Early Years Of World War Research Articles

The Cultural and Musical Tradition of Elbasan (16th - 20th Century)

The aim of this paper is to explore and review the role and contribution of Elbasan city in the well-known cultural and musical tradition of Albania. Referring to documents, this tradition dates back in the 16th century with the creation of the first musical bands, characteristic of that time, known otherwise as fanfarat or tajfat. During Ottoman invasion, especially during the 16th-17th century, oriental influence on Albanian folk music has been quite evident. Some musicologists think that this impact has been more evident especially in the music of the middle part of Albania. It needs to be emphasized that this influence has not been absolutely strict, since in most songs it appears either as a collaboration or a parallel version. After the 17th century in Elbasan, as well as in its surrounding regions, there was born folk music, firstly as the music of beano, and later on as a typical civic folk music accompanied by the orchestra. Ethnomusicologists think that prior to folk city music, there used to be country folk music, in the north eastern part of Elbasan, in the villages around Zaranika estuary, where old songs were sung, and very soon they were spread even in Elbasan. Meanwhile, by the years 20s and 30s of the 20th century in Elbasan there was spread civid folk music whose founders were the trio of: Isuf Myzyri, Leksi i Vinit as well as Mustafa Bodini. Folk songs of Elbasan belong to the musical style of the middle part of Albania; since they are sung in the dialect of Elbasan, they are considered as the civic folk songs of Elbasan. There needs to be highlighted that even during the first half of the 20th century, a great role in the musical and cultural tradition was played by the social and patriotic clubs, such as “Bashkimi” (1908), “Drita”, Vllaznia (18 April 1908) as well as the creation of patriotic society known as “Afërdita”. The latest one, in 1917 reestablished a musical band as well with the same name “Afërdita”, which existed before. This band besides various marches, it used to play hymns too by using wind instruments, folk music not only in Elbasan but even in other towns in Albania. The band “Afërdita” functioned until the early years of World War 2. 
 
 Received: 6 February 2021 / Accepted: 20 April 2021 / Published: 17 May 2021

Our Ancient Wars: Re-thinking War through the Classics ed. by Victor Caston and Silke-Maria Weineck, and: Women and War in Antiquity ed. by Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith

Reviewed by: Our Ancient Wars: Re-thinking War through the Classics ed. by Victor Caston and Silke-Maria Weineck, and: Women and War in Antiquity ed. by Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith Michael J. Taylor Victor Caston and Silke-Maria Weineck, eds. Our Ancient Wars: Re-thinking War through the Classics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 296pp. Cloth, $90.00. Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith, eds. Women and War in Antiquity. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. ix + 341 pp. 13black-and-white figs. Cloth, $55.00. Approaching modern warfare from the perspective of ancient conflict has a very old pedigree: Alexander the Great on campaign slept with a copy of the Iliad—his ancient war—under his pillow (Plut. Alex. 8.2). But ancient wars do not always prove as relevant as might be hoped. Young George Washington read Julius Caesar and Quintus Curtius, which did little to prepare him for the grim reality of backwoods combat in the French and Indian War. One finds essays written by classicists during the early years of World War II comparing elephants to tanks, Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia to Hitler’s blitzkrieg, or US Army bayonet training to Roman fencing, but all in retrospect seem silly and inaccurate once the realities of industrial, mechanized, and ultimately atomic warfare became manifest. The pompous irrelevance of the Classics is nicely captured in cinema by the incompetent battalion commander in Terrence Malick’s World War II film The Thin Red Line (1998), who brags to a subordinate officer that he has read the Iliad at West Point in the original Greek—ēōs rhododactylos!—before ordering a suicidal assault on a fortified position at Guadalcanal. The volume Our Ancient Wars tries to link ancient and modern wars in a more profound way, although not necessarily with more success. Produced out of a 2010 conference of the same name, it brings together ancient historians, literary experts, and philosophers to discuss ancient wars in light of the modern, and to analyze modern conflict from ancient perspectives. The contemporary wars of the conference were the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then the civil war in Syria has spawned the rise of the Islamic State, which smashes ancient artefacts in spasms of medieval iconoclasm, yet also funds itself through the sale of smuggled antiquities. In the recent battle in the ancient oasis city of Palmyra, ISIS did terrible damage before the site was retaken by the Syrian Army, although perhaps no worse than the emperor Aurelian, who sacked the city in 273 c.e. Still, even for “our ancient wars” circa 2010, the obvious parallels to wars ancient and contemporary are oddly ignored. An interesting essay could be written on Xenophon’s Anabasis, with the critical Battle of Cunaxa fought not far from modern Baghdad and the Greek mercenaries along the course of the Tigris River in perhaps the most perilous redeployment out of Iraq in history. Alexander the Great fought the decisive battle of Gaugamela in Northern Iraq, and subsequently engaged in protracted asymmetric warfare in Sogdiana, now modern day Afghanistan. And for a historical parallel with the 2003–2010 Iraq War, one thinks immediately of Trajan’s invasion of Mesopotamia from 113–117 c.e.: a poorly conceived plan that was initially a smashing success, only to spiral into an uncontained insurgency, prompting a contentious withdrawal under his more cautious successor. [End Page 378] The 20th century saw great overlap between classicists and the cataclysmic wars of the era. Scholars served on the front lines, intrigued as secret agents (supposedly Syme), sheltered from air raids, and endured prison camps. Some did not survive, to the impoverishment of the field, from the young French archaeologist Adolphe Reinach, who published the cavalry frieze on the Pydna monument in 1910 only to die four years later in the opening days of World War I, to Friedrich Münzer, the dean of Republican prosopography, who perished in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. Fewer classicists today have practical experience in conflict zones. As far as I can tell, Paul Woodruff is the...

