert as much control as possible over the framing of US policy in foreign media, particularly through radio broadcasts. The present article focuses on the Truman administrations’ mediated public diplomacy efforts in Denmark, as implemented through the United States Information Service (USIS) in Copenhagen. Through an examination of archival material from the US State Department and digitized versions of preserved Danish radio broadcasts, this study shows how the United States tried to promote favourable framings of its policies in Denmark. Because the ideological battles of the Cold War were fought through the media, the Danish Broadcasting Corporation was deemed of special importance to US interests. However, from the outset, the political and executive heads of Danish State Radio were still traumatized by the coercion they had experienced under Nazi occupation in 1940–45; they therefore adhered strictly to principles of autonomy and rejection of unmitigated propaganda. With surprising operational flexibility, the Copenhagen branch of USIS thus adjusted their procedures to fit the local environment; USIS delivered source material and offered assistance, but left decisions about editing and approach angles to Danish journalists. Occasionally, therefore, sensitive themes such as race relations and McCarthyism in the United States received a critical framing in Danish media. However, regarding USIS’s core issues such as the nature and intentions of the Soviet regime and Danish citizens’ faith in NATO, USIS, via Danish State Radio, played an important role in framing US policy and reversing neutralist attitudes.

FIRST BATTLE LINE ON SALONICA FRONT 1916-1918

During the First World War Macedonia in its ethnic borders was a space of bloody fights of the Great Powers and their struggle for world domination and colonial empires. The front line on the territory of Macedonia, known as the Front of Macedonia, whose length was several hundred kilometers long, stretched predominantly through the mountainous areas at an altitude of over 2,000 meters where the armed conflicts, between the forces of the Entente and the Central Powers took place. The immediate cause of the formation of the Macedonian Front was the failure of the Dardanelles Operation, when troops from Galipola were transferred to Thessaloniki. The Macedonian front was the only allied front where the only command had been operating throughout its existence. At the beginning, the main command was held by the General Moris Saraj. The paper deals with the tragedy of the cities and the population, and the mountain heights that were located on the first frontline of the Macedonian Front, with huge destruction and devastation from everyday artillery and air strikes. Bitola as an important communication point was constantly exposed to bombardment, and many of the surrounding villages disappeared forever. Only a few kilometers southeast of Bitola is the top Kajmakcalan, where there were also fierce fighting with many casualties and terrible devastation. The Battle of Kajmakcalan as part of the military operations of the Macedonian Front is one of the great battles of the First World War. In the history, the Battle of Kajmakchalan has been observed according to the great number of dead and wounded and the altitude where it took place. The breathtaking legendary city of Dojran and its surroundings, located in the center of the demarcation (front line), was completely destroyed. The residents of Dojran, on the orders of the Central Forces who were stationed there, left their homes and left in other Macedonian cities, but also in Serbia and Bulgaria, before the very beginning of the "Dojran Front".

„Ludzie czarni od słońca i osmaleni od wiatru, o spojrzeniu straszliwym i groźnym” – wojownicy husyccy w świetle źródeł z epoki

W historii czeskiego oręża jedno z najważniejszych miejsc zajmuje okres rewolucji husyckiej lat 1419–1436. Jest to też niewątpliwie czas wielkiej chwały husyckich wojsk polnych „sierotek” i „taborytów”, którym przez półtorej dekady nie była w stanie sprostać żadna ze stających z nimi do konfrontacji ówczesnych armii. Przedmiotem badań nie będzie jednak uzbrojenie tych wojowników, lecz ich wygląd oraz czyny, przede wszystkim te pozamilitarne, które bardzo szybko przysporzyły im złowrogiej sławy. Nierzadko paraliżowała ona całe armie oraz obrońców zamków i miast – wystarczył dźwięk słów ich bojowej pieśni Ktož jsú boží bojovníci. Ich swego rodzaju „znakami rozpoznawczymi” były: palenie i burzenie klasztorów i kościołów, tortury i mordy na ludności wsi i miast ze szczególnym upodobaniem palenia na stosie lub w stodołach oraz rabowanie wszelkich dóbr ruchomych i nieruchomych oraz handel nimi. I mimo że w średniowieczu takie postępowanie nie należało do rzadkości, to jednak „łatka” pozbawionych litości grabieżców była bardzo chętnie przypinana właśnie husytom.

