Man's War Research Articles

Love, debauchery? On body writing from the perspective of the city

The Chinese urban literary context of the 1990s has brought the liberation of Chinese urban women's desires to a considerable depth. Some female writers, mainly Lin Bai, who were famous for their "body writing", introduced some unexpressed female body desires into literature for the first time. However, the rise of consumer culture destroyed this beautiful picture. The voyeuristic desire of men and society has also led to a part of women's culture that is gradually becoming vulgar, inferior, and commercially deviant. This paper focuses on "One Man's War" and analyzes the difference between "body writing" "traditional writing" and "love writing" in the context of urban culture by reading the original text and combining it with Sisu's "body writing" theory. By reading the original text and combining Sisu's "body writing" theory, we analyze the difference between "body writing" and "traditional writing", "love writing" and "erotic writing" in the context of urban culture, and reposition the value of "body writing" to explore its literary-historical significance.

Recognizing the Authentic, Documented Middle West

Recognizing the Authentic, Documented Middle West Christopher Reed (bio) As an American historian, I view the Old West (and now the Middle West) as a place of diversity and contradictions, and as being a real place. In the historical mind, but perhaps more importantly, because of the documented record, the Old West/West/Middle West is as authentic as could be experienced, or even imagined. My personal recollection from the mid-twentieth century of the image of the Midwest is linked to an oft-told family story of how my mother's great grandmother "safely brought her little children across the mountains" into Ohio. This bit of oral history from the mid-nineteenth century, backed up by documentation in later years, depicted the Trail of Tears and left an imprint on my mind and in my imagination of the Middle West as a place of safety and security. The offshoot of this sojourner's trek as part of the displacement of the Cherokee nation eventually led to the enlistment of her offspring as combatants and participants in the liberation of an entire people by 1865. So, the Midwest carried a salutary image in my imagination despite its sometimes contradictory resistance to abolitionism counterbalanced by a willingness to embrace a civic nationalism to preserve the Union. This sentiment was embraced by many Whites despite their holding firmly to the notion of White supremacy as "White men fought a White man's war." Despite the current national rancor over censorship in all spheres of communication, the evolving world of academics allows for new interpretations to emerge as is exemplified in the foci of Imagining the Heartland on whiteness and imagination as negative influences. In this somewhat controversial piece, a coterie of writers has undertaken the task of exposing the supposed wholesomeness of the geographical Midwest as established in the popular imagination. Contributing to the latter [End Page 153] dimension, Hollywood with the Wizard of Oz, the media in its forms ranging from television to advertisements, politicians from Reagan to Trump, and leading literary publications have created an impression in the American mind of a nation with a pure regional environment that acts to both nurture and preserve whiteness. What our colleagues across disciplinary lines have advanced as a concept bears little resemblance to a provable theory. Rather than in the Midwest, White racism originated in the South as a justification for the subjugation and economic exploitation of African labor. Unfortunately, its pervasiveness is real and an integral part of the national fabric. Further, the element of racial purity had its roots in the earliest efforts at English settlement along the entirety of the North American coast. America was envisioned as a City upon a Hill, a new Jerusalem bestowed on God's favorites. This is the origin of some of the nation's most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness for it has led to a heritage for almost all non-Black groups, newly arrived or lengthily rooted, in which they locate cultural comfort. America's problem started with an aversion to anyone or any group unlucky enough to be considered an Other. So, it is not just the Midwest that has upheld some of the nation's most deep-seated convictions about the value of whiteness. From opposition to a recognition of the humanity of Indigenous people, it spread to "Outlandish Africans." For the latter group, it produced an indelible stain that persists even today (even with a near national aversion to use of the "N" word publicly). From the hostility in the Midwest directed against darker-complexioned (and other complexioned) peoples, whether Indigenous, Hispanic or Chinese, it seemed a likely extension of New England coastal aversion to Anabaptists, Catholics, Quakers, and Jews which was aggressively held by Englishmen. With the advent of the twentieth century, a partial acceptance of the Irish within the body of Whites led to their partial welcome by the Second World War. For historians, beginning with the decline in acceptance of Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis that featured the admirable and highly successive efforts of hardy White settlers civilizing a demographically empty land to be designated the Middle West with their muscles, good...

