Century War Research Articles

Military service and marital dissolution: a trajectory analysis

Military service adds additional challenges for married couples. Previous literature on service and marital stability is comprised of mixed results and has often ignored the timing of these effects. This timing is important as it helps disclose the nature of causality and has implications for both military and social security policies. Using a trajectory specification, I estimate the effect of military service on the likelihood of divorce during the volunteer’s period of service and the years following. Two veteran cohorts are examined, those who served during the early twenty-first century wars and those who served during the early 1980s. Among my results, the former cohort is shown to have had their divorce probability increased in the first 2 years post-service, while the opposite effect is found for the latter cohort. Unlike many previous studies of military service and marital stability, I find that effects are not overly dissimilar across racial groups.

Impact of 20th Century Wars on the Development of Neurosurgery.

The treatment of neurosurgical casualties suffered during the wars of the 20th century had a significant impact on the formation and early growth of neurosurgery as a specialty. This chapter explores how the evolution of military tactics and weaponry along with the circumstances surrounding the wars themselves profoundly influenced the field. From the crystallization of intracranial projectile wound management and the formal recognition of the specialty itself arising from World War I experiences to the radical progress made in the outcomes of spinal-cord-injured soldiers in World War II or the fact that the neurosurgical training courses commissioned for these wars proved to be the precursors to modern neurosurgical training programs, the impact of the 20th century wars on the development of the field of neurosurgery is considerable.

Want to Wake Alive: Selected Poems / K. B. Aussi petit que mon prochain by Keith Barnes & Jacqueline Starer

had no fate. His own father couldn’t surmise the meaning of his mysterious name.” As for the fate of Feodasi’s neighbors, only these “stamps” of their lives remain, posted at Sănduleni’s single mailbox and collected in the darkest hours of the night by a guy on a bicycle. Lori Feathers Dallas, Texas Verse Keith Barnes & Jacqueline Starer. Want to Wake Alive: Selected Poems / K. B. Aussi petit que mon prochain. Helen McPhail, tr. Dol de Bretagne, France. Éditions d’écarts. 2014. isbn 9782919121175 Born in 1934 in Dagenham near London, Keith Barnes painted at age eight and wrote his first score at age twelve. Having started a promising musical career, he destroyed all his compositions at age twenty-five to focus on poetry. In 1962 he started a nomadic quest that took him from Cyprus to France, Israel, and the United States. He wrote two volumes of poetry, Born to Flying Glass (1967) and The Thick Skin (1971), and three unpublished novels before dying of leukemia in 1969 at age thirty-four. His legacy would have faded to a shadow in war poetry anthologies but for the efforts of Jacqueline Starer, his companion between 1963 and 1969. For the past fifteen years, she tirelessly organized readings of his poems in French bookstores, on French radio, and at international festivals. She published three books about him with the Éditions d’écarts, a small Breton publishing house: Oeuvre poétique / Collected Poems (2003), K.B. Keith Barnes (2007), and The Waters Will Sway: Selected Poems / Die Wasser werden schaukeln: Ausgew ählte Gedichte (2010). Want to Wake Alive is part tribute and part love story. Barnes and Starer experienced love at first sight, a coup de foudre, and were only separated by his mort foudroyante. They lived in constant motion, spontaneously and to the fullest, and brought out the best in each other in spite of the odds. Starer brought sense, stability, and support to his life. He dared her to be creative. She was not just his muse but an equal partner. Her latest book’s structure shows it clearly. Fully bilingual, it features a selection of Barnes’s poems in English, Starer’s own biography of the poet, translated by Helen McPhail, and her own interpretive translation of the selected poems. Barnes’s first poems, “Devaluation,” a melancholy reflection on the alienation caused by war, and “Catterick 1954” (International Socialism, Winter 1961), a tale of young recruits, addressed the pain caused by a century of war. He soon adopted a deceptively simple, antiheroic style focused on everyday life. Adopting American English , he used wordplay, neologisms, elliptical phrases, and alliteration. The poem “Try Not to Have Something to Say” shows how he used these techniques to enhance a rich web of cultural references. The poems written during the last year of his life formulate anguished existential questions in a lapidary style reminiscent of John Donne’s. The blank spaces between words represent silent signs of childhood war trauma, postmodern transgression, and self-search. His last poem, “Pencil,” is pure chiseled wit: “As richly colored as the crowns of kings / gold red black as any summer pie / I had pencils like you before / always withdrawing as they draw / who finished up / but stubs / but butts / their ash spilt on pages.” “Poet-albatross,” as French critic Maurice Nadeau called him, Barnes “never thought I’d cry except it rains so lone” (“God Give Me My Bone Back”). In his quest for innocence, he gave us glittering shards of heaven that challenge us to “want to wake alive.” Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin Andreï Makine A Woman Loved Geoffrey Strachan, tr. Graywolf Press This beautifully written novel follows the quest of a Russian filmmaker to accurately portray the real Catherine the Great, both under the harsh strictures of the Soviet Union and in modern times. Deeply linked to the history of Russia, Makine examines questions of politics, identity, freedom, and art. Eka Kurniawan Beauty Is a Wound Annie Tucker, tr. New Directions Steeped in the culture of Indonesia, this novel fearlessly tackles dark topics in order to act as a satirical critique of Indonesia’s often bloody history...