From Information to Knowledge to Wisdom: the Cold War Battle for Information Superiority and Its Implications for Thriving in the Age of Data Smog

Abstract This article employs a comparative historical perspective to narrow the gap in the existing knowledge of the origins of the trans-Atlantic information explosion phenomenon that dates back to the early decades of the twentieth century. The author examines the root cause of the unprecedented growth of the overall amount of documents through the lens of the rapid expansion of scientific and technical advances across the world and subsequent spread of modern technologies, particularly those applied to scientific and technical information (STI). The study’s focus is on two superpowers of the era: the thriving Soviet military-industrial complex that went hand in hand with the rise of the STI management system in the mid-twentieth century United States. By exploring the practices of a range of U.S. and Soviet information agencies, this research draws parallels with the current information overload and informs our judgment about the challenges and possibilities in scientific and scholarly research brought about by today’s global information age.

The manuscript of General A.A. Alymov “Novachin” from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum

The article deals with the provenance and contents of the manuscript «Novachin» by General A.A. Alymov, stored in the fund of manuscripts and documents of the Department of History of Russian Culture of the State Hermitage Museum. The manuscript is dedicated to the history of the Dragoon Life Guards Regiment, its participation in the battles of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-1878, and history of the Russian Guard. On the basis of printed sources, brief information is given on the history of the Dragoon Life Guards Regiment from the moment of its foundation until 1964, as well as the main combat episodes in the history of the regiment are charachterized. Particular attention is paid to the battle of Novachin on November 10, 1877, in which the regiment covered itself with unfading glory.

Slaughter at the Chapel: The Battle of Ezra Church, 1864 by Gary Ecelbarger, and: The Battle of Peach Tree Creek: Hood's First Effort to Save Atlanta by Earl J. Hess

Reviewed by: Slaughter at the Chapel: The Battle of Ezra Church, 1864 by Gary Ecelbarger, and: The Battle of Peach Tree Creek: Hood's First Effort to Save Atlanta by Earl J. Hess Christopher M. Rein Slaughter at the Chapel: The Battle of Ezra Church, 1864. Gary Ecelbarger. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-0-8061-5499-2, 275 pp., cloth, $26.95. The Battle of Peach Tree Creek: Hood's First Effort to Save Atlanta. Earl J. Hess. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. ISBN: 978-1-4696-3419-7, 344 pp., cloth, $37.50. Comparative reviews provide a unique challenge for the reviewer—in addition to discovering similarities in coverage and contrasting differences in approach, style, and content, the reviewer can find it difficult to avoid developing a preference for one work over the other and then using the review to justify that opinion. While Gary Ecelbarger's Slaughter at the Chapel and Earl Hess's The Battle of Peach Tree Creek continue both authors' investigations into the pivotal Atlanta campaign of 1864, providing detailed, traditional accounts of Confederate general John Bell Hood's series of wasteful, attritional assaults in the last weeks July 1864, which eventually cost the Confederacy control of the city, there are subtle differences in approach, argument, and conclusions. Both books could be described as traditional military history, but Hess includes detailed information on women soldiers in the battle (202), while Ecelbarger provides extensive descriptions of leaders on both sides and command arrangements and, more accurately, dysfunction that will appeal to military professionals and students, demonstrating that both scholars have their eyes on a scholarly, or, at least, professional, as well as a popular audience. Though both accounts are deeply grounded in solid academic research and both read exceptionally well, a comparative analysis reveals Hess's scholarly approach and highlights Ecelbarger's popular appeal, betraying their respective occupations as a distinguished professor of history and as a public historian and battlefield tour expert. One hopes that Earl Hess does not run out of energy before he runs out of Civil War topics to write about. An established dean of the military and social history of the conflict, the prolific author has contributed studies on tactics, battles, individual commanders, theaters of the war, soldiers, and campaigns, including his own work on the Battle of Ezra Church published in 2015, making possible a true "apples to apples" comparison. But his goal here is to set the stage for the later actions by exploring the incredible challenges Gen. William T. Sherman faced in tightening the noose around Hood's still dangerous forces coiled like a snake inside Atlanta's formidable defenses. To untrained observers, Civil War battles appear to be decided before they begin in favor of whichever side can marshal greater combat power on the field, but this ignores the incredible complexity that reveals Sherman's military genius. Hess details how the Union commander had to constantly maneuver his forces toward and around the fortress city and shows that doing so exposed portions of his command to a sortie by the Confederate garrison. [End Page 304] Hess focuses on Hood's first opportunity to inflict a potentially decisive blow on a portion of Sherman's command as it straggled across Peach Tree Creek, leaving parts of Gen. George Thomas's Army of the Cumberland isolated and beyond supporting distance from the other two Union armies under Sherman's command. Fortunately, Confederate errors in deployment and stalwart Union resistance frustrated Hood's elaborate plans on that day, holding the position and inflicting irreplaceable casualties on the Confederate commanders. Hess's narrative unfolds geographically, as the echeloned attack hit sections of the Union line sequentially, pushing some portions back but failing to roll it up in the decisive action that commanders on both sides sought but rarely achieved. Befitting his exhaustive knowledge of Civil War tactics, Hess highlights the Union's superiority in artillery, a testament to the attention paid to both technology and logistics, but Ecelbarger's detailing of the almost complete absence of Union artillery at Ezra Church reveals there was more to the Sherman's army than just superior technology and...

