Wartime Experiences Research Articles

East Africa after Liberation: Conflict, Security, and the State since the 1980s by Jonathan Fisher

Only a small number of Africa’s many civil wars since independence have ended with rebel victory, and an even smaller number of those victories have seen rebels transition into successful rulers able to create durable political systems that persisted for decades following the ouster of the ancien regime. In East Africa after Liberation, Fisher considers several flagship cases from the 1980s and 1990s—Uganda’s National Resistance Army (nra), the Rwandan Patriotic Front (rpf), the interlinked Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (eplf), Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (eprdf), and Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. With compelling theoretical insight and rich empirical detail, Fisher shows how, after these “post-liberation” insurgencies won their wars, their leaders then renovated regime politics in the states that they captured and became new governing elites. He also shows how they shaped Africa’s regional politics, both in conjunction and, ultimately, at odds with one another.At its heart, this book is about how revolutionary ideologies about state–society relations were refracted through social relationships within and across insurgency movements both during and after victory. It is about how movement leaders sought to invest their liberation mindsets not only into building cohesive rebel organizations but also into the development of pragmatic solutions to the domestic and regional challenges of maintaining their regimes after victory.In the book’s substantive chapters, Fisher develops this story across three periods, which also serve as key conceptual categories. Taking each rebel movement in turn, Chapters 1 and 2 examine the first category of “insurgency,” the initial period when rebel leaders acquired their liberation ideologies and deployed these ideas in building and sustaining their movements during their wartime experiences. This section also shows how leaders developed relationships across movements based on shared characteristics, ultimately leading to the formation of what Fisher describes as a “collective.”In the second category, “Liberation” (Chapters 3–4) refers to how this distinct category of actors—victorious rebels now rulers—consolidated new regimes at home and built their collective affinities into a formidable regional power bloc in East and Central Africa, while continuing to wear strident revolutionary ideology on their sleeves. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the culmination of these events into a regional “crisis,” when these four regimes meddled in the Great Lakes and sparked a complex and protracted regional conflict following their ouster of Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaïre’s dictator. Very soon after this episode, by virtue of shifting priorities of regime security and competitive jockeying for regional dominance, the liberation alliance unraveled and issued into the “wars between brothers”—Rwanda vs. Uganda, and Ethiopia vs. Eritrea—still packaged as ideological battles.The main strength of this book is its effort to take seriously the notion that “ideas matter” and to operationalize it theoretically and empirically. Fisher successfully weaves the cases through time while providing conceptual markers for how the ideological frameworks of East African leaders elided and collided with rebel, regime, and regional governance. Yet although the stories of Uganda, Rwanda, Eritrea, and Ethiopia are important to tell, their convergence into a similar theoretical stream deprives the book of comparative leverage vis-à-vis the stories of political development in other African states. This shortcoming is not, however, a deal breaker by any means.Another core strength of this book is Fisher’s ability to build relationships in the field, establishing credibility with key actors and penetrating networks of elites that often refuse to tell outsiders about the inner workings of their politics. For all its refreshing audacity, however, this methodology also points to potential pitfalls, among them the uncritical reproduction of elite narratives. Although Fisher discusses the challenges that accompany this kind of research, the next step should be a more thorough attention to the distinct caveats involved in talking to Africa’s politico-security elites.East Africa after Liberation makes critical contributions to our understanding of the intersections between domestic and regional politics in four pivotal East African states. Whereas the prevailing literature tends to focus on the instrumental motivations of Africa’s political actors, Fisher’s more sociological approach considers the frames of meaning that guide the behavior of the revolutionary elites who had to govern fragile states within contentious neighborhoods. It also has broader implications regarding political order in Africa more generally. This book is essential reading for the study of contemporary African politics.

In the Nightmare Country: John Metcalfe’s ‘The Bad Lands’

‘In the Nightmare Country’ offers a detailed analysis of John Metcalfe’s short story, ‘The Bad Lands’ (1920), arguing that it represents an amalgam of Gothic and modernist devices and preoccupations that has significant implications for the development of twentieth-century British Gothic writing. The article considers how Metcalfe's story was shaped by Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence on one hand and Freudian psychoanalysis and wartime experiences on the other. It also examines the important role played by the anthologist, Dorothy L. Sayers, in the popularisation of emerging forms of psychological gothic during the 1930s.