American foreign policy: alliance politics in a century of war, 1914-2014

American foreign policy: alliance politics in a century of war, 1914-2014

Molly Deaths and The Failed War on Drugs

Sociologist Tammy L. Anderson proposes that the 2003 RAVE Act may endanger ravers more than protect them. Today’s popularity of huge commercial raves—and the incidence of health complications at them—suggests this relic law of the twentieth century War on Drugs needs our attention.

"American angels of mercy" and the Russo-Japanese War.

The Russo-Japanese War was a clash between two expanding empires. In some ways, it was a very 20th century war, with large armies using automatic weapons; in other ways, it reflected the values of the 19th century, with Russian citizens donating money to the Japanese Red Cross in appreciation for the care of their soldiers. It was onto this battlefield that Dr. Anita Newcomb McGee brought an American mission to observe military medical practices of the conflict. McGee received her medical degree from Columbian College (now The George Washington University) in 1892 and at the outbreak of the Spanish–American War in April 1898, McGee organized volunteer nurses for the Daughters of the American Revolution. McGee’s organizing ability led to her appointment as the only woman Acting Assistant Surgeon in the U.S. Army, in charge of the Army’s nurses. After this brief war ended, McGee pursued the establishment of a permanent nurse corps, and is known now as the founder of the Army Nurse Corps. With the threat of war between Russia and Japan looming, McGee led a group of nine volunteer nurses to Japan in 1904. She returned the following year as an official U.S. Army observer and later lectured and wrote on her experiences in the war.

Burma’s Fault Lines: Ethnic Federalism and the Road to Peace

After more than half a century of war and broken ceasefire agreements, Burma is currently in the midst of landmark peace talks between its government and a coalition of ethnic resistance groups. In July, the Nationwide Ceasefire Coordination Team (NCCT)—representing sixteen ethnic nationalities including the Karen, the Kachin, the Mon, the Arakanese, and the Shan—met in Kachin-held Laiza to discuss the terms of a proposed national ceasefire, under negotiation with the government since last November. The ethnic nationalities, of which all but the Kachin and the Ta’ang have already struck bilateral ceasefire agreements with the government, are calling for greater administrative autonomy within a new federal Union of Burma, control over natural resources in their territories, and a guarantee that political dialogue with the government will take place within months of a national ceasefire accord.