Hearing Early Modern Battles: Soundscape Audio as a Way of Recreating the Past

This article provides a model of analysis for examining museum exhibitions that specifically incorporate soundscapes for early modern battle histories: one is a local museum at Radway, England, that commemorated the Civil War Battle of Edgehill (1642), and the other is the National Museum of Scotland’s exhibition Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites’ that includes the 1745 rising that culminated in the Battle of Culloden (1746). Using film music diegesis, the article analyses the ways in which emotions are generated, performed and produced through soundscapes created for early modern battlefields in museums, demonstrating how gendered representations of the past can be overturned and democratized by soundscapes.

A Bloodless Victory: The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memory by Joseph F. Stoltz

Reviewed by: A Bloodless Victory: The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memory by Joseph F. Stoltz Samuel Watson (bio) A Bloodless Victory: The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memory. By Joseph F. Stoltz III. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. xiii, 176. Cloth, $39.95.) While Steven Watts, Alan Taylor, Paul Gilje, Nicole Eustace, and Gene Smith have each addressed specific groups' memories of the War of 1812, Smith's student, Joseph Stoltz, is the first to devote a monograph to doing so, focusing on the best-known battle of the war across two centuries. Like several books on the memory of Civil War battles, Stoltz's explores politicized memories and public memory through memorialization at the battle site, but he adds the long history of popular culture, extending his study to the present day. The historiographical message is not surprising—that memory has been contested and has waxed and waned and changed with the times—but Stoltz's treatment of the range and variety of memory-making in New Orleans packs a lot into this book, so timely after four score years of concerted militarization in American life. A Bloodless Victory moves chronologically, beginning with a concise but accurate discussion of the campaign and battle, which recognizes the many U.S. advantages and the central role of artillery to winning the battle (rather than the efforts of western riflemen and creole pirates often credited by mythology). The chapters range across political, cultural, social, and urban history—the latter a rarity in studies of American military memory since most notable battles on U.S. soil occurred in rural areas. In the years immediately after the war, the production of memory about the battle expressed the republican virtues of the citizen–soldier and the republican mother, with nods to religion. The Republicans used songs, plays, and images to obscure their failings during the war, to attempt to unite the country by comparison with the Hartford Convention. In the process, they increasingly equated the battle with Andrew Jackson: The memory of the battle became the celebration of Jackson, by his boosters. This sparked polarization, as Jackson's critics began (rightly) to question the battle's centrality to the outcome of the war while emphasizing his imposition of martial law as an example of his wider disrespect for the rule of law. New Englanders gradually stopped [End Page 611] celebrating the battle's anniversary, while Democrats in other parts of the country made it a partisan Democratic holiday. Despite Democratic attempts to use New Orleans as a symbol of national unity in the 1850s, southerners turned the battle into a celebration of sectional prowess. Confederate defeat in the Civil War, plus another imposition of martial law in New Orleans by another Democrat (Union general Benjamin Butler), confused this memory by threatening southern martial identity, and few Americans outside of New Orleans continued to memorialize the battle. (Democratic celebrations finally became celebrations of their party, with little to do with the battle.) The centennial of the battle found women's heritage groups leading the way, presenting its history as a nationally unifying alternative to sectional memories of the Civil War, but the emerging Anglo–American rapprochement compelled them to employ New Orleans as an example of the justice and necessity of defensive war, in the media mobilization that facilitated U.S. entry into the first World War. The first century of New Orleans memory had one thing besides politicization in common: It was whitewashed. This began to change during the 1920s and 30s, when memory-makers translated the emergence of white ethnic pluralism into the top billing of Jean Lafitte as the hero of New Orleans. By the 1950s, Lafitte had become a Cold War symbol of selfless service and national integration. For a few years, New Orleans became an emblem of national unity, the subject of both rural nostalgia (in the eponymous Johnny Horton song) and of the growing number of films showing African Americans in a positive light (fighting alongside white Americans in a 1958 movie). But by the 1965 sesquicentennial, the memory of New Orleans was back in decline. One naturally thinks of civil rights, Vietnam...

