World War In France Research Articles

Cyanide: An Old Enemy With Heightened Risks

August 2006 32:4S yanide is an old enemy of human health. One of C most notorious of poisons, cyanide has caused both accidental and purposeful human fatality since antiquity. In Rome during the first century, long before cyanide was identified or named, the Emperor Nero allegedly used the cyanogenic plant cherry laurel to kill enemies. Cyanide continued to be used through the centuries as an agent of suicide and genocide and a weapon of war. Histories of 20th century warfare are peppered with references to cyanide, purportedly used by France in World War I, Japan in World War II, the Nazis in World War II, and Iraq in the 1980s. Cyanide remains a viable weapon in the 21st century as exemplified by its planned or actual use in terrorism including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Tokyo subway attack, the 2002 plot to poison the water supply to the American Embassy in Rome, and the alleged amassment by ‘‘Dr. Chaos’’ of more than 1 pound of cyanide in the Chicago subway system in 2002. The latter examples show that, its status as an old enemy notwithstanding, cyanide is a current threat to human health. Today, cyanide is associated with heightened risks. Always a relatively accessible poison, cyanide might be more readily available today than ever before with the advent of widespread use of the Internet. In the study ‘‘Look What I Found! Poison Hunting on eBay,’’ cyanide was among the poisons advertised as available for sale in searches of the online auction web site over the 10-month period from May 2003 to February 2004. The perpetrator in the 2003 cyanide murder of a Baltimore teenager obtained cyanide over the Internet from a chemical and laboratory-supply company. The potential availability of

Women and the Second World War in France, 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints. By Hanna Diamond. Women and Men in History. Edited by, Patricia Skinner, Pamela Sharpe, and Penny Summerfield. Harlow: Longman, 1999. Pp. xiv+231. £45.00 (cloth); £14.99 (paper).French Women in Politics: Writing Power, Paternal Legitimization, and Maternal Legacies. By Raylene L. Ramsay. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. Pp. xviii+318. $75.00

<i>Women and the Second World War in France, 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints</i>. By Hanna Diamond. Women and Men in History. Edited by, Patricia Skinner, Pamela Sharpe, and Penny Summerfield. Harlow: Longman, 1999. Pp. xiv+231. £45.00 (cloth); £14.99 (paper).<i>French Women in Politics: Writing Power, Paternal Legitimization, and Maternal Legacies</i>. By Raylene L. Ramsay. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. Pp. xviii+318. $75.00

Why Stay We Here? (Odyssey of a Canadian Officer in France in World War I) (review)

Why Stay We Here? (Odyssey of a Canadian Officer in France in World War I) (review)