Standing Up to Giants: Thailand’s Exit from 20th Century War Partnerships

This article examines the U.S.-Thai relationship through various changes, paying close attention to strategic military operations within the Kingdom and into neighbouring countries. Multifaceted impacts of American outsourcing and corporate expansion are discussed. Thailand’s role in the War on Terror amid domestic political turmoil and global economic uncertainty draw questions of the value of the 20 th century relationship model. Controversy about undeclared wars within the United States supports argument that Thailand should further remove itself from American-led foreign wars. As the ASEAN partnership continues to play a more dominant role in Thai government policy, with regional concerns more relevant than transpacific issues, Thailand is urged to revise legislation to protect its own security and interests. Such a focus is expected to reestablish Thailand as a regional leader.

The Horrors of War: Representations of Violence in European, Oriental, and “Patriotic” Wars

As military men living in a particularly belligerent period, Russian officers at the turn of the 19th century had ample opportunity to experience the manifold aspects of war. Any reader of their military diaries and memoirs knows how rarely their authors venture beyond the subjects of strategy and tactics, let alone describe the death and suffering that are common in times of war. Nevertheless, Russian war literature from the late 1700s and early 1800s contains a significant number of testimonies about the perceived transgressions of normal military experience. These transgressions, called here the of were both unusual enough to arrest attention and unsettling enough to generate specific discursive strategies that helped the diarists and memoirists cope with their traumatic impact. Sensitivity to the of war is a variable defined, on the one hand, by the historically changing character of warfare and, on the other, by the individual's idea of the acceptable forms of violence in war. Although war suspends the existing political and social order, it is often conducted in accordance with certain rules--for example, feudal warfare based on notions of aristocratic honor or 20th-century international conventions prohibiting the use of poison gas and explosive bullets. The boundary between acceptable and unacceptable forms of violence is defined in different ways by different social groups and societies, often as a function of the timing of their encounters with modernity. The modern mind has an ambiguous attitude toward war. It exhibits a mounting uneasiness about the inhumanity of war, yet may succumb to the temptation of the idea of total war as a means to end all such warfare. (1) As narrating subjects become more sensitive to the of they sometimes employ elaborate discursive strategies to overcome their potentially traumatic influence and to continue fighting. Whereas accounts of horrors reveal the increasingly unsettling character of warfare, the discursive treatment of these can make the continuation of war possible. Over the course of 18th- and early 19th-century European campaigns, tsarist officers adopted elements of the code of conduct characteristic of the ancien regime--a set of unwritten principles that channeled violence and minimized the destructive impact of war on civilian populations. (2) At the same time, a series of campaigns against Ottoman Turkey confronted the tsarist officers with the barbarities of oriental warfare, which further strengthened their commitment to the of regular war. The European and Turkish campaigns constituted two alternative varieties of Russian war experience that were taking shape by the time of what became known as the Patriotic War of 1812. Napoleon's invasion was the war in centuries to affect the Russian interior; it accordingly led to an unprecedented mobilization of society beyond the military class. It forced the rationalistic sensibilities of the educated Russians to confront the of the first total which called into question the wisdom of ancien regime warfare and challenged the earlier perception of the civilian population as neutral and uninvolved. Based on Russian memoirs and diaries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the present article discusses three major aspects of contemporary war experience and analyzes discursive techniques that helped the tsarist officers deal with the of war. First, I highlight the role of the European campaigns of the Russian army in the emergence of the military intelligentsia, who became committed to the of regular warfare and condemned transgressions of these rules by their own soldiers. Next, I analyze the construction of the Ottomans as an oriental Other, whose way of fighting Russian officers found both spectacular and barbarous. Finally, it explores Russian memoirs and diaries of the War of 1812, in which portrayals of unacceptable forms of violence both sustained and suspended the discourse of patriotic struggle against unprecedented foreign invasion. …

Culture, knowledge and diplomacy in contemporary EU–China relations—reflections on the legacies of Matteo Ricci