The Culture of Fear in World War One

The Culture of Fear in World War One Mark Whalan (bio) W. Scott Poole. Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror. Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2018. 304pp. Notes. $26. Zachary Smith. Age of Fear: Othering and American Identity During World War I. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. xi + 233pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $59.95. In 1917 the pioneering American film director D.W. Griffith visited the Belgian town of Ypres on the Western Front to conduct research for his movie Hearts of the World after being given exceptional access to the lines by British authorities eager to harness his skills for propaganda purposes. Despite receiving license to film whatever he wished, what he found was perplexing. The battlefield was "too colossal to be dramatic," he later complained, its human figures "hidden away in ditches" leaving "literally nothing that meets the eye but an aching desolation of nothingness." "You might as well try to describe the ocean or the Milky Way," he lamented.1 Despite being the most famous and innovative creator of war movies in the era—a reputation staked on the Civil War battle scenes in The Birth of a Nation—Griffith admitted defeat and recreated his own more camera-friendly version of the trenches on Salisbury Plain instead. Griffith is a marginal figure in the two books discussed here, but his response to the war was indicative of a broader cultural impasse. The industrial, technological, and tactical innovations of World War One posed unprecedented challenges not just for the politicians, military commanders, and populations that prosecuted it, but also for the cultural apparatus the West had available for representing and understanding war. Few events in history have been seen as having such an immediate and wide-ranging impact on cultural imaginaries across media and genre; there is a huge body of scholarship examining the war's impact on the modernist movement, for example, or how it transformed memorial architecture and commemorative practice. Yet the authors of these two books have traced the war's relation to another less-acknowledged twentieth-century cultural legacy, to a phenomenon often simultaneously psychological, political, and aesthetic—fear. In Wasteland, W. Scott Poole suggests the Great War gave birth [End Page 613] to modern traditions of horror, a genre that flourished after 1918 across the West in much visual and literary media; it catered to populations reeling from the events of 1914–18 through developing a set of classic iconographies and dramatic situations that powerfully evoked and channeled the embodied and psychological experiences of the conflict. Zachary Smith's more historically focused Age of Fear examines how fear of a German racial and/or religious other in the United States saturated the political rhetoric, religious ideology, and popular culture of the war, a discourse that framed conflict with Germany less as a selfless and idealist battle to make the world safe for democracy and more as an existential struggle to stave off racial annihilation. Both authors locate the extensive twentieth-century legacies of the politics of fear that developed in World War One; and while they are clear that fear does not inevitably tend in one political direction, both are forthright about its hospitability to absolutist, authoritarian governance and its centrality to some of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries' darkest moments. For Poole, what World War One munitions did to the human body (and bodies) was the source of much of the horror genre that flourished in its aftermath, especially in German expressionist cinema in the 1920s and early 30s and then in the "Universal Horror" classics of Hollywood in the 1930s. Revenant armies of the dead, monsters stitched together from multiple corpses, the animation of puppets or dolls, and monsters invading peaceable countries became widely used and popular conventions in films made or designed by men who often had first-hand experience of combat in the war. Poole assesses a diverse range of cultural material to build his argument, drawing from different national and generic traditions and across media. Anglophone poetic modernism is represented here by Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot; the latter's long poem "The Waste Land" (full of rattling bones, sprouting corpses, and unreal burning...