IN MEMORIAM: RALPH SIMON PALMER, 1914–2003

Ralph Simon Palmer, best known as the author and editor of the Handbook of North American Birds (Yale University Press), died in Bangor, on 21 July 2003 after a brief illness. He was 89. Ralph was born in Richmond, on 13 June 1914, the eldest of four children born to Marion Holmes and George Luther Palmer. Seven years later the family moved to Brunswick, where Ralph attended high school, began collecting books, assisted the noted Bowdoin College ornithologist, Alfred 0. Gross, and joined the AOU in 1932. He was a life member of the AOU and became an Elective Member in 1947 and a Fellow in 1956. He graduated with high honors from the University of Maine in 1937; his honors thesis, Mammals of Maine, remains a standard reference. He received his doctorate from Cornell University in 1940 for his work on the nesting behavior of Common Terns. After working briefly at the State of New York Conservation Department, Ralph accepted a teaching position at Vassar College in 1942, where he remained an assistant professor until 1949. His academic career was interrupted by World War II; he served as an ensign in the U.S. Naval Reserve and was in the third wave to land on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. In August 1949, he was appointed as a senior scientist of the New York State Museum and State Science Service, where he worked for 27 years. Having retired to Ralph built his own house in Tenant's Harbor with the help of his sons, Keith and Douglas. Among several of the distinctive features of this house was the climate-controlled basement that housed his enormous personal library. Keenly interested in art, especially wildlife art, Ralph designed his living room to display a stunning painting of a red fox in winter by renowned Swedish artist Bruno Liljefors. In 1978, Ralph was appointed as research associate of the Smithsonian Institution, a post he held for five years, and in 1981 he was appointed as a faculty associate in zoology and forest resources at the University of Maine at Orono. He received an honorary doctorate from the University of Maine at Machias in 1994. Ralph received the William Brewster Memorial Medal, the AOU's most prestigious award, for writing and editing the Handbook of North American Birds series, which was partially subsidized by the AOU. Ralph had hoped to emulate Arthur C. Bent's Life Histories of North American Birds, providing updated species accounts for all North American birds. However, the Handbook project was hindered by numerous delays; the fourth and fifth volumes, which covered raptors, appeared 26 years after the first volume. The AOU ultimately withdrew its support of the Handbook, in favor of The Birds of North America, which was completed in 2003. Disgruntled with that loss of financial support, Ralph dropped his AOU membership and returned his Brewster award, obviously distressed that he would not complete a project on which he had worked so very hard. He had already collected material for future volumes, at least through the owls, and now recognized that all that effort was in vain. Despite removing himself from the ornithological mainstream, he maintained many strong friendships and an active correspondence. He felt a particular bond with Allan R. Phillips; they had both taken part in the Allied landing in France in World War II and were both viewed as outsiders. Ralph did not suffer fools lightly, and he was unwilling to discuss matters in detail unless he felt that the receiver measured up to his considerable standards. Ralph was noted for the depth and breadth of his interests and knowledge-about birds, mammals, Native Americans, history, early exploration, naturalists, geology, plants, philosophy, and wildlife art. He was an accomplished photographer and painter. In short, he was a scholar and naturalist in the fullest

A Grateful Heart: The History of a World War I Field Hospital (review)

The infantry division of the American Army in France in World War I had 28,000 men in four regiments. Each regiment had its own field hospital of 100-150 beds with six medical officers and eighty-three enlisted men; the hospital moved by truck and operated in tents or in expediently useful buildings, and could expand to 300-400 beds with additional personnel.

Nietzsche and postmodernism in geography: An idealist critique

The suitability of a new philosophical paradigm for geography needs to be assessed in the context of the questions it was designed to address and on the basis of clearly articulated criteria. Postmodernism, the latest contender for the attention of geographers, is here assessed in relation to Collingwoodian idealism. As an intellectual movement postmodernism arose in the unique circumstances of academic life in post Second World War France. In this rigidly structured academic environment a new generation of French scholars, well schooled in the philosophies of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger and the ideas of Marx and Freud, discovered the radical nineteenth century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and drew upon his ethical and philosophical writings to address contemporary issues of power, knowledge, truth and modernity. All the central anti-humanist ideas of what was to become postmodernism are to be found in Nietzsche: a distrust of science and knowledge truth claims, the notion of multiple interpret...

Collective Amnesia and the Mediation of Painful Pasts: the representation of France in the Second World War

Collective Amnesia and the Mediation of Painful Pasts: the representation of France in the Second World War

Women and the Second World War in France 1939-1948: Choices and Constraints. By Hanna Diamond. (Longman Series on Women and Men in History). Harlow, Pearson Education, 1999. 231 pp. Pb 14.99.

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Women and the Second World War in France 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints. By HANNA DIAMOND. (Longman Series on Women and Men in History). Harlow, Pearson Education, 1999. 231 pp. Pb £1.99. JACKIE CLARKE JACKIE CLARKE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTONCAMBRIDGE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume LV, Issue 1, January 2001, Pages 121–122, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/LV.1.121 Published: 01 January 2001

Collective Amnesia and the Mediation of Painful Pasts: the representation of France in the Second World War

Museums and interpretation centres are one of the elements that contribute to the structuring of communal memories within societies. This article considers these processes through the specific study of the ways in which the collective memory of the Second World War in France has evolved. Emphasis is placed on an analysis of the representation of resistance in French museums and interpretation centres. An historical and spatial study of the development of these museums is also developed. This shows how the collective memory has been restructured in recent years as more and more people realise the need for a more ?honest? approach to the mediation of this difficult period in French history; a period that many would like to forget .