The worlds that Matteo Ricci lived in—early modern Europe, Ming China and the pre-Westphalian international order—are vastly different from the world of the 21st century, when accelerated globalization binds China and Europe together as never before and when global international society is moving decisively beyond Westphalia. How much are the legacies of Matteo Ricci still relevant, 400 years on, to enriching the relationship between China and Europe in the 21st century? This paper starts with a brief overview of the civilizational encounters between China and Europe and the unfolding of their turbulent and often troubled relationship over the last four centuries of wars, collapse of empires, internal convulsions, nation-state building, scientific and industrial revolutions and great economic transformations. Against this historical narrative is the discussion of Matteo Ricci as a cultural agent, a knowledge broker and a practitioner of public diplomacy in fostering Sino–European relations in its nascent years. The paper argues that even in an increasingly globalized world, Matteo Ricci’s conception of culture, his wisdom about the power of knowledge and his practice of people-to-people diplomacy remain valuable in informing both China and the EU, two aspiring global players, in their search for a viable China–EU strategic partnership.

A Tomato for All Seasons: Innovation in American Agricultural Production, 1900–1945

Economic and geographic centralization are typically seen as critical components of the industrialization of food during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of the fresh- and processed-tomato industries during this period offers an important counterexample to this dominant narrative. Between the late nineteenth century and World War II, the most salient characteristic of both fresh- and processed-tomato production was economic and geographic decentralization. This article argues that the emergence of sites of tomato production and processing in virtually every region of the country played a vital role in fulfilling the long-standing quest for year-round access to both fresh and processed tomatoes.

Peter Post, William H. Frederick, Iris Heidebrink, and Shigeru Sato, eds. The Encyclopedia of Indonesia in the Pacific War: In Cooperation with the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation . Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010, xxix+684 p.

The Encyclopedia of Indonesia in Pacific War: In Cooperation with Institute for War Documentation PETER POST, WILLIAM H. FREDERICK, IRIS HEIDEBRINK, and SHIGERU SATO, eds. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2010, xxix+684 p.The twentieth century has been characterized as century of wars. It experienced two world wars, many regional wars in context of Cold War, and various kinds of internal wars. These wars produced many casualties, both military and civilian. In return, many nation-states that two great wars brought into being have made it habit to commemorate those who sacrificed their lives for their countries. By end of century, remembering has become common exercise for national governments and civic duty for citizens. In this context, intensive efforts at recollection, collective reflection and redress in relation to these wars have materialized in academia as well as public sectors. In addition, international and intergovernmental cooperation has produced new memories, understandings, and interpretations of wars. As such, boom has taken place in many parts of globe (Winter 2006, 1).Two reasons deserve to be mentioned regarding this trend from global perspective. First, as those who experienced war age, they are eager to archive their memories for future generations. In Netherlands, many memorials and statues bearing names of those who fell in war have been established by local communities. Second, many developing countries that were also former European or American colonies have been democratized in process of the Third Wave (Huntington 1991). For these countries, democratization has been process of confronting colonial and authoritarian legacies through historical fact-finding efforts that are concerned with addressing human rights violations that occurred under authoritarian regimes (De Brito et al. 2001). Thus, politics of memory sheds light on those who suffered as well as oppressed. This process has made possible, for instance, international cooperation between former colony (Indonesia) and its erstwhile suzerain power (The Netherlands) to present truth about what happened during war period.Under these changing international and domestic socio-political over years, tremendous international collaborative efforts have borne fruit in form of Encyclopedia of Indonesia in Pacific War. It is timely publication and provides broad understanding of topic. It has 56 contributors from various parts of globe with 684 and xxix pages, plus 24 pages of pictures at end of volume. It has eight major chapters-chapter one general introduction; chapter two historical overview; five middle chapters on matters directly related to Japanese occupation (chapters three to seven), namely, administration and policies, coercion and control, economy, society and social change, and culture; and chapter eight on postwar burdens and memory. The 156-page long Lexicon of People, Events and Institutions addendum to book is especially useful for readers and scholars in need of quick reference. To describe this Encyclopedia as a strong encyclopedia that can help you to get an early, broad understanding of topic (Storey 2008, 5) is indeed accurate.In his introduction Peter Post, one of editors of Encyclopedia, explains purpose of tome. It aims to go beyond myths and misconceptions and treats varied aspects of Japanese occupation period in comparative way, gives factual details of how different groups of people initially reacted towards Japanese military rule and how these groups experienced changes in their living circumstances, and pays attention to legacies of war in three main countries concerned, e.g. Japan, Indonesia, and The Netherlands (p. 2). According to Post, four major advancements in historiography of Japanese period in Indonesia over last two decades have made this Encyclopedia project possible. …