Turning Points of the American Civil War ed. by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White

Reviewed by: Turning Points of the American Civil Wared. by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White Paul D. Travis Turning Points of the American Civil War. Edited by Chris Mackowski and Kristopher D. White. Engaging the Civil War. ( Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2018. Pp. xxii, 248. Paper, $24.50, ISBN 978-0-8093-3621-0.) So far removed from it, how is one to understand the tragedy of the U.S. Civil War? And for teachers, how can it be taught to students? Since the war's conclusion, millions of words have been written in attempts to explain it. Much of this historical quest has focused on battles and the most notable generals, the Confederacy's deified Robert E. Lee and the United States' tentative but persistent Ulysses S. Grant. Amid the books and articles about the war hover the ghosts of President Abraham Lincoln and, to a lesser degree perhaps, Jefferson Davis—whose roles and strategies for success in the war still lead to discussion and often disagreement among scholars at professional meetings. Monuments erected years ago bring many together today, either to protest the inclusion of a participant in the war or to claim an individual's relevance not only to the 1860s but also to the present. The Confederate flags that still often fly from the beds of pickup trucks and in more remote locations—maybe as indicators that, in the flag flyers' opinion, the South never lost and the North never won (unenlightened as such a perception may be)—suggest that the war still looms large. Now there appears yet another book, Turning Points of the American Civil War, that seeks to explain, as the title suggests, nine occasions during the war that could have altered history and might have led to a far different outcome. In a series of essays, notable Civil War scholars explore the "what ifs" of history. However, editor Chris Mackowski explains that "explorations of 'what if' doubtless prove entertaining, [but] they are often fruitless exercises," adding, and most would agree, that "what didhappen and the consequences thereof" are [End Page 700]at the heart of historical inquiry (p. 233). Mackowski and coeditor Kristopher D. White cover Civil War battles and events, from the first battle of Bull Run to Lincoln's reelection in 1864. Each essay stands alone on its merit, with the editors' introductions to the chapters providing background and insight helpful to novice and scholar alike. These introductions are as valuable as the essays. James A. Morgan's contribution, "Unintended Consequences: Ball's Bluff and the Rise of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War," is particularly outstanding. Not only was the battle one of the turning points of the war, but it also led to the joint congressional committee's formation and its early disenchantment with the manner in which Union forces were engaging the enemy. One could weep over Lincoln's discovery that his good friend, U.S. senator Edward Dickinson Baker, a Union officer, was slain in this battle, leading to the many woes the president faced in ensuing years. This factor was also a turning point, if not an omen, of what was to come. In another piece, "The Cresting Tide: Robert E. Lee and the Road to Chancellorsville," White quotes General Lee, who lamented his troops' lack of provisions because many were "destitute of shoes" (p. 119). Heartbreaking. All the essays included in this slim volume are excellent, both readable and meticulously researched. Turning Points of the American Civil Waris a must-read for all Civil War buffs. Paul D. Travis Texas Woman's University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Screen Circuits: Fear and Paranoia in the Sprawl (circa 1995)