Women and the Second World War in France (1939-1948)

Women and the Second World War in France (1939-1948)

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access Women and the Second World War in France 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints. By HANNA DIAMOND. (Longman Series on Women and Men in History). Harlow, Pearson Education, 1999. 231 pp. Pb £1.99. JACKIE CLARKE JACKIE CLARKE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHAMPTONCAMBRIDGE Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar French Studies, Volume LV, Issue 1, January 2001, Pages 121–122, https://doi.org/10.1093/fs/LV.1.121 Published: 01 January 2001

Late Modern

HistoryVolume 85, Issue 280 p. 724-742 Late Modern First published: 16 December 2002 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-229X.00171Citations: 1AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Books reviewed: Donald M. MacRaild Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 Iain McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776-1832 Alvin Jackson Ireland 1798–1998: Politics and War Stevan K. Pavlowitch A History of the Balkans, 1804–1945 W. D. Rubinstein Britain’s Century: A Political and Social History 1815–1905 David Philips and Robert D. Storch Policing Provincial England 1829–1856: The Politics of Reform Graeme Morton Unionist Nationalism: Governing Urban Scotland, 1830–1860 Patrick Polden A History of the County Court, 1846–1971 Anne Digby The Evolution of British General Practice, 1850–1948 Eugenio F. Biagini Gladstone Standish Meacham Regaining Paradise: Englishness and the Early Garden City Movement Ian Packer Lloyd George Paula M. Krebs Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War Brian Bond and Nigel Cave (eds.), Haig: A Reappraisal 70 Years On T. Kirk and A. McElligott Opposing Fascism: Community, Authority and Resistance in Europe John Newsinger Orwell’s Politics Neil Gregor Daimler-Benz in the Third Reich Hanna Diamond Women and the Second World War in France 1939–1948: Choices and Constraints Cecil D. Eby Hungary at War: Civilians and Soldiers in World War II Joseph A. Soares The Decline of Privilege: The Modernization of Oxford University Robert Holland Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus 1954–1959 Joanna Bornat, Robert Perks, Paul Thompson and Jan Walmsley (eds.), Oral History, Health and Welfare Citing Literature Volume85, Issue280October 2000Pages 724-742 RelatedInformation

Book Review: Women and the Second World War in France, 1939–1949: Choices and Constraints

Book Review: Women and the Second World War in France, 1939–1949: Choices and Constraints

Shorter notice. Women and the Second World War in France, 1939-1948: Choices and Constraints. H Diamond

Shorter notice. Women and the Second World War in France, 1939-1948: Choices and Constraints. H Diamond

Shorter notice. Women and the Second World War in France, 1939-1948: Choices and Constraints. H Diamond

Shorter notice. Women and the Second World War in France, 1939-1948: Choices and Constraints. H Diamond

Charles Journet and Jacques Maritain: Correspondance ed. by Mgr. Pierre Mamie, George Cottier, O.P.