To Address You as My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln ed. by Jonathan W. White

Reviewed by: To Address You as My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln ed. by Jonathan W. White Janette Thomas Greenwood To Address You as My Friend: African Americans’ Letters to Abraham Lincoln. Edited by Jonathan W. White. Foreword by Edna Greene Medford. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xxiv, 280. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6507-8.) This outstanding volume of Black Americans’ letters to Abraham Lincoln, edited by Jonathan W. White, captures the voices of free Blacks and the newly emancipated at a pivotal moment in history. As private correspondence, “they offer intimate, uncensored, desperate, and often heart-wrenching portraits” of the writers’ wartime experiences (p. 4). They also offer new insights into how Black Americans viewed Lincoln, whom they deemed an advocate and a friend. White created this book with his students in mind, but general readers and scholars will greatly benefit from this volume as well. White expresses his hope that the experiences reflected in these letters will aid “Americans in the twenty-first century to reenter the tumultuous, uncertain, and compelling world of the Civil War” and to appreciate a “down-to-earth” president who “never lost . . . his interest in the lives of ordinary Americans” (p. xxiv). White more than succeeds in these admirable goals. White culled more than 120 letters to include in this volume, most of which are published here for the first time. The letters largely originated from two key sources: the Papers of Abraham Lincoln website—which includes more than 81,000 untranscribed documents from the National Archives and the Library of Congress—and the Library of Congress’s digitized Lincoln papers. Meticulous annotation provides both deep context and evidence to “humanize the writers” and to “illuminate their life circumstances” (p. xxii). While Lincoln probably read only a small portion of these letters, their authors “felt confident petitioning someone they considered their friend and their president” (p. 6). Their correspondence “speaks volumes about Lincoln’s reputation” among African Americans “as well as about their own place in American society” (p. 6). White argues that by writing to Lincoln, Black correspondents made “an explicit claim to the rights of citizenship” (p. 5). White effectively organizes the letters into three sections based on the type of correspondence that Lincoln would have handled as chief executive, as commander in chief, and as chief citizen, “an informal role in which a president works to ‘represent all of the people of the United States’” (p. xxii). Topics include a wide range of concerns from colonization, to protests over mistreatment and unequal pay in the military, to demands for political and economic rights, all presented with thorough introductions. This collection is especially effective in sketching out the story of Black women during the war, the inordinate sacrifices they bore, and their [End Page 148] politicization. Women’s experiences are captured in great detail. For example, White includes letters that show the consequences women experienced when their husbands and sons refused to accept unequal pay. Some women also claimed citizenship based on their sacrifices for the Union. A New Jersey wife wrote, “I have four children to support and I find this a great struggle. . . . I being a cold woman do not get any state pay. Yet my husband is fighting for the country” (p. 99). Appeals to Lincoln regarding the discharge of soldiers from the military—a topic that White notes has received little attention—provide even more detail about life on the home front for Black Americans. Letters also discuss the mistreatment of Black soldiers by white officers and the unscrupulous methods of recruiters who kidnapped Black men to force them into military service. Many correspondents compared this treatment to the slave trade; one kidnapped soldier related to the president, “I was fooled in to the Service and the way I was Sold” (p. 128). Read in the context of the ongoing Black freedom struggle, these letters are especially poignant, reminding us that the fundamental demand of Black Americans during the Civil War, for equal treatment under the law, remains unfulfilled despite their sacrifices and those of their descendants. As White concludes, “Lincoln and the black community had begun to...

Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll

Reviewed by: Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers by Dillon J. Carroll David Silkenat Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers. By Dillon J. Carroll. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. xiv, 324. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6966-7.) In recent years, historians have paid increasing attention to Civil War soldiers’ mental health. Diane Miller Sommerville, Brian Matthew Jordan, Jeffrey W. McClurken, James Marten, Sarah Handley-Cousins, and others have demonstrated that wartime trauma had lasting effects on veterans, many of whom struggled for decades. Dillon J. Carroll’s Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers impressively builds on and adds to this scholarship. Carroll chronicles how wartime experiences undermined Union and Confederate soldiers’ mental health, as the horrors of combat combined with poor food, disease, exhaustion, and homesickness. Drawing on the work of Kathryn Shively, Carroll argues that Civil War soldiers practiced self-care individually and in community with fellow soldiers to cope with the trauma of war. Some soldiers ended up hospitalized for mental illness: over 1,500 Union [End Page 154] soldiers were sent to the Government Hospital for the Insane (later rebranded as St. Elizabeth’s Hospital) in Washington, D.C., while an unknown number of Confederate soldiers were sent to state institutions. In the decades that followed, veterans carried their trauma with them. Overcrowded asylums struggled to cope with increasing numbers of former soldiers, while many traumatized veterans received care from family. Carroll persuasively argues that many Civil War veterans suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder. While he is not the first historian to make this claim—see Eric T. Dean Jr.’s Shook over Hell: Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass., 1997)—Carroll skillfully draws on modern psychology and medicine to demonstrate how traumatic wartime experiences prompted postwar symptoms, including nightmares, headaches, and suicidal behavior. Although Carroll is careful not to posthumously diagnose individuals, he argues that the patterns of behaviors that veterans demonstrated, and that doctors and families witnessed, point in that direction. Carroll also argues that other war-related phenomena, including alcoholism, opium addiction, and syphilis, contributed to the postwar veteran mental health crisis. Invisible Wounds has much to recommend it. It artfully uses asylum records, soldiers’ letters, and diaries to examine mental illness from the perspectives of both doctors and patients. It also is unafraid to engage with modern medicine and put it in conversation with Civil War–era understandings of mental illness. The book’s descriptions of the brutality and trauma of Civil War soldiering are graphic and evocative. Carroll also does an excellent job depicting a handful of veterans and doctors, including Thomas Hyde, Prince Rivers, Pliny Earle, and Silas Weir Mitchell, giving faces to the book’s broader themes. Some readers may not be swayed by a few of the claims made in Invisible Wounds. Carroll observes that relatively few Black veterans ended up in hospitals like St. Elizabeth’s. He argues that African Americans did not experience the negative effects of wartime service because they were “imbued with a sense of purpose and a desire to strike back at the trauma of slavery” and were therefore “less susceptible to combat trauma than white soldiers” (p. 2). This is a provocative claim, and the evidence that Carroll provides to support it is intriguing but ultimately not entirely persuasive. Deeply researched, Invisible Wounds paints a gruesome picture of how the Civil War left a lasting mark on the minds of the men who fought in it. Its brisk, accessible writing style would make it appropriate for undergraduate and graduate classrooms, where it is bound to prompt discussion and debate. David Silkenat University of Edinburgh Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association

Catharsis by the Bug River. Przewóz [The Carriage] (2021) by Andrzej Stasiuk as a ‘Cleansing’ Novel

The main goal of this paper is to analyze, depict, and characterize the semantic construction of the latest novel Przewóz [The Carriage] (2021) written by one of the most significant contemporary Polish writers Andrzej Stasiuk. A key way of organizing Stasiuk’s novel is juxtaposing semantically distant wholes, which creates strong tensions not only at the level of language but above all at the level of meaning. Categories of different meaning interpenetrate in the novel, creating a conglomerate of new meanings, showing the fractures of the world described by the novelist, the incoherence of a reality infected by war.Such construction of the novel, based on contrasts and the tensions resulting from their occurrence, allows Stasiuk to reflect the tragedy of wartime experience. War is a catalyst that makes us aware of the uncertain anchoring of concepts and categories, hitherto considered unchanging and permanent, it allows us to capture the illusory nature of human beliefs, the incoherence of human actions, and the naivety of human recognition. The marginal comes to the fore, becoming a model of the world under a microscope, a theatre of history, revealing the nakedness of human existence. Such basic and key concepts as strength, courage, beauty, sacrifice, patriotism, culture, universality, boundary, and truth are questioned.Stasiuk’s ontology is based upon a constant play of tensions between particular categories that make up reality. Nonetheless, the writer does not propose a coherent, unambiguous assessment of reality but rather draws attention to its complexity, impossibility of complete cognition, elusiveness, and delusion. These tensions, so pronounced in Stasiuk’s novel, reveal the illusory nature of the concepts in which a human is immersed, and at the same time, as one of the fundamental elements determining the artistic value of artwork, they are expected to lead to a catharsis, to a release of emotions, they also help to understand better the situation into which a person is thrown at the border moments. Thus, works designed in this way – as cleansing and releasing, and saturated with tension and contrasts – become, as it were, automatically universal, going far beyond transient vogues.The goal of the paper is also to focus on these aspects of Stasiuk’s novel, to demonstrate how war as a border situation can lead to a relativization of concepts, how it can introduce confusion and chaos into a well-established, as it would seem, axiological system, which the writer demonstrates precisely by creating clear tensions. In his novel, Stasiuk does not offer a zero-one vision of the world, tensions are not created mechanically, and the writer uses contrasts and paradox, but what is really important for him are halftones, ambiguities, multivocalities, and a smooth transition in between categories. This is what sets Stasiuk’s world in motion.