The 1990s was a strange time to be alive: a saxophone playing U.S. president waltzed into a Cold War vacuum left behind by the crumbling of the Soviet Eastern Bloc, while Gulf War 1.0 was the first mediated war, yet one lacking any meaningful optics - Baudrillard's so-called weak event. Meanwhile, technology, culture and information was rapidly beginning to coalesce in unexpected ways. The 1990s was more of a feeling than a knowing, there was certainly change afoot and the clock was ticking on a century of acceleration and shrinking horizons. Zygmunt Bauman (Liquid Modernity, 2000) and Paul Virilio (Open Sky, 1997) capture this time from the perspective of the machine's lens and big data's gathering torrents. We were only just beginning to stockpile our algorithmic future. There is of course a strong human element to all of this as well, as domesticity was about to be transformed in ways not seen since the automation of white goods in the 1950s. Installing a telephone line in a new rental was a priority as this was not just a communication device but a gateway to a new digital epoch (chat rooms, conspiracy theories, gaming mods and a seemingly limitless archive of music). Australians, who would become the new suitors of the boom in computer peripherals and digital gadgetry, turned the latent ability to send short text messages from their mobile phones into a new form of digital dialectics. Meanwhile, the cinema was signalling a grave warning of what all of this might mean if we could indeed become virtual, if the machine was in fact alive and information networks consciousness itself. From James Bond confronting a Rupert Murdock/Conrad Black-type media demigod in Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), to the digital psychedelics of the millennial rush in Strange Days (1995) to Henry Rollins raging against reality in the William Gibson penned Johnny Mnemonic (1995). These mid-nineties films tapped a rich vein of paranoia around the new vanguard of networked information and computer-generated image making while also expressing - in often garish terms - a deep anxiety about a not-to-distant future crackling into view beyond the millennial divide.

The current state of the project "Russkyi mir" and the consequences of its implementation in Ukraine

In the author's article Volodymyr Hurzhy "The current state of the project "Russkyi mir" and the consequences of its implementation in Ukraine" interprets the project "Russian measure" as a new form of the Russian national idea, which always had a relational-mythological core and was associated with ideas about choices Russian people. From the ideological point of view, the doctrine of the "Russkyi mir" is an option of a religiously motivated ideology appealing to the Orthodox values, specifically meaningful Russian history, the Russian language as a marker of the territories to which the project is directed. These parameters make it possible to identify the "Russkyi mir" doctrine as one of the options for post-secular global religious-political projects. The vast majority of Soviet rituals and practices were "absorbed" by the "Russkyi mir" and continue to be preserved and function in modern Russia in the 21st century in a re-imagined form. But now, with the loss of sacrality of the first of the key Soviet holidays - the Day of the October Revolution - the function of "the beginning of a new world" took over the holiday of the Victory Day (May 9). This function is enshrined in the collective memory of the people through the annual military parades, the historical reconstruction of the key battles of the Second World War, the spread and consolidation in the public consciousness of the thought of determining the role of the Russian people in gaining victory over Hitler's Germany as an absolute evil. Constantly reproducing an existentially marginal situation, the state affects the key need of its citizens in the sense of global security. These representations in total show new technologies for the deployment of conflict situations, based on global competition in the plane of values.

The Battle of Cheriton: the analysis of artefacts from an English Civil War Battlefield

ABSTRACTThe Battle of Cheriton in 1644, one of many English Civil War battles, was a major turning point in the war. The battle has not been studied in detail, but the battlefield has been subject to extensive amateur metal detecting. Until now, only a very small percentage of the Cheriton battlefield assemblage has been examined. This paper aims to gain a new understanding of the events of the battle by analysing the assemblage of small finds that has been collected from the battlefield site. The result of this analysis is that the true location can now be provided with some certainty, along with a better understanding of the events and range of weapons used at the battle.