Asymmetries in Altruistic Behavior during Violent Intergroup Conflict

Recent theoretical and experimental investigations of altruistic behavior in intergroup conflict in humans frequently make use of the assumption that warfare can be modeled as a symmetrical n-person prisoner's dilemma, abstracting away the strategic differences between attack and defense. In contrast, some empirical studies on intergroup conflict in hunter-gatherer societies and chimpanzees indicate that fitness relevant risks and potential benefits of attacks and defenses might have differed substantially under ancestral conditions. Drawing on these studies, it is hypothesized that the success of defenses was much more important for individual and kin survival and that a disposition to act altruistically during intergroup conflict is thus more likely to evolve for the strategic situation of defense. It is then investigated empirically if such asymmetries in the occurrence of altruistic behavior during intergroup conflict can be found. Analyzing detailed historical case data from 20th century wars, this study finds that altruistic behavior towards members of the in-group indeed seems to occur more frequently when soldiers are defending themselves and their comrades against enemy attacks. It is proposed that this asymmetry reflects adaptive behavioral responses to the materially different strategic character of attacks and defenses under ancestral conditions. If true, this would call for a refinement of theories of the evolutionary interaction of intergroup conflict and altruism.

A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, by Artemy M. Kalinovsky

A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan, by Artemy M. Kalinovsky. Cambridge, New York, Harvard University Press, 2011. 304 pp. $27.95 US (cloth). At 2012 Chicago summit, NATO members and their partners agreed to withdraw their combat from Afghanistan by end of 2014. As phased withdrawal of remaining 68,000 US inches forward, and as brazen suicide attacks by Taliban mount, Obama Administration anguishes over same questions that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev faced in 1987-88. Will incumbent Afghan government survive on its own? How much funding is sufficient to keep government and army afloat? It is unfortunate that Artemy Kalinovsky's book, A Long Goodbye, not published before 2001, but even if it had been, one wonders if George W. Bush or his closest advisors, who involved United States in Afghanistan (the graveyard of empires), would have read it. Readers who have experienced twenty-first century war in Afghanistan will certainly have a sense of tragic deja-vu in reading this book, as British and Soviet readers in nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, would have had. Kalinovsky focuses primarily on Soviet decision-making process. He poses less common question: Why did it take leaders in Moscow so long to withdraw Soviet troops? Indeed, very soon after intervening in December 1979, Brezhnev leadership realized it had blundered. Even though no one voiced objections at June 1980 plenum, several political and military officials, as well as academics, had communicated their anxieties. Speaking at 1995 conference on Afghanistan in Lysebu, Norway sixteen years later, General Valentin Varennikov--quoting his superior, Chief of General Staff Nikolai Ogarkov--gave reasons for their reservations eerily resonant today: no one in international community would understand if Soviet Union intervened; Soviet soldiers were unfamiliar with Islamic culture, tribal relations, and local terrain; and Afghans should maintain security themselves (p. 22). By early 1981, one of four original advocates of intervention, defense minister Dmitrii Ustinov, was willing to approach other members of leadership with idea of withdrawing troops (pp. 58-59). Significant policy changes were next to impossible during interregnum of feeble General Secretaries Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, but why did it take Gorbachev so long to withdraw after his ascent to power in 1985? Kalinovsky identifies four patterns, or paradigms that shaped Soviet involvement in Afghanistan and delayed withdrawal of troops: the longstanding Soviet tradition of aid to Third World countries; belief that Soviet Union could actually change Afghanistan; lack of coordination among Soviet military and KGB working in Kabul; and US-Soviet tensions in 1980s (pp. 12-13). In first of book's seven chapters, Kalinovsky explains what is now widely known, i.e. that Brezhnev leadership intervened reluctantly. In pre-intervention period, Kalinovsky's paradigm of Soviet belief in Afghanistan's changeability does not always hold true. After all, ever since Saur Revolution in 1978 that brought to power Nur Mohammed Taraki and Hafizullah Amin--the leaders of Peoples' Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA)--Soviet leaders and advisors had urged moderation, cautioning against accelerated communist reforms, but headstrong Afghan leaders did not listen. Some Soviet Politburo members were loath even to extend initial diplomatic recognition to communist PDPA regime, according to Karen Brutents, former deputy head of Soviet Communist Party's International Department, who also participated in conference in Norway. They understood basic incompatibility of Marxism and Islam. Even after uprising in Herat in March 1979, during which some Afghan soldiers defected to side of mujahadeen and more than a dozen Soviet advisors and their families were beheaded, Soviet leaders made a conscious decision not to intervene in Afghanistan. …