Cousin Marvin's Secret

Cousin Marvin's Secret

‘A War of Man Against Locust’! Locust Invasions and Anti-locust Campaigns in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia, 1918–1940s

This article traces the scourge of locust plagues in the Salisbury district of Southern Rhodesia, and examines state and settler strategies to combat successive outbreaks between 1918 and 1951. Focusing on the Red and Brown migratory locust, we explore the origins and extent of locust recurrent plagues, and examine the efficacy of the campaigns that were embarked on to mitigate the impact of the scourge. Although the plagues presented Southern Rhodesia with a difficult challenge to its fledgling agricultural sector, this subject has escaped the attention of historians, with most narratives focusing on undercapitalisation, the impact of environmental challenges and the role of the colonial state in general in the development of commercial agriculture. Thus, by exploring natural disasters, we seek to fill this gaping lacunae in the agrarian historiography of colonial Zimbabwe. Employing primary data, we argue that, to the extent that the campaigns did not involve other countries in the Southern African region, the campaigns carried out during the period under review fell short on mitigating the impact of locust scourge in the country. It was only after the International Red Locust Services took a well-coordinated campaign that the locust scourge was brought under control.

The First World War and the Myth of the Young Man's War in Western Europe

During and after the First World War, authors in several of the main belligerent nations presented the war as a young man's war. The young man's war proved to be a powerful trope, and a myth emerged about the typical trench soldier as handsome, white, and eighteen. In this article, I examine literature about the Great War across several nations – primarily Germany, Great Britain, and France – to demonstrate how and why youth became embedded in the collective memory and representation of the war. I argue, in part, that notions of youth in the early twentieth century allowed participating nations to emphasise innocence and tragedy, claiming the moral high ground in the process. As a result, it is now difficult to accurately depict the First World War soldiers as fathers as well as sons, husbands as well as fiancés, men with careers as well as boys fresh from school. The generation of 1914 must be conceived more broadly, which would disallow easy teleologies to later tragic events in the 1930s.

For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops by Kelly D. Mezurek

Reviewed by: For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops by Kelly D. Mezurek Douglas R. Egerton For Their Own Cause: The 27th United States Colored Troops. Kelly D. Mezurek. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-1-60635-289-2. 354 pp., cloth, $37.95 By the war's end, 178,975 African Americans, constituting roughly one-twelfth of all the soldiers who fought for the United States, had filled 145 infantry regiments, seven cavalry units, thirteen artillery groups, and one engineering battalion. An astonishing 74 percent of northern black men of military age enlisted to fight for a nation that denied them citizenship. Despite this, the black soldiers who [End Page 218] donned blue have been curiously understudied. Classic studies by Benjamin Quarles and Dudley Taylor Cornish are now more than half a century old, while important recent studies by Joseph Glatthaar and John David Smith examine black soldiers within the context of their relationship with white officers or their commander in chief. Very few studies focus on a single black unit. Kelly Mezurek's impressively documented and clearly written study of the 27th USCT does far more, however, than merely address that unfortunate omission. Unlike the fabled 54th Massachusetts, the 27th was neither a pioneering unit nor did it see a good deal of action (although several of its companies played a supporting role in the disastrous Battle of the Crater). Whereas 140,313 of the USCT soldiers were black southerners born into slavery, the Ohioans who volunteered for the 27th had been free for all or most of their lives. It was not even the first Ohio-based USCT regiment, an honor that went to the 5th. But its wartime experience, Mezurek demonstrates, was in many ways far more typical of life in the USCT than that of more celebrated regiments. Its soldiers did more than their share of fatigue duty, and when they returned home no grand parade welcomed their return. No bronze relief sculpture was erected in their memory. A good many volumes explain why white soldiers, both North and South, fought for their respective nations. Mezurek's study does that as well, but it also chronicles what these soldiers' lives were like. During the antebellum years, midwestern whites were especially hostile to black residents and immigrants and had little interest in supporting black enlistments if that might lead to voting rights and citizenship. Governor William Dennison, an antislavery Republican, rejected black volunteers in the days after Sumter, and when African Americans forged ahead and set up a recruiting station in Cincinnati, a mob tore down their American flag. They reported the incident to a policeman, who snapped, "We want you damned niggers to keep out of this; this is a white man's war" (29). His 1862 successor, David Tod, a National Union man, was not much better, and as a result, black men who wished to serve had to catch the train for Massachusetts, where so many joined the 54th and 55th that they comprised the third largest contingent in the former and the largest state group in the latter. Only after a declining number of white volunteers forced Tod's hand did the governor reluctantly agree to black enlistments. The average age of those who signed on was just under twenty-five years, similar to northern white enlistees and other USCT units. A majority of soldiers in the 27th resided in rural areas or small towns. But while only 27 percent of them were born in Ohio—compared [End Page 219] to 60 percent of whites—a far higher percent of them were American-born than were white troops. Only five men in the regiment were foreign-born, and then only in nearby Canada. Most had lived in the state for years, and after their regiment was mustered out in September 1865, they returned to and remained in the Buckeye State. The 27th began its service in April 1864, two months before Congress equalized pay for soldiers regardless of race. Rural men who served as farm laborers at best earned $1 per day, and there was rarely any guarantee of a steady income. As a result, many...