From the Wartime State of Siege to Weimar’s Early Years: Parliamentarism and States of Emergency in Germany, 1914–1924

ABSTRACT One of the paradoxical – but seldom recognised – aspects of the wartime state of emergency in Germany between 1914 and 1918 is that it went hand in hand with a simultaneous strengthening of parliamentarism. The Reichstag not only approved the granting of extraordinary powers to the unelected Bundesrat (Federal Council) to ‘order all necessary measures required to avert economic harm’ for the duration of the conflict, allowing in effect a temporary suspension of its own legislative rights. It also actively pushed the Bundesrat to go further in using these dictatorial powers, and when this failed, advocated handing them to a specially appointed Reich cabinet instead. Although moves to create such a Reich cabinet were blocked by conservative and military interests during the war itself, what was imagined in 1914–18 in many ways came to be put into practice under the two Enabling Acts passed by the Reichstag in late 1923. As a result of their wartime experience, the centrist parties in the Reichstag had come to the conclusion that in an emergency situation, temporary dictatorship on terms responsibly set by parliament was not only preferable to handing full powers to the military, but also a positive means of safeguarding and fortifying the indirect form of democracy, built on compromise and negotiation between elected representatives of the people, that was the foundation of the Weimar Constitution.

Barred by Congress: How a Mormon, a Socialist, and an African American Elected by the People Were Excluded from Office

Barred by Congress: How a Mormon, a Socialist, and an African American Elected by the People Were Excluded from Office

Jak w czasach niegodnych zachować godność. Kazimierz Stołyhwo podczas II wojny światowej

How to Maintain Dignity in Undignified Times. Kazimierz Stołyhwo during the Second World War Kazimierz Stołyhwo (1880-1966) was an outstanding Polish anthropologist. On November 6, 1939, together with other professors of the Jagiellonian University, he was arrested by the Germans during the “Sonderaktion Krakau”, and then transported to the concentration camp in Sachsenhausen. Stołyhwo described his camp and wartime experiences in detail in a little-known, but valuable publication In captivity of the NSDAP. Biographical Summary in the Period from September 1, 1939 to January 18, 1945 (Kraków 1946). During this difficult time, he proved to be a righteous and uncompromising man. Sick and exhausted, he was finally released from the camp on April 23, 1940 – it was the result of pressure from European politicians and scientists. After the war, Stołyhwo continued to work at the Jagiellonian University.

Post-1980 Remembrances of Female Wartime Experiences as Communist Underground Operatives During the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949)

This article investigates a selection of post-1980 life writings—autobiographies, memoirs and remembrances—by and about Chinese women and their experiences as underground operatives for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) between 1945 and 1949. It aims to uncover what women’s wartime stories were, as well as why and how they were constructed, considering the broader context in which these narratives were made. A premise of this article is that these published life writings were used as an ideological tool for the men and women who narrated them and for their acquaintances who were fellow underground operatives. It argues that the success of female underground operatives in both the pre-1949 and post-Mao periods depended to a considerable extent on how effective they were in mobilizing dominant, normative female roles, attributes, and norms. This article adds to our understanding regarding pre-1949 CCP clandestine activities and the nuanced relationship between the CCP and Chinese women.