The Rise and Fall of the Brazilian-American Military Alliance, 1942-1977

The article examines how the military alliance took shape in the early years of World War II, how the Brazilian Expeditionary Force became symbolic of Brazil’s war role, and how end of war decisions effected Brazil’s gains. Brazilian leaders promised more than they could deliver. The post war era saw less cooperation but continued efforts at maintaining good relations. Vargas to Geisel years brought shifts that ultimately led to unilateral renouncement of the alliance. Even so the two militaries sought to maintain ties where possible. The text sketches the long term relations and it is based on archival research.

Book Review: Reporting Under Fire: 16 Daring Women War Correspondents and Photojournalists, by Kerrie Logan Hollihan

Reporting Under Fire: 16 Daring Women War Correspondents and Photojournalists. Kerrie Logan Hollihan. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, 2014. 256 pp. $19.95 pbk.Beginning with her discussion of female war correspondents in the late 1880s, Kerrie Logan Hollihan set the groundwork for a series of profiles and a convincing argument. Beyond one or two, you've probably never read their names, though several were celebrities in their day. Their stories are worth telling-and remembering, she says. All 16 of the stories she tells are compelling, worth telling-and remembering.For example, she tells the story of Peggy Hull reporting during World War I when women did not even have the right to vote yet savvy editors hired women to write ad copy and features from the women's angle. Hull became the first American woman to embed with American forces. Along the Texas-Mexican border in the early 1900s, she went right along on the marches and never complained that her feet hurt.Similarly, Helen Johns Kirtland reported from France during World War I. Whereas her husband, Lucian, had no trouble gaining credentials that gave him access to the front lines in France, for Helen, the same rules did not apply. Not one woman was credentialed as a war correspondent in the fall of 1917.The social changes after World War I, including the right to vote, did not change their status on newspaper staffs. Nor did it change the magnitude of the achievement of female war correspondents. Irene Corbally Kuhn scooped the other news services, earning a $50 bonus, and made news of her own when she became the first to make a radio broadcast across China in 1924.Throughout the book, Hollihan discussed the talents and strengths of female journalists such as Sigrid Schultz who, like so many of the female war correspondents, was gifted with instincts that led her to solid information. She picked up the art and science of hanging around, building relationships with potential contacts and fruitful sources. Armed with such insights, Dorothy Thompson, in the early years of World War II (WWII), sized up Adolf Hitler as a unimpressive person and shared her frank views, becoming the first reporter expelled by the Nazis. Time magazine named her the second most popular woman in the United States after First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.The author also discussed how these pioneers in journalism were on the front lines of not only conflicts worldwide, but also of a changing profession. During WWII, Martha Gellhorn moved away from the flowery sentences commonly attributed to female journalists of the time to a more hard-hitting style of reporting. Gloria Emerson discovered that the best stories come from people doing their jobs. Similarly, Georgie Anne Geyer, a graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in Chicago, was a trendsetter in modern reporting style at the Chicago Daily News, a paper she described as unlike any paper today focusing on straight reporting. …