A Duel of Nations: Germany, France, and the Diplomacy of the War of 1870-1871 by David Wetzel (review)

Reviewed by: A Duel of Nations: Germany, France, and the Diplomacy of the War of 1870-1871 by David Wetzel Dirk Bönker A Duel of Nations: Germany, France, and the Diplomacy of the War of 1870-1871. By David Wetzel. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2012. Pp. xvi + 310. Paper $26.95. ISBN 978-0299291341. A decade ago, David Wetzel published an important study of the political origins of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, in which he offered a welcome counterpoint to the Prusso-centrism of most accounts of the outbreak of that war (A Duel of Giants: Bismarck, Napoleon III, and the Origins of the Franco-Prussian War [Madison, 2001]). With A Duel of Nations, Wetzel has now published the long-awaited sequel. It offers a multilayered analysis of the diplomacy of the war itself, focusing on the key French and Prussian decision makers, yet also extending to the statesmen of the other leading powers in Europe, from Britain to Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire. The analysis covers the span of the entire war, ranging from its declaration in July 1870 to the collapse of the Second Empire and the subsequent formation of a new Republican government in France, to the armistice in late January 1871 and the ratification of the preliminaries of peace by the French National Assembly on March 1, 1871. Like its predecessor, the book is an impressive piece of scholarship. Well written and incisively argued, it is based on a clear command of the available secondary literature and printed primary sources, as well as vast multinational archival research, mostly involving diplomatic records and personal papers. Two issues emerge as central to the diplomacy of this mid-nineteenth century war of nation and empire: first, the question of international intervention and the [End Page 698] localization of the war, and, second, the challenge of ending war and negotiating peace. Exploring these issues from the perspectives of the major participants, Wetzel superbly shows how Otto von Bismarck dealt, ultimately successfully, with the interrelated tasks of localizing the war and bringing it to a successful conclusion. The Prussian minister president worked hard to prevent an internationalization of the war, from the specter of a League of Neutrals in the first weeks of war to the repercussions of the Russian decision to use the war to advance the empire's interests in the Black Sea by annulling the Black Sea clauses of the Peace of Paris of 1856. Bismarck also resisted the efforts of Prussian army leaders to fight the war to some imaginary military "finish," and he focused on finding French leaders willing and capable of both accepting defeat on France's behalf and negotiating peace on Prussian terms. This included representatives of the old Imperial Regime, as well as those of the new Republic. Wetzel also succeeds at reconstructing the tortured struggles of Jules Favre, Louis Adolphe Thiers, and other representatives of the post-Napoleonic government to admit that the war was lost following the catastrophic defeat of the armies of the Second Empire, and then to accept the consequences. Their efforts to end the war took place in a fast-developing, turbulent situation, defined by the realities of continuing Prussian military dominance, limited international support, and tumultuous French politics, which not only countenanced a restoration of imperial rule but also involved the flourishing of radical politics. Moreover, demands for peace ran up against the will of some members of the new government, led by Léon Gambetta, the new charismatic Secretary of War. This group wanted to fight, at all costs, a nationalist-republican guerre à outrance based on a combination of newly raised provincial armies and guerilla warfare behind Prussian lines. All in all, Wetzel has written a concise overview of the diplomacy of the war of 1870-71. He does not cover uncharted terrain, however, or make a bold new argument. In fact, Wetzel wisely presents his book as an up-to-date diplomatic history in English that heavily draws on the work of others—including the outstanding work of historian Eberhard Kolb on Bismarck's diplomacy and peacemaking, which is only available in German (Der Weg aus dem Krieg...