Toward a Transnational History of Wartime Japanese Americans: Nisei and Imperial Japan's Race Propaganda

Abstract This essay examines a wartime experience of Japanese Americans (Nisei) in Japan, proposing to view them as US–originated immigrants abroad. Several thousand Nisei resided in their ancestral land at the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and many struggled with negative public perceptions associated with their enemy birthland as well as pressures to be assimilated into their racial home. Based on the belief in blood ties, the official demands for these Nisei included not only the prioritizing of racial belonging over birthright citizenship but also their total commitment to Japan's anti-American war. Through an analysis of rarely consulted primary sources, this essay first explains these Nisei's efforts at double ethnicization: safeguarding an identity as a US–reared subgroup of Japan's imperial subjects while distinguishing them from their compatriots stateside. Their wartime history also entailed incorporation into Japan's psychological warfare, but resident Nisei managed to exploit their cultural attributes rooted in American upbringing—“special talents” that were deemed invaluable for anti–US propaganda. While working as radio announcers and scriptwriters, many Nisei authored numerous materials about racist America based on their pre-migration experience as a persecuted US minority. Only by serving as messengers and producers of race propaganda knowledge could they legitimately remain “Nisei,” or Japanese of US background, in the land that abhorred things American. This transnational story of wartime Nisei formed a grossly understudied aspect of American (im)migration and ethnic history—one that seldom views native-born US citizens as immigrants or an ethnic group in a foreign land.

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ФУНКЦІОНУВАННЯ ЕТНОНІМА МОСКАЛЬ В УКРАЇНСЬКОМУ СЕГМЕНТІ ІНТЕРНЕТУ

Words used to identify ethnic groups, nationalities, or nations are called ethnonyms. These terms come from different sources and represent various aspects of a particular group’s culture and history. Ethnonyms can affect how an ethnic group sees themselves and how others perceive them, as they often contain auto-stereotypes and reflect perceptions of other communities. These names are essential to the language of each group and help shape their worldview based on the linguistic community’s stereotypes. Stereotypes and associations related to ethnonyms are deeply rooted in society and culture. The effect of wartime experiences has significantly altered the stereotypes of the Ukrainian-speaking community, indicating their flexibility over time. This article discusses the evaluation concept in linguistics, which involves expressing one’s subjective attitude toward a particular topic in speech. Objective and subjective factors play a role in the evaluative activity, including elements like axiological predicates, motivation, classifiers, and intensifiers. Categorization is an essential aspect of human cognitive activity, as it allows us to organize knowledge into distinct categories based on similarities and differences between objects and phenomena. Each category is multifaceted and interdependent with others. The article applies these concepts to the analysis of the ethnonym “moskal” and its derivatives, which have negative connotations and emotional associations in the Ukrainian segment of the Internet. Using these terms in different contexts can elicit positive or negative reactions, which should be considered when analyzing their usage.

Forgotten wars: Russian nurses reflect on their choices in the armed conflicts of Afghanistan and Chechnya

This article examines Russian nurses’ reflections about their individual moral experience of the armed conflicts in Afghanistan (1979–1989) and in Chechnya (1994–1996; 1999–2009). The study relies on published documents and interviews featured in various online sources. The study aims to shed light on the main value orientations that influence present-day evaluations of these events and to show how the values systems of those participating in war had become transformed under the influence of wartime experiences. The concept of charity plays a crucial role in the nurses’ reflection as it enables them to emphasise their special mission in war: not only to provide people with health care but also with moral support. This concept also underpins the practises of justification of moral choice. The article demonstrates that the discrepancy between established commemorative practises and the personal inability to make sense of death in war makes any justification of casualties impossible on the level of individual reflection relative to the events of the WWII. The circumstances of war’s ‘trauma epidemics’ remain significant within these women’s personal moral experience. In addition to the paralysis or passivity in the face of death that they experienced, in their civilian lives, they become acutely aware of the impossibility of finding any meaning in the death toll that is war’s inevitable result. The nurses’ memoirs lay a special emphasis on their attitudes toward the enemy. On one hand, they remember the feelings they experienced toward the enemies in Chechnya or Afghanistan; on the other hand, from a more recent perspective, it becomes clear that these armed conflicts require new interpretations and evaluations.