Woody Guthrie, American Radical

Woody Guthrie, American Radical

The Research and Production Plant, Parkgate, Dublin: Archaeological Investigations of a World War II Munitions Facility

This paper describes the structures, operations, and history of the Research and Production Plant, Parkgate, a munitions facility developed by the Irish State in the early years of World War II (referred to in Ireland as 'the Emergency'). Located on the edge of the city of Dublin and within the historic curtilage of Phoenix Park, its emissions were the cause of some controversy and resulted in a local health scare, suppressed and censored by the Fianna Fáil government of the day. The Plant's eventual closure was brought about by complaints from the Office of Public Works regarding severe chemical damage in the adjacent Peoples' Garden and to trees and other vegetation further away in the Park proper. In the meantime, production had switched to service a private concern, which was to benefit further from the arrangement before restrictions on the importation of phosphorus and other chemicals were lifted in 1946. The structures were identified and recorded over the summer of 2007 and the research conducted the following winter, based on files held in the Military Archives and contemporary parliamentary reports.

The Persian Gulf Theater in World War II

Although coveted by the Axis powers for its rich oil supplies, the Persian Gulf Theater was the scene of very little fighting in World War II due to strategic allied victories on the distant periphery. The theater remained important, however, for several reasons. The early years of World War II saw Anglo and Anglo-Russian military attacks on two Gulf regimes sympathetic to the Axis, Iraq and Iran. Logistics delivery to Soviet Russia, furthermore, brought for the first time a substantial American military presence to the Gulf, which totaled at its peak approximately 65,000 civilians and uniformed service members of the United States, primarily in Iran. The potential loss of the Gulf's prolific oil fields became a key concern early in the war, and a dialogue arose between Western diplomats, military leaders, and oil company executives over who should defend them, and if needed, who should destroy them to deny their use by invading Germans. This article analyzes the significance of the Persian Gulf Theater during World War II and its most lasting impact, the enduring relationship that emerged between the United States and the Iranians, and the United States and the Saudis.

Sovietization of the Baltic States: Independence Negotiated, Then Stolen

This article examines the forces and circumstances of the early 1940s during which a unique climate was created for the Sovietization of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. It also considers the legal aspects of the case, namely the integration of these three independent, sovereign states into the Soviet Union which violated nearly all measures of international law. This, however, was met with little resistance from the international community, primarily because of the rise of Nazi Germany, the general chaos in the early years of World War II, and the shifting alliances along the Eastern Front. With many former Soviet republics in the spotlight today struggling to stabliize as independent states, and with the Russian Federation still occupying several territories of the former Soviet Union under the auspices of peacekeeping missions, the relatively settled case of the Baltic states serves as example to analyze processes of Sovietization, and should aid in fostering greater interest in the various ways by which desovietization is occurring in the contemporary world.