Georgia's Civil War: Conflict on the Home Front by David Williams

Reviewed by: Georgia's Civil War: Conflict on the Home Front by David Williams Scott A. MacKenzie Georgia's Civil War: Conflict on the Home Front. David Williams. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-8814-6631-7. 284 pp., cloth, $35.00. The causes of Confederate defeat continue to attract scholarly attention. Debate rages between the external force and internal collapse schools of thought. Valdosta State historian David Williams's Georgia's Civil War aims to add that vital state to the discussion. Expanding on his previous work on the Georgia-Alabama home front, he examines the impact of the war via the "rich man's war, poor man's fight" perspective. He argues that deteriorating conditions at home motivated widespread desertions to the point that Georgia became practically ungovernable. Despite this sound approach, Williams makes some critical errors that undermine his thesis. His failure to engage the broader literature and treatment of Georgia as a homogeneous unit limits the book's potential to address the bigger questions surrounding the Civil War's effect on southern society. Williams stumbles in his introduction with an absurd claim. "For more than a century and a half," he writes, "historians have often ignored the South's home front difficulties" (xi). This statement flies in the face of the superb literature on this topic. Worse, he cites as source material the same books that he claims ignored the topic, including the multiauthored Why the South Lost the Civil War, Michael P. Johnson's Towards a Patriarchal Republic, and Mark Weitz's A Higher Duty. Bizarrely, he omits Mark Wetherington's Plain Folk's Fight, which, along with Weitz's work, counters his claims about internal collapse. The closest Williams comes to a historiographical critique is a biting comment on Gary Gallagher's Confederate War. His failure—and that is the right description here—to place the book within the larger scholastic community creates a missed opportunity. The extent of this oversight becomes apparent in the book's body. Williams treats Georgia as a homogenous unit. He fairly claims that planters' obsession with cotton production exacerbated wealth disparities and corrupted its democratic institutions. Yet, he cites raw electoral numbers to show how close the secession vote was instead of showing regional variations. Despite an initial enthusiasm for war, the home front fractured soon after the men left for the front. Williams bombards the reader with numerous examples of discontent among Georgians of all classes, races, and genders. He makes effective use of citizen letters to the governor and newspaper editorials that complained about rising prices, taxes, impressment, and conscription. The planter-led government both refused to help and proved to be powerless even when it tried. Governor Joseph Brown won reelection in 1863 for his promises to help the lower classes but only maintained planter rule. The arrival of Union armies in 1864 hit Georgia at her weakest. Their presence, Williams argues, turned unrest into virtual anarchy throughout the state. As before, however, [End Page 392] there is no regional nuance in his analysis. Desertions began almost immediately and became pandemic. Williams could have used them to engage Weitz's study of regional variations in desertion patterns, which would have shown a more nuanced view of the problem. Using Wetherington's study would have shown how the ability of some white Georgians to cohere across class lines during the war. At times, Williams's narrative appears repetitive, but the multiplicity demonstrates his point about the extent of the discontent. His treatment of a unitary Georgia, sadly, undermines many of his arguments. His conclusion mirrors the weak introduction. Williams discusses Georgia's postwar status in an epilogue. Like before, the state appears as a homogenous unit. Citing mostly secondary works, he maintains the same argument that planters remained in power by exploiting poverty and racism—segregating poor whites from blacks, denying the latter voting rights, combined with tenancy, company towns, and debt peonage to keep most Georgians under control. In addition, planters created the Lost Cause narrative to paper over wartime divisions. Offering little new to the discussion on the Civil War home front or Reconstruction, his routine conclusion should disappoint many readers...