BOOK REVIEWS CharlesJournet andJacques Maritain: Correspondance. 3 vols. Edited by MGR. PIERRE MAMIE and GEORGE COTTIER, 0.P. Vol. 1: 1920-1929. Fribourg: Editions Universitaires; Paris: EditionsSt. Paul, 1996. Pp. 827. SF 110. ISBN 2827106833. Vol. 2: 1930-1939. Fribourg: Editions Universitaires; Paris: Editions St. Paul, 1997. Pp. 1001. SF 130. ISBN 2827107651. Vol. 3: 1940-1949. Fribourg: Editions Saint-Augustin, 1998. Pp. 969. SF 100. ISBN 2880111374. Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) hardly requires introduction to the readers of The Thomist. Charles Journet (1891-1975), by contrast, has remained relatively unknown outside of the French-speaking world. Professor of dogmatic theology at the diocesan seminary in Fribourg, Switzerland, for his entire teaching career, and the author of numerous works in theology, most notably L'Eglise du Verbe incarnee (3 vols.: 1941, 1951, 1969), Journet attracted attention in 1965 when Pope Paul VI appointed him to the College of Cardinals. For some fifty years, from 1920 until Maritain's death in 1973, MaritainandJournet maintaineda regular correspondence, uninterrupted even by their separation on two continents duringWorldWar II. Prepared under the editorial direction of Georges Cottier, 0.P., and Bishop Pierre Mamie, the Correspondance will eventually total six volumes, containing virtually all ofthe letters exchanged between the two friends. The volumes include explanatory footnotes (identifying persons, publications, and events little remembered today), short essays (on topics such as the religious climate in Geneva during the 1920s), appendices (usually composed of texts the authors had included in their correspondence), biographical summaries, chronologies, and indices: in all, an impressive undertaking. Initiated by Journet, who wrote Maritain to express his admiration for the philosopher's then-newly published Introduction generate ala philosophie, the correspondence between the two men would serve as the principal vehicle for a remarkably close friendship. The first three volumes of the Correspondance take us across a widely diverse historical terrain: the inception of the Thomistic renaissance in the early 1920s, the condemnation of Action fran~ise in 1926, the Spanish Civil War, the defeat of France in World War II, De Gaulle and the Resistance, censorship in war-time Switzerland, the Vatican of Pope Pius XII, and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. 131 132 BOOK REVIEWS At the time of their first exchange of letters, Maritain was a rising star on the French Catholic intellectual scene, with several books already to his credit, includingArt et scholastique andLa philosophie bergsonienne. Journet was then a parish priest in Geneva, whose first book, L'Esprit du protestantisme en Suisse, would not appear until 1925. The family backgrounds and intellectual milieus of the two men could not have been more different. A member of the Parisian liberal elite by right of birth (grandson of the Protestant Jules Favre, a leading politician of the Third Republic), educated at the Sorbonne, student of Henri Bergson, and friend of Charles Peguy, Leon Bloy, Georges Rouault, and Jean Cocteau, Maritain-a Catholic convert-circulated freely within French intellectual and artistic circles. By contrast, Journet-a cradle Catholic born to a family of petits commercants and educated in the seminary-found himself a foreigner to the mainstream cultural life of his native Geneva, then a bastion of Protestant thought, religious practice, and political governance. What drew the two men together was their shared conviction that a return to Thomas Aquinas's philosophical and theological thought could provide the basis for a renewal of spiritual life within the Church, as well as foster interaction between the Catholic tradition and the intellectual currents of modernity. To this end, Maritain and his wife Raissa would found the Cercles thomistes in 1922, an initiative thatJournet welcomed and to which he lent his enthusiastic support over the ensuing years. The aim was to establish groups of Catholic intellectuals whose common reference to Thomas Aquinas would furnish a supportive context for dialogue on (and with) the contemporary culture. Given the insularity of Catholic intellectual life during this period-laicization had pushed it to the margins of public debate on major issues-the project of adopting a stance of active engagement vis-a-vis modernity represented a considerable departure from conventional practice. Despite this new attitude of openness, Maritain's writings from the period often betray...