John Dewey and the Question of Race: The Fight for Odell Waller

In an attempt to better understand the complexity of American racism and democ- racy, this paper explores racism through the plight of an African American share- cropper, Odell Waller, and the reaction and involvement of John Dewey, America's most liberal democratic philosopher of the 20th century. This exploration delves into the nature of American justice in one of the most difficult struggles in our history, the late years of the Depression and the early years of World War II. Fur- thermore, the paper traces Dewey's limited discussion of race and his involvement in attacking racism in American society. History teaches us that American democratic values can be undermined by racism and prejudice. In an America becoming more culturally diverse, racism and cultural suspicion again cast a shadow over the landscape. While much of the suspicion can be attributed to the September 11 attacks, America has a long history of refusing the poor, people of color, and the culturally diverse the American dream—equality of opportunity. In an attempt to better understand the complexity of American rac- ism and democracy, this paper explores racism through the plight of an African American sharecropper, Odell Waller, and the reaction and involvement of John Dewey, America's most liberal democratic philosopher of the twentieth century. The Waller case provides a context for the exploration of Dewey's thought on race during one of the most difficult struggles in our history, the late years of the De - pression and the early years of World War II. In 1940, Odell Waller was a twenty-three-year-old African American share- cropper living in Gretna, Virginia, a small town in Pittsylvania County. As a share-

Myths of Blitzkrieg —The Enduring Mythology of the 1940 Campaign

March/April 2005 · Historically Speaking1 1 Myths of Blitzkrieg—The Enduring Mythology of the 1940 Campaign James S. Corum The first great Blitzkrieg campaigns of World War II have provided a fertile field for the growth ofmilitary myths. There are many origins of military mythology , but the major myths that arose from the 1940 campaign originate from two sources: the need for the defeated powers to explain a disastrous campaign and, much later, the need to find historical justification for current military theories. Of the five most important myths of the 1940 campaign, some were refuted decades ago, but others seem to have an enduring appeal and still affect the way military historians and theorists conceptualize warfare. Myth 1: Blitzkrieg was a strategy. In the early years of World War II the form of war that quickly became known as "Blitzkrieg" became a major topic ofdiscussion by British and American soldiers, journalists, politicians , and most ofthe educated populace. The rapid German conquest ofPoland, the speedy campaign in Norway, and the fall of France and the Low Countries demanded an explanation . While the German victory in Poland could be explained by the enormous advantages of population, wealth, and technology that the Germans enjoyed, the defeat of the British and French in Norway and northern France in 1 940 signaled a genuine revolution in warfare. Why had the British and French succumbed so easily to the Germans? The answer was quick in coming: the Germans had employed a long-prepared Blitzkrieg strategy against the Western allies. Yet there really was no such thing as a Blitzkrieg strategy. Blitzkrieg, a term coined and popularized by journalists in the early years of World War II, was not commonly used in the Wehrmacht before or even during the war. Campaigns led by armored and motorized spearheads that aimed to outflank and destroy the enemy forces were known in German military doctrine as Bewegungskrieg (translation: war of maneuver). Maneuver warfare, to use the correct term, included several concepts such as combined arms (the effective use of infantry, artillery, tanks, engineers , and motor vehicles in concert) and joint operations (operational coordination of air and ground forces to attain an operational objective). The Germans were well trained in both the combined arms tactics and joint operations necessary to carry out a war of maneuver, and this operational method fit in well with the preference to fight short and decisive wars. But a tactical and operational method cannot in itself be called a strategy. In fact, while the Wehrmacht had long thought through the plans for a war against Poland, it was well behind the planning curve in the Scandinavian campaign. There had been no prewar planning or even a serious effort at intelligence gathering for a campaign in Norway. Only in December 1939 did the Germans put together a planning staff for the Norway/Denmark operation. It was a hurried and incomplete effort, and as late as three weeks before the invasion the German staff still lacked intelligence as to the location of some ofthe Norwegian airfields. It was still a successful effort because the British and French plan to intervene in Norway (started before the Germans) was worse than the German plan. The long-prepared German plan for the 1940 offensive was a fairly cautious piece of work, essentially a rehash of the 1914 Schlieffen Plan. In a lucky stroke for the Germans, a stray plane carrying a copy ofthe plan crashed in Belgium in January 1 940, so a new plan had to be created—one that was based on von Manstein's concept of concentrating most ofthe mechanized forces for one great breakthrough in the Ardennes. The German plan relied on poor French leadership to work, and in this assumption the Germans were quite correct. Myth 2: One of the most popular myths promulgated by the French and British leadership at the time is that the German army simply overwhelmed the Allies with masses of modern tanks. This explanation was circulated by many ofthe most prominent military commentators and served to insulate the French and British military leaders from charges of incompetence. Generals can scarcely be blamed if they are overwhelmed by superior numbers. If...