"Twenty-Negro," or Overseer Law: A Reconsideration

"Twenty-Negro," or Overseer LawA Reconsideration John M. Sacher (bio) On October 11, 1862, the Confederate Congress revised its conscription policy. The original act, passed in April 1862, had provided a list of exemptions for essential home-front occupations, including Confederate and state officers; mail carriers; teachers; nurses; printers; apothecaries; ministers; employees in mines, furnaces, and foundries; and men working on the railroads. In thinking about the requirements of the home front, legislators had forgotten several fundamental needs, among them the need to supervise the nation's slave population. In the antebellum South, the control of slaves, particularly on plantations, often rested in the hands of white overseers. In addition to performing their police role, overseers also contributed to crop yield, as white southerners presumed slaves worked more efficiently and produced larger crops under direct white supervision. The modified conscription law recognized the Confederacy's need for overseers: it stipulated that in order "to secure the proper police of the country" on each plantation with twenty or more slaves on "which there is no white male adult not liable to military service," one person shall be exempted from conscription while engaged as an overseer.1 This exemption, more commonly known as the "twenty-negro" or "twenty-slave" law, merits a close reexamination in its historical context focusing on the demand for it, its multiple iterations, and its enforcement. Such investigation leads to the conclusion that the legislation should properly be termed the "overseer" law, not the "twenty-negro" law. The measure should not be considered solely in terms of its effect on class relationships in the Confederacy. Instead, it represented an attempt to balance the competing needs of the Confederate army (an insatiable demand for soldiers) and the home front (food production and slave control). Additionally, sensitive to its potential to undermine class harmony, Confederate legislators, in response to criticisms, twice altered the law to mitigate social conflict. When one examines these factors, one is struck not by politicians' callousness toward common folk but instead by their sincere efforts to achieve [End Page 269] the competing goals of maintaining an army in the field, supervising the Confederacy's slave workforce, and keeping the support of non-slaveholders. Also, the government closely regulated who could take advantage of the overseer law's provisions. In fact, the best evidence available indicates that less than 10 percent of southern planters received exemptions, and they often received exemptions for experienced overseers, not for themselves or their sons. Nevertheless, the law, particularly when considered in conjunction with both the ability of prospective conscripts to provide substitutes in their place and perceived abuses of the exemption system, fueled allegations during and after the war that the conflict had become a "rich man's war and a poor man's fight." In an often-cited letter, Mississippi senator James Phelan admonished Jefferson Davis, "Never did a law meet with more universal odium than the exemption of slave owners." Writing two months after the measure's passage, Phelan, who had voted against the exemption and planned to propose a new law rescinding it, contended that even planters recognized its "gross injustice" and that "its influence on the poor is most calamitous." Specifically, Phelan warned that recusant conscripts had banded together to resist the measure and that it had planted seeds of revolt within the army.2 Many scholars have adopted Phelan's opinion of the overseer exemption; they posit the twenty-negro law as a key plank in their argument that the Confederacy collapsed from internal class fissures. The traditional view of Confederate conscription starts with Albert Burton Moore's 1924 Conscription and Conflict in the Confederacy, which remains the standard text on the subject. Moore proclaimed that the twenty-negro law "caused much dissatisfaction among the masses and in the ranks. It was regarded as pure class legislation." Other historians agree. In Masters without Slaves, James Roark contends that "the law allowed planters and their sons to avoid conscription." Paul Escott, in After Secession, blames the twenty-negro law for "open[ing] a breach between the planter class and the small farmers and non-slaveholders."3 Some scholars who emphasize a Confederacy imploding from class conflict...