Осмысление истории Великой Отечественной войны как важнейшее направление формирования исторического сознания и совершенствования образования (Рец. на кн.: Большая излучина Дона. Место решающих сражений Великой Отечественной войны 1942–1943 гг. [Текст] / Г. Г. Матишов, В. И. Афанасенко, Е. Ф. Кринко, М. В. Медведев. – Ростов н/Д : Изд-во ЮНЦ РАН, 2016. – 454 с.)

Осмысление истории Великой Отечественной войны как важнейшее направление формирования исторического сознания и совершенствования образования (Рец. на кн.: Большая излучина Дона. Место решающих сражений Великой Отечественной войны 1942–1943 гг. [Текст] / Г. Г. Матишов, В. И. Афанасенко, Е. Ф. Кринко, М. В. Медведев. – Ростов н/Д : Изд-во ЮНЦ РАН, 2016. – 454 с.)

Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 by Robert J. Cook

Reviewed by: Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 by Robert J. Cook Jennifer M. Murray Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865. By Robert J. Cook. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. xii, 273. $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-2349-4.) The current discourse about the place of Civil War symbols on the landscape of the United States has once again opened the vibrant, cacophonous chords of [End Page 1015] Civil War memory. Civil War scholars have explored these "'mystic chords of memory'" and America's contested narratives of the nation's most divisive event (p. 13). David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) has defined much of the historiographical conversation. Blight argues that Union and Confederate veterans willingly forgot the war's contested elements in order to promote sectional reconciliation. Recent scholars, including Caroline E. Janney and M. Keith Harris, have disputed Blight's thesis, suggesting a more contested process of reconciliation. Robert J. Cook's Civil War Memories: Contesting the Past in the United States since 1865 offers the most recent attempt to explore Americans' memories of the nation's defining conflict. Whereas most scholars of Civil War memory focus on the war's veterans, Cook also considers Civil War memory in the twenty-first century, thereby showing the continued relevance of the Civil War in modern politics and culture. The first section of the book covers familiar terrain. Cook challenges Blight's reconciliation thesis, arguing that Union and Confederate veterans did not forget the war's divisive aspects. Instead, he maintains, the veterans "played an active role in the reconciliation process, but not through any desire to forget on their part" (p. 97). Veterans advanced reconciliation through a deliberate recognition that their foes fought courageously for their respective causes. The process of forgetting came from subsequent generations who expressed no interest in widening the sectional chasm. Cook credits Gilded Age writers and publishers for having a hand in shaping Civil War memory. Through important publications in Century, Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, and Annals of the War, readers were regaled with often-glorified tales of the war's soldiers and battles. The second half of the book, "The Modern Era," advances the conversation about memories of the Civil War into the twenty-first century. Moving beyond the traditional focus on the war's veterans, Cook explores how Americans have engaged with the war and molded it to suit contemporary political and social agendas. For example, World War II offered an opportunity for the federal government to use Abraham Lincoln and the rhetoric of the Gettysburg Address to foster patriotism. The Civil War centennial, in the midst of the civil rights movement, deepened sectional and racial discourse. Black activists had little interest in commemorating the Civil War. Indeed, Malcolm X discredited popular portrayals of Lincoln as the great emancipator. In the years after the Civil War centennial, the war received less attention, from both academics and popular audiences. Cook attributes this neglect to the "'post-heroic era'" when Americans "seemed to lose not only their faith in towering figures like Abraham Lincoln but also their psychological need for them" (p. 184). Americans in the twenty-first century continue to grapple with the Civil War's legacy. Barack Obama reenergized Lincoln's popularity through rhetorical appeal and by launching his presidential campaign on the steps of the Old State House in Springfield, Illinois, where Lincoln had kicked off his senatorial race in 1858. The National Park Service's Civil War sesquicentennial theme of "Civil War to Civil Rights" offered an opportunity to explore racial accomplishments and the war's social and cultural legacies. Yet the overall public response to the war's 150th anniversary was anemic. [End Page 1016] Civil War Memories offers a comprehensive treatment of the memory of the nation's most enduring and contested event. In offering a study of Civil War memory since 1865, Cook underscores that memories of the war have never been monolithic. They have always been debated, politicized, and maligned. His attention to the war's differing memories...