The Franco-Prussian War: the German conquest of France in 1870-1871

Franco-Prussian War: German Conquest of France in 1870-1871. By Geoffrey Wawro. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 327 pages. $35.00. Reviewed by Dr. Eugenia C. Kiesling, Professor of History, US Military Academy. For 40 years, no historian has dared to risk comparison with Michael Howard's Franco-Prussian War: German Invasion of France, 1870-1871 by publishing an English-language history of the Franco-Prussian War. Professor Geoffrey Wawro is not only brave but has succeeded in producing, if not a replacement for Howard, a worthy companion volume. Even more than Howard's book, this is straightforward military history, a study of armies and battles with little discussion of national policy, and with no concern for the economic or other domestic aspects of the war. As such, it is a useful work. Franco-Prussian War was a military proving ground in an age full of uncertainties. French long-service professionals fought against Prussian conscripts, Chassepot rifles and Mitrailleuse machine guns against the Dreyse needle gun, Krupp's new steel breech-loading six-pounder gun against the French army's four-pounder bronze muzzle-loaders, an efficient general staff against a poor one. No one knew how these various contests would turn out, and Wawro offers an enthralling narrative of how battles were won and lost. As such, it ought to be of great interest to the professional soldier as well as the military historian. In introducing the two armies, Wawro touches only briefly on the fairly well-understood subject of contemporary technological developments and their impact on military tactics. That decision reflects a reasonable economy of force, especially as the necessary points are clearly illustrated in the battle narratives. More problematic is the absence of discussion of the technology's effects at the operational and strategic levels of war. For example, because Wawro says little about railroads, readers unfamiliar with the subject may fail to recognize the technological background to General Helmut von Moltke's prediction for battles of encirclement. One advantage of being the second person to write on a given war is there is no historiography to bother about. Wawro's book is all the more readable for the absence of arguments with other historians. On the other hand, a historiographical discussion would have had the salutary effect of forcing Wawro to take more rigorous positions on certain points of controversy. In particular, Wawro does not situate himself vis-a-vis the triumphalist school of German military history, which sees the Prussian of as a model of inexorable efficiency, the precursor of the Wehrmacht of the early years of World War II. If one believes this theory, Germans rolled over France in and 1940 (and almost in 1914) because their was overwhelmingly superior in quality of soldiers, leadership, doctrine, organization, and use of technology. This school emphasizes the German General Staff system and an aggressive approach to war characterized by doctrines like auftragstaktik and operational art. In the early pages, Wawro appears to belong in the triumphalist camp. His chapter on The Armies in 1870 compares the sins of the French army with a Prussian war-planning marked by theoretical and technical innovations. He invidiously compares French methods, orderly but slow and rigid, with auftragstaktik, purposeful energy behind the appearance of disorder. But the operation narrative refers to auftragstaktik and operational art too rarely to demonstrate the importance of these concepts to the German victory. For example, the claim that operational art dictated a particular action begs the question of defining operational art and explaining how a doctrine enforces its will on armies. …

A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory (review)