Negotiating Hierarchy and Memory: African and Caribbean Troops from Former British Colonies in London's Imperial Spaces

The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War has refocused the attention of historians not just on the processes that led to war but also on the multitude of ethnicities who participated in the conflict. This coverage reflects not just the ‘global turn’ in the historiography of the war but also an acknowledgement that the contribution of African, Caribbean and Asian servicemen has not received sufficient attention in previous studies. Organizers of official commemorations of the war have taken great care to make ceremonials more inclusive. Despite the renewed efforts of historians and politicians, the memory of the service of Black troops from former British colonies remains marginalized, in particular, those from Africa and the Caribbean. In this article, using mostly government archives, I argue that the origins of present day marginalization lie in the decisions made by politicians, military and colonial officials charged with the cultural remembrance and commemoration of African and Caribbean servicemen in the aftermath of the war. I will argue that, in the landscape of the symbolic centre of the former imperial metropole, officials deliberately constructed a memory of the war as a ‘white man's war’, fought with the assistance of loyal Asians, with the service of Africans and Caribbeans expressly excluded. This cultural construction of whiteness presents an obstacle in the present day to a full understanding of the extent of Black colonial participation in the war.

Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight? Technological Change, Tactical Developments and the Demographic Composition of the American Military

According to the consensus among the public, policy-makers and academics, the poor are both more likely to enlist in US armed forces and to pay with their life the price of US security. In addition to moral considerations, this topic is important also for its policy and theoretical implications: a military primarily composed of the poorest segments of a society can, among others, alter policy-makers’ incentives to resort to force as well as affect its performance in the battlefield. In this article, we question this consensus. First, the causal mechanism underlying existing research is based on unwarranted assumptions. Second, the empirical evidence supporting this argument relies on aggregate data (e.g., average or median income by zip-code) that do not permit to reach definitive conclusions about military personnel’s socio- economic background. We address these problems by drawing from recent works on the evolution of modern warfare and change in military technology in order to develop a demand-side theory of military personnel that we test on individual-level data gathered from the Department of Defense and the NLSY97 survey. We argue that the 1970s U.S. Offset Strategy has promoted a dramatic change in warfare (the 1990s information technology-driven Revolution in Military Affairs) that has progressively led, on the one hand, to a more capital-intensive military and, on the other, to a more selective recruitment process. According to our theory, we expect those coming from poor and disadvantaged segments of the American society to be less likely to meet the requirements of the military. Consistently with our argument, in contrast to the post-Vietnam era, we find that those who enter the U.S. military are not statistically different from the median household with regard to education, cognitive abilities, parental income and other socio-economic indicators.

White Man's War, Coloured Man's Labour. Working for the British Army on the Western Front

The Great War was indeed a world war. Imperial powers like Great Britain drew on their far-flung empires not only for resources but also for manpower. This essay examines one important (though still inadequately studied) aspect of British wartime exigency, the voluntary and coerced participation of the British Empire's coloured subjects and allies in military operations on the Western Front. With the exception of the Indian Army in the first year of the war, that participation did not include combat. Instead coloured troops, later joined by contract labourers, played major roles behind the lines. From 1916 onwards, well over a quarter million Chinese, Egyptians, Indians, South Africans, West Indians, New Zealand Maoris, Black Canadians, and Pacific Islanders worked the docks, built roads and railways, maintained equipment, produced munitions, dug trenches, and even buried the dead. Only in recent years has the magnitude of their contribution to Allied victory begun to be more fully acknowledged. Yet the greatest impact of British labour policies in France might lie elsewhere entirely. Chinese workers seem likely to have carried the virus that caused the Great Flu pandemic of 1918-19, which may have killed more people around the world than the war itself.