World War II, film, and history

The immediacy and perceived truth of the visual image, as well as film and television's ability to propel viewers back into the past, place the genre of the historical film in a special category. War films-including antiwar films-have established the prevailing public image of war in the twentieth century. For American audiences, the dominant image of trench warfare in World War I has been provided by feature films such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Paths of Glory. The image of combat in the Second World War has been shaped by films like Sands of Iwo Jima and The Longest Day. And despite claims for the alleged impact of widespread television coverage of the Vietnam War, it is actually films such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon which have provided the most powerful images of what is seen as the of that much disputed conflict. But to what degree does history written lightning, as Woodrow Wilson allegedly said, represent the reality of the past? To what extent is visual history an oversimplification, or even a distortion of the past? Exploring the relationship between moving images and the society and culture in which they were produced and received, World War II, Film, and History addresses the power these images have had in determining our perception and memories of war. Examining how the public memory of war in the twentieth century has often been created more by a manufactured past than a remembered one, a leading group of historians discusses films dating from the early 1930s through the early 1990s, created by filmmakers the world over, from the United States and Germany to Japan and the former Soviet Union. For example, Freda Freiberg explains how the inter-racial melodramatic Japanese feature film China Nights, in which a manly and protective Japanese naval officer falls in love with a beautiful young Chinese street waif and molds her into a cultured, submissive wife, proved enormously popular with wartime Japanese and helped justify the invasion of China in the minds of many Japanese viewers. Peter Paret assesses the historical accuracy of Kolberg as a depiction of an unsuccessful siege of that German city by a French Army in 1807, and explores how the film, released by Hitler's regime in January 1945, explicitly called for civilian sacrifice and last-ditch resistance. Stephen Ambrose contrasts what we know about the historical reality of the Allied D-Day landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, with the 1962 release of The Longest Day, in which the major climactic moment in the film never happened at Normandy. Alice Kessler-Harris examines The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, a 1982 film documentary about women defense workers on the American home front in World War II, emphasizing the degree to which the documentary's engaging main characters and its message of the need for fair and equal treatment for women resonates with many contemporary viewers. And Clement Alexander Price contrasts Men of Bronze, William Miles's fine documentary about black American soldiers who fought in France in World War I, with Liberators, the controversial documentary by Miles and Nina Rosenblum which incorrectly claimed that African-American troops liberated Holocaust survivors at Dachau in World War II. In today's visually-oriented world, powerful images, even images of images, are circulated in an eternal cycle, gaining increased acceptance through repetition. History becomes an endless loop, in which repeated images validate and reconfirm each other. Based on archival materials, many of which have become only recently available, World War II, Film, and History offers an informative and a disturbing look at the complex relationship between national myths and filmic memory, as well as the dangers of visual images being transformed into reality.

Mothers, Marraines, and Prostitutes: Morale and Morality in First World War France

A novel describing French women on the eve of mobilization for the First World War, the popular French author Marcelle Tinayre remarked: 'Woman's patriotism is not of the same nature as that of man. It does not possess the brutality of an instinct or the austerity of an idea. It's a sentiment ... that does not know the bloody drunkenness of battle. The France of women is above all the hearth, the spouse, the child.'1 Here was a patriotism grounded not in the abstract love of country or in ideas of duty and honour, but in home and family life. While this statement expresses one set of powerful ideas about the proper role of women in wartime, it is but one end of a wide spectrum of cues given to women during the First World War. Within hours of the declaration of war in 1914, the president, Raymond Poincare, had called upon the French to forge a union sacree to put aside their individual differences to fortify the nation against its enemies. Although the most obvious emblem of the union sacree was the political alliance between anti-clerical Republicans and religious Catholics, the maintenance of the union sacree, as Jean-Jacques Becker suggests, required constant effort, even after France had been invaded and the northern part of the country had been occupied by Germany. Thus, careful attention was given to keeping up the morale not only of soldiers but also of civilians and non-combatants. In an oft-cited example of the attention focused on civilians, in 1915 the cartoonist Forain depicted two trench-bound soldiers, known colloquially as 'poilus': one says to the other 'let's hope they hold on,' and, when asked to whom he refers, answers 'the civilians'.2 Like workers and the religious, women were among the not fully