Reviewed by: A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory Caroline Chung Simpson A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory. By Emily S. Rosenberg. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003. "This book," author Emily S. Rosenberg concludes at the close of her study of Pearl Harbor, "has attempted to work against the revelatory and event-centered tradition that generally seeks to uncover the 'reality' of the past and to stabilize historical meaning" (189). Instead, Rosenberg tries to understand Pearl Harbor less as an event, or a chain of causal effects (the facts surrounding December 7, 1941 have long since been exhaustively "uncovered") than as an unstable and contingent series of memory acts reflecting debates about, primarily, militarism or military culture and racial politics in the United States in the last six decades. She goes beyond simply asserting that Pearl Harbor is "a date which will live" (as recent invocations of the event in the wake of 9-11 seem to have affirmed) in order to focus instead on how it "lives" in a thousand guises and symbolizes dozens of often conflicting historical "lessons" (5). This study pays homage to the important recent scholarship on history and memory, a field of theory that dispenses with the illusion of a public/private divide between history and memory by exposing the unstable aesthetic and affective terms of official forms of remembrance. Rosenberg's adoption of this view of "history/memory" allows her to appreciate especially how the representation of Pearl Harbor has been shaped by "diverse print, celluloid, electronic and commemorative media" (7), amid a half century of cataclysmic cultural and political upheaval. [End Page 81] The book is divided into two sections. The first lays out the foundational meanings that initially became associated with Pearl Harbor, and the second section examines the significant post-1991 revisions and re-transcriptions of Pearl Harbor's meaning. Topics include the immediate post-WWII debates about what Pearl Harbor did or did not reveal about "backdoor" government deceit and American-Japanese relations, as well as the impact of the many controversies surrounding the fiftieth anniversary celebrations and the increasing visibility of Japanese American internment in academic and popular accounts of the early years of World War II. The ten chapters are short, usually no more than twenty pages (one chapter, "Commemoration of Sacrifice" is barely ten pages, in fact). As a result, this study is best approached as an attempt to sketch, rather than to question or re-vision, the broader significance of these episodes in shaping the cultural stakes and practices of remembering Pearl Harbor. Although Rosenberg is a historian, her analysis would probably disappoint those historians seeking comprehensive, detailed engagements with these complex debates and the archives that continue to amass about them. Asian American historians, in particular, will find nothing new or provocative in the chapter on Japanese American internment, for example. Rosenberg characterizes Japanese American narratives of the internment as either "compliance" (or "model minority") and "resistance" (142) stories, a familiar if somewhat reductive viewpoint. Curiously, this assertion appears in the context of a passage where Rosenberg quotes Lisa Lowe's observation that "stereotypes that construct Asians as the threatening 'yellow peril,' or alternatively, that pose Asians as the domesticated 'model minority'" (143) serve to maintain the coherence of the United States in the face of histories of racism that often exceed its logic. A number of other points of historical "fact" would likewise benefit from more questioning or troubling. In Chapter 5, "Bilateral Relations", which treats the controversies that arose in the months leading to the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor in 1991, Rosenberg observes that "the emergence of strong identity politics during the 1980s and 1990s," acting in concert with "the end of the cold war," established the tense terms of the global debates about the commemoration of Pearl Harbor (102). Yet nothing more is said about the convergence of these ideological shifts in the rhetoric or tenor of the debates. Neither does the chapter confront the question of how these cultural formations affected the rising demands within the United States for a presidential apology for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nor the meaning of the...

Oliver Cecil Simpson

Oliver Cecil Simpson

Useless Eaters

The methods used for mass extermination in the Nazi death camps originated and were perfected in earlier use against people with physical, emotional, and intellectual disabilities. This article describes the historical context of attitudes toward people with disabilities in Germany and how this context produced mass murder of people with disabilities prior to and during the early years of World War II. Several key marker variables, the manipulation of which allowed a highly sophisticated Western society to officially sanction the murder of people with disabilities, are examined. Important implications must continually be drawn from these sad events as we work with people with disabilities at the dawn of a new century.

Silent heroes: downed airmen and the French underground

In the early years of World War II, it was an amazing feat for an Allied airman shot down over occupied Europe to make it back to England. By 1943, however, pilots and crewmembers, supplied with kits, knew they had a 50 percent chance of evading capture and returning home. An estimated 12,000 French civilians helped make this possible. More than 5,000 airmen, many of them American, successfully traveled along escape lines organized much like those of the U.S. Underground Railroad, using secret codes and stopping in safe houses. If caught, they risked internment in a POW camp. But the French, Belgian, and Dutch civilians who aided them risked torture and even death. Sherri Ottis writes candidly about the pilots and crewmen who walked out of occupied Europe, as well as the British intelligence agency in charge of Escape and Evasion. But her main focus is on the helpers, those patriots who have been all but ignored in English-language books and journals. To research their stories, Ottis hiked the Pyrenees and interviewed many of the survivors. She tells of the extreme difficulty they had in avoiding Nazi infiltration by double agents; of their creativity in hiding evaders in their homes, sometimes in the midst of unexpected searches; of their generosity in sharing their meager food supplies during wartime; and of their unflagging spirit and courage in the face of a war fought on a very personal level.