Fear and food security

Fear and food security

Identity and Discourse: Te Pipiwharauroa and the South African War, 1899–1902

The Māori-language newspaper, Te Pipiwharauroa, vigorously supported the British side during the South African War (1899–1902). With a British policy that the conflict was to be a ‘white man's war’, Māori were officially omitted from serving as soldiers in the New Zealand contingents to South Africa. For Māori who sought to engage with the mainstream Pākehā (European) society in a meaningful way, the exclusion demonstrated that full citizenship had not yet been attained, but supporting the war allowed some degree of participation and acknowledgement. However, a number of other elements also contributed to the paper's pro-war stance. Two of the leading commentators were Rēweti Kōhere, who edited the paper on behalf of the Anglican Church, and Āpirana Ngata, the leader of an activist group that sought to reform and advance Māori society. This essay examines Te Pipiwharauroa's reporting of the war, and explores how their schooling, tribal loyalties to church and state, notions of race, and their reformist agenda all influenced their interpretation of the war, an imperial event of international interest, to a local Māori audience.

“The book is inspired by the Australian soldier”: the wounds of war and the literary rehabilitation of the Australian soldier in Vietnam War writing

This article historicises two particularly significant examples of Australian Vietnam War literature: When the Buffalo Fight, written by Lex McAulay and published in 1980, and In Good Company: One Man's War in Vietnam, written by Gary McKay and published in 1987. Through their parallel emphases on a traditional trope of Australian soldiering masculinity and the personal and reflective character of their narrative voices, these texts, and others like them, salvaged the image of the Australian soldier from the deep ambivalences and moral ambiguities that surrounded the conduct of the Vietnam War. It is argued that these texts contributed to a revitalised collective consciousness of the role Australian soldiers played in the Vietnam War and that this continues to wield significant political influence, particularly in relation to how Australia's role in more contemporary wars is understood and commemorated.

Déjà Vieux: Derrida's Late Conjuration of de Man

Déjà Vieux: Derrida's Late Conjuration of de Man

Machinal Effects: Derrida With and Without de Man

last lecture and the last chapter of Derrida's Memoires, for Paul de Man, if it had not been for the necessity of adding Like the Sound of the Sea Deep Within a Shell: Paul de Man's War in a revised edition of 1988 Derrida quotes passages from two letters de Man wrote to him in 1970 and 1971 before and after the publication in Poetique of de Man's The Rhetoric of Blindness: Derrida as Reader of Rousseau.2

War Stories

For humans, war remains an inexhaustible subject of storytelling and analysis—such a compelling topic that experts trace the origins of written history, historiography, to the Athenian general Thucydides, who wrote The Peloponnesian War nearly 2,500 years ago. The appeal of war stories, whether we read them for elevation or escape, is eternal. Science fiction, like every other genre whose authors have written for economic gain and popular acclaim, has plenty of combat. This installment of BiblioTech focuses on two novels at opposite ends of the timeline: Robert A. Heinlein's Hugo-winning classic Starship Troopers and newcomer John Scalzi's Hugo-nominated novel Old Man's War.

Victims of War: The First World War, Returned Soldiers, and Understandings of Domestic Violence in Australia

In the wake of the First World War in Australia, numerous ex-soldiers appeared before the courts after having committed acts of violence against their wives. Reports and records of these court cases suggest that many in the community accepted explanations that connected men's apparent nerve-shattering experiences of battle with their violent actions back home. While a link between war trauma and wife abuse appears to be borne out in many cases, there were also many instances where such a link clearly did not exist. As public attention focused on men's war injuries (whether real or assumed), the abuse suffered by wives was overlooked. The notion that returned soldiers' violence in the home was the result of mental disturbance can be seen as a contributing factor in the shift towards a psychological understanding of domestic violence that occurred in Australia over the first half of the twentieth century.

Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War

Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South during the First World War

JEANETTE KEITH. Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South During the First World War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. viii, 260. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50

JEANETTE KEITH. Rich Man's War, Poor Man's Fight: Race, Class, and Power in the Rural South During the First World War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. viii, 260. Cloth $59.95, paper $22.50