Students and Graduates of Gdynia Primary Schools in the fi rst Post-war Decade (1945–1956)

The aim of this article is to answer the following research question: what did the process of education of school youth look like in the fi rst post-war decade, and what was the infl uence of wartime experiences on school youth? The text presents a group of pupils from Gdynia primary schools in the years 1945-1956, which is a representative group for the research on the process of education of schoolchildren in urban schools in the period of the People’s Republic of Poland. However, the article also emphasizes the infl uence of the region on the formation of the group ofchildren from Gdynia’s schools. Moreover, the article presented problems and challenges related to the reconstruction of education in the post-war period, which both students and teachers had to face.

“The Song They Lived By”: The “Marines’ Hymn” during World War II

With the onset of America’s involvement in World War II in December 1941, there was a marked upswing in the popularity of all patriotic music, including the “Marines’ Hymn.” This article provides insight into the story of the “Marines’ Hymn” during World War II, including the increase in demand for published sheet music editions and the numerous suggestions of new lyrics to reflect the wartime experiences of Marines around the globe. It also highlights the role played by Marine Corps leadership in encouraging the hymn’s popularity, both at home and in the directives given to their combat correspondents reporting from the front.

War Routes of Civilian Mariupolites: Sociological Exploration

The article analyses sociological data collected on wartime ways and routes among civilian Mariupolites between 24 February and 30 June 2022. The gathered narratives from Mariupol civilians during the war in order to reproduce the chronology of events, document the wartime experience, and spread awareness of the problems faced by the people of Mariupol during their time in the besieged and later occupied city, during evacuation, and when searching for a new place of residence (interviews and electronic diaries). In total, more than 300 life narratives were analysed. The analysis made it possible to draw up a chronology of events in Mariupol during the war up until 30 June 2022, and to describe the experience of the first days of war before the complete siege of the city and during the blockade before evacuation, as well as under occupation. The peculiarities of public shelters and daily life during active hostilities and the complete blockade of the city were studied. In addition the study revealed the specific experience of the elderly and the disabled. Conflict situations that arose between Mariupol residents during hostilities and the occupation were also analysed, as were several life paths following the complete seizure and occupation of the city. Social types of experience were distinguished by availability of evacuation, its time in relation to the war, experiences during evacuation, and place of residence at the time of the survey.

Nazi Conspirator, Russian Patriot: Judging General Andrei Vlasov

Lieutenant General A.A. Vlasov was an infamous, high-ranking Soviet defector during the Second World War. After his capture by German soldiers in 1942, Vlasov featured heavily in anti-Soviet German propaganda and organized anti-Soviet resistance in German-occupied territories. He was recaptured by Soviet forces in May 1945 and executed as a traitor in August 1946. Vlasov’s story challenged crucial Soviet narratives about the war and posed a threat to Soviet solidarity and stability in its aftermath. His case was rarely acknowledged among Soviet historians, only resurfacing after its collapse in a wave of nationalistic works that sympathized with Vlasov as a patriot and martyr of Stalinist repression. In the West, numerous political and practical factors since the 1950s have left scholars split on the truth of Vlasov’s intentions, beliefs, and historical impact. His story remains controversial in Russian academia; attempts to rehabilitate Vlasov have been suppressed by the Putin regime. This paper utilizes German and Soviet primary sources from recently declassified Russian state archives, as well as Western, Soviet, and Russian historiographic works from the 1950s to today. This paper demonstrates that Vlasov was intensely preoccupied with how he would be perceived by history; in this pursuit, he actively curated a vague, inconclusive record of his wartime experience. It also assesses why Vlasov’s case presents a unique challenge to historians and remains highly controversial in academic and political discourse under the Putin regime.