The French Colonial Service and the Issues of Reform, 1944–8

The problems of decolonisation in post-Second World War France have attracted renewed attention in recent years. A new generation of historians and political scientists has focused on why it was so difficult for the country's political and intellectual élites to accept the end of empire. This attention to the subjectivity of policy and opinion-makers has added a novel dimension to understanding how and why the end of the colonial era occurred with such difficulty and bloodshed for the French. This new orientation has largely displaced the old ‘Gaullist’ explanation for the failing of France's post-war regime, the Fourth Republic, in colonial policy. The older notion, articulated by General Charles de Gaulle himself during his twelve-year exile from political power between 1946 and 1958, blamed the unstable parliamentary coalitions and governing political parties of the era for the series of crises and disasters in colonial policy faced by a deeply fractured legislative regime. The rapid rise and fall of governments, the turnover of ministers, the constant governmental disputes on a range of questions, it was alleged, was the cause of inconsistent and weak policies incapable of meeting the succession of crises. The newer research, however, has demonstrated that the institutional problems of the Fourth Republic were not the key issue and that the essential problem lay with an inability of élites to recognise, accept and adapt to decolonisation worldwide. It has been shown that, far from having inconsistent or weak policies, the governing cadres of the Fourth Republic shared fundamentally similar concepts and goals in their determination to maintain the integrity of the French Empire. Yet this same historiography has focused on the political parties, pressure groups and shifting political landscape of French colonial policy while largely overlooking an important, though less obvious, player.

On Re‐Reading The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett is commonly known by his third and most famous novel, The Maltese Falcon, uniquely featuring the detective hero, Sam Spade. A 1941 film version of the book, which had been published in 1929, was a box-office hit starring Humphrey Bogart. This partly accounts for the recognition Hammett and Spade continue to enjoy, but we measure the endurance of the author and his fictional creation by more than popularity, or the devotion of the Bogart cult. Together they established the fictional detective as a fully fledged social observer and critic. A close reading of the novel in the context of contemporary events shows that the author was working out the controversial 'lessons' of World War I, as they applied to the politics of peace and disarmament of the 1920s. To accomplish this, Hammett, an anarchist and an anti-fascist, created a character to mock bourgeois pretensions of law, order, and progress, which inspired the rhetoric of international relations during that decade. How much did these motives account for Spade's original qualities and for his subsequent influence? To begin to answer these questions and to understand the vehicle Hammett fashioned for American detective fiction, a brief review of American politics and diplomacy during the 1920s and an exploration of their relation to certain features of political and literary thought is required. Beginning in 1917, with the revelation of the secret European diplomacy that had preceded World War I, a stream of published documents and high-level memoirs refuted official versions of the war's origins and purposes (Fay 1-49 passim). For the horrendous expenditure of the war, which governments had justified in terms of 'freedom,' 'democracy,' and 'civilization,' society obtained little but death and disorder, it seemed. As facts demolished the idealistic picture painted by Allied wartime propaganda, Armistice Day ceremonies became solemn observations of needless sacrifices made to the failed god of nationalism. The doctrine of German war guilt enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles (1919) was also a casualty of revision, indicating the responsibility of Britain and France, states that had benefited from the Treaty's harsh peace terms to make appropriate adjustments in their relations with Germany. This British, French, and German diplomats cautiously attempted with the Locarno Treaty (1925), which provided for the admission of Germany to the League of Nations, thus ending German isolation. The Treaty signaled the end of French predominance in Europe, giving Britain, France's ally, decisive influence over the continental balance of power. But it neither significantly altered the terms of the Treaty of Versailles nor eliminated Allied fears of German revanchism. To insure against this eventuality, the French foreign minister Aristide Briand approached the American government with a non-aggression alliance in April 1927, the anniversary of the American declaration of war for the defense of France and Great Britain in World War I. Evading this politically risky entanglement, the Republicans in Washington offered the internationally minded a harmless revised version that appealed to the sovereign states of the world to take a rhetorical stand against aggression. This was known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a so-called Peace Pact history texts often describe as one of the diplomatic triumphs of President Calvin Coolidge's administration. For Dashiell Hammett, working out his new novel based on the subject, glossing over realpolitik maneuvering with high sounding rhetoric was a characteristically insincere operation of the international state system. In fact, Britain and France together, contrary to disarmament agreements, planned to revise the standards of general military and naval forces in their favor. The French agreed the Admiralty could abandon the naval limitations of the Washington Conference (1922) pertaining to light cruisers.(1) In turn, the British government would approve a larger effective French army than allowed by the Treaty of Versailles. …