"There are Times When Silence is a Sin": The Women's Division of the American Jewish Congress and the Anti-Nazi Boycott Movement

From 1933 to 1941 the American Jewish Congress helped lead a consumer boycott of German-made goods in the United States in an effort to undermine the Hitler regime and alleviate the crisis of German Jews. While failing to bring an end to Hitler's antisemitic campaign, the anti-Nazi boycott movement—and the Congress's participation therein— is still regarded as one of the most significant examples of American Jewish mobilization on behalf of European Jewry. Scholarly accounts of the boycott effort, most notably Morris Frommer's American Jewish Congress: A History, 1914-1950 and Moshe Gottlieb's Ameri can Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933-1941, illuminate the central role of the American Jewish Congress in organizing the boycott effort as well as the tensions within and between American Jewish organizations that inhib ited a united protest front.1 These assessments, though, have neglected one of the boycott movement's essential features: from 1934 to 1941 the Women's Division of the American Jewish Congress assumed a pivotal role in the day-to day operation and local supervision of boycott work. Reflecting a gendered distribution of activist labor, division members took on the jobs of neighborhood organization, consumer mobilization, and storefront picketing. Their work was critical to the functioning of the protest effort through the early years of World War II and thus vital to understanding the complex dynamics and mechanics of the boycott movement. Historians' neglect of the Women's Division part in boycott work is not anomalous. The historiography of American Jewry and the Holo caust speaks little of Jewish women. Landmark studies of American Jewish mobilization during World War II focus primarily on the leadership of major American Jewish defense organizations, such as the

A New Deal for the Arts.

During the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930s and into the early years of World War II, the federal government, as one of its efforts to employ some of the millions of Americans then without work, supported the arts in unprecedented ways. For 11 years, between 1933 and 1943, federal tax dollars employed artists, musicians, actors, writers, photographers, and dancers. Never before or since has our government so extensively sponsored the arts. This book, based on a 1997 exhibit at the National Archives and Records Administration, tells the story of these short-lived, but remarkable, cultural endeavors.

Persistent Memory: Central European Refugees in an Andean Land

Persistent Memory: Central European Refugees in an Andean Land

A historically significant case of labor-management problems: The newport torpedo plant before world war II

This study argues that the failure of submarine torpedoes during the early years of World War II were partially the result of the unique labor-management problems in the only arsenal producing this weapon before the war. Declassified National Archives material obtained by the authors records the continuous friction between unionized workers, local and federal politicians, and U.S. Navy administrators which led to morale and productivity problems at the Newport, Rhode Island torpedo arsenal. These problems resulted in inadequate production, enforced conservation of torpedoes, and a consequent lack of torpedo testing before World War II.

"Merely a Facade"? Roosevelt and the Southwest Pacific

tralia, the region's geographically largest nation. So it is for Austra lian-American relations in the midst of a conflict that reshaped the geopolitical, economic, and even ideological face of the entire world. Nothing has made, and continues to make, Australians bitter and angry more than to be taken for granted. Britain had made a habit of it even as the colony developed its own identity as a nation—well be fore official independence. The most flagrant examples came in the two twentieth-century world wars. Had Britain made and suffered, on a per capita basis, Australia's contributions and losses in World War I, His Majesty's Government would have sued for peace. Then, in the early years of World War II, Britain followed a logical Germany first policy without ever consulting the Australians. Troops from Down Under,1 their homeland directly threatened by rapid Japanese expan sion, were expected (not asked) to participate in campaigns across North Africa that were peripheral to both the Pacific and the Euro pean wars—though not peripheral to British imperial interests. Then came the Americans, Douglas MacArthur and Franklin D. Roosevelt, who treated Australia as a launching pad either for personal fame or for a counterattack against the Japanese. Granted, the Australians des