Warfare and Logistics along the US–Canadian Border during the War of 1812 by Christopher Dishman

Reviewed by: Warfare and Logistics along the US–Canadian Border during the War of 1812 by Christopher Dishman Don Hickey (bio) Keywords War of 1812, Canada, Maritime history Warfare and Logistics along the US–Canadian Border during the War of 1812. By Christopher Dishman. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2021. Pp. 352. Cloth, $39.95.) It is well-known that armies travel on their stomachs, but that doesn't mean that nations going to war are always prepared to adequately support their troops in the field. When the theaters of operation are numerous and remote, the problem of supply is magnified. In the War of 1812, there were arguably as many as ten theaters: Four in the Canadian–American borderlands (Lake Erie–Detroit River, Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River, and the Richelieu River–Lake Champlain corridor); three on the Atlantic seaboard (Maine, the Chesapeake Bay, and the Georgia coast); another on the Gulf Coast (that included Pensacola, Mobile, and New Orleans); the St. Louis theater in the West; and, finally, the high seas. Although the British had to send men and materiel across the Atlantic, they had deep pockets and plenty of wartime experience and thus had a well-developed and well-financed system of supply. Even so, they had trouble supporting operations in the West, especially at Detroit and New Orleans. For the United States, the distances were more manageable, but without an established system of supply and the money to support it, their challenges were no less daunting. As a result, despite the successes of the British early in the war and of the Americans later on, the outcome on the battlefield was inconclusive. In his new book, Christopher Dishman, an independent scholar who cut his teeth on the Battle of Monterrey in the Mexican War, examines the war along the Canadian–American border. Not unreasonably, Dishman treats the four theaters as an integrated whole. Although the title, preface, and dust jacket promise that this work will take a deep dive into the logistics of the war, he offers little more on that important and underserved subject than one finds in any study of the battles and campaigns. There is some material on logistics in the opening chapter, but that is far from complete and serves as little more than a teaser for what should have followed. This work is instead a conventional narrative. Dishman is a newcomer to the field of 1812 studies, and he brings to the project a fresh set of eyes. This is often a plus because the author is unencumbered by the traditional narrative. For 1812 studies, Alan Taylor's The [End Page 627] Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York, 2010) is a good example of the freshness that a newcomer can bring to the table. The great strength of Dishman's work is that he offers readers a tight and coherent treatment of Canadian–American theaters in this conflict, and it was here, after all, that the war was going to be won or lost. Although the United States went to war to force the British to give up certain maritime practices—restricting and looting American trade under the authority of the Orders-in-Council and impressing American seamen from American merchant vessels—the only way the new nation could put any pressure on Britain to change these policies was by targeting Canada. In theory, this meant seizing Canada and holding it for ransom on the maritime issues, although in practice what the fate of Canada would have been had the United States actually conquered it is unknown. In any case, the young republic failed to take Canada, and in truth conquering it was probably beyond its means. If so, then this war was unwinnable and probably never should have been undertaken. Better, perhaps, to simply endure the insults and injuries until the end of the war in Europe eliminated them. The principal weakness of Dishman's work is that he is treading a well-worn path, and while he does a good job of drawing together material from a wide variety of sources, there isn't much here that most students of...

J.D. Salinger and the moral wounds of war

AbstractThis paper examines Salinger's novel Catcher in the Rye for some insight into a soldier's psychological reactions to prolonged exposure to combat. Salinger was a heroic survivor of some of the worst battles on the Western Front, starting with landing on the beaches of Normandy and ending with the Nazi surrender. He is also an example of how the experience of war effects young men who fight in it. Salinger was very reluctant to talk about his wartime experiences except with others who shared the same experience, as is common among combat veterans. The author of this paper believes that clues to the impact of the war on Salinger can be found, in disguised form, in his writing, especially in Catcher, which Salinger worked on throughout the war, and for 6 years after it. This paper also looks at the nature of the “moral wound” now of much interest and where that wound may be located in the psyche.

Civil Wars in the Shadow of World War II: The Cases of Chameria/Çameria and Kosovo

This article assesses the occurrence of civil war in the Balkans during World War II and the Axis occupation. It draws on the wartime experiences in the border areas of Kosovo (‘Greater Albania’)/Serbia and Albania/Greece to illustrate the complex interrelation between ethnic tensions and political imperatives, on a local, national and transnational scale. It discusses the Italian and German occupation policy towards national minorities and armed groups as a key contributing factor to civil war and pinpoints the similarities, differences and interdependencies between the different civil war parties and agents of violence.