Book Reviews

Volker Janssen of California State University, Fullerton reviews, “America's Economic Way of War: War and the US Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War” by Hugh Rockoff. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the economic causes and consequences of the wars that the United States fought in the twentieth century. Discusses a century of war; the economics of war; the Spanish-American War; the Philippine-American War; World War I; World War II; the Korean War; the Cold War; the Vietnam War; the Persian Gulf War; and the American economic way of war. Rockoff is Professor of Economics at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.”

Elite power and educational reform: An historiographical analysis of Canada and the United States

In this article, I reopen some of the seminal theoretical debates among critical scholars on the nature of educational reform, arguing that there has been a consistent tendency in the literature to dismiss or downplay the significance of “instrumentalist” analyses in favour of cultural/hegemonic and structuralist explanations. As a result, education scholars who advance the instrumentalist emphasis on elite intervention in the policy process and the importance of organised class action have often been dismissed as one-dimensional and conspiratorial. To support this argument – and, by extension, those made by instrumentalist theorists – I bring together historical evidence from Canada and the United States in three historical periods: the mid-nineteenth century, the early twentieth century and post-Second World War. In each of these historical periods, I demonstrate how the structure and purpose of educational institutions were modified largely at the behest of economic elites (closely associated with political power and the professional educational establishment) in order to shape and implement a particular model of educational reform. Central to my argument is that powerful economic actors have always recognised the political nature of schooling and that elite class consciousness is and has been well-developed with respect to educational issues. The concluding section outlines the implications of my arguments for the future of educational reform.

Gender and power in Sierra Leone: women chiefs of the last two centuries

Gender and Power: The Women Chiefs of Sierra Leone Men's and Women's Cultural Associations: The Construction of Gender and Gendered Authority Women of Authority Before the Colonial Era Women Chiefs During the Nineteenth Century Wars of Trade, Expansion, and State-Building Women Leaders and the Mediation of Colonial Rule Women Chiefs and the Nation State The Sierra Leone Civil War and the Challenges for Women's Customary Authority

Building Virtual Cities, 1895–1945

This article traces the development and diffusion of self-governing “miniature municipalities” and “juvenile cities” between the late nineteenth century and World War II. Hundreds of thousands of children enjoyed junior citizenship in these environments in connection with the period’s city improvement schemes. The stories of the men and women who set out to construct virtual cities as a means of addressing the problems of life in real cities introduce a new cast of characters and a new movement to the historiography of urban reform in the United States.

Vigencia y limitaciones de la guerra híbrida

La guerra híbrida es uno de los numerosos conceptos barajados hoy en día por la comunidad de defensa internacional para definir las “nuevas guerras” del siglo XXI. Concebida para advertir de una tipología de conflicto que parece integrar el empleo de medios convencionales e irregulares, la guerra híbrida está recibiendo una gran atención a pesar de las controversias que genera. El artículo presenta el concepto de amenaza híbrida, estudia su configuración teórica, identifica sus características fundamentales y evalúa su utilidad práctica.