Postwar Experiences Research Articles

Amputated Men, Colonial Bureaucracy, and Masculinity in Post–World War I Colonial Nigeria

Abstract Since the 1980s, several aspects of masculinity in relation to the First World War, including the image of the citizen-soldier, have been well studied. Other aspects, however, such as the experience of combat and its impact on peacetime masculinities lag well behind. Though wartime and postwar experiences in Africa provide a repertoire for gender and masculinity research, the continent has been neglected in this realm of studies. British colonial Nigeria contributed tens of thousands of combat men to the war with thousands becoming disabled and facing challenges to their masculine identities, yet there is no serious research on this topic for Nigeria. This paper contributes to this long-neglected aspect of African history. Known in colonial archival documents only as “amputated men,” war-disabled Nigerian men struggled to navigate colonial bureaucracy in order to obtain artificial limbs and redeem what they considered their lost manhood. Employing data collected from the Nigerian and British archives, the article’s objectives are twofold: it analyzes the diminishment of the masculine identities of war-disabled men in Nigeria following the First World War, and it explains how such diminishment was accentuated by an inefficiently structured British colonial bureaucracy, paired with British colonial racism. The article contributes to scholarship on WWI, disability studies, gender studies, and colonial studies, through examination of the protracted legacies of the global conflict on the African continent.

Perceptions of War Trauma and Healing of Marital Relations Among Torture-surviving Congolese Couples Participating in Multicouple Therapy.

Citizens of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) experienced widespread torture during national wars between 1998 and 2003. Couples who survived and stayed intact suffered tremendous relationship stress. This study used a critical ethnography framework to explore the prewar, wartime, and postwar experiences of 13 torture-surviving couples who participated in a 10-session Torture-Surviving Couple Group in 2008 in the DRC. The group was designed to address the relational effects of torture and war trauma. Participants reported profound negative effects of the war on their relationships; mostly positive experiences during the group, including marital and peer connection and relationship growth; and a number of improvements in their relationship after the group. Implications include support for the use of relational interventions informed by both treatments for traumatic stress and couple approaches to promote trauma healing. Future directions call for increased funding, research, training, and clinical action to treat the effects of traumatic stress on relational family dynamics.

‘An uglier duckling than before’: Reclaiming agency and visibility amongst facially-wounded ex-servicemen in Britain after the First World War

In total, 60,500 British soldiers were wounded in the head or eyes during the First World War. Despite these numbers facially-wounded ex-servicemen, in particular their post-war experiences, are largely overlooked in the social history of the conflict. Whilst part of a wider constituency of war-wounded veterans, owing to the value ascribed to the face in terms of personal identity and socio-economic values, disfigured veterans were excluded from the discourse of masculine heroism in which other war wounds were framed. Narratives of facial injury emphasised despairing passivity, which acted to emasculate and ‘other’ the facially-wounded. How accurately though does this reflect their lived experiences? Using first-hand testimony from facially-injured ex-servicemen this article challenges the representation of the disfigured veteran as passive, arguing that men exercised agency through their self-representations and behavioural responses. Drawing on normative conceptions of masculinity, and on idealised images of war-wounded veterans, facially-wounded ex-servicemen constructed counter-narratives of their emotional response to facial injury which emphasised conformity to these ideals. The conceptualisation of disfigurements as war wounds, and the high cultural status of the war-disabled, allowed facially-wounded ex-servicemen to reclaim the masculine status which they were denied in popular representations, and to assert their right to social visibility in post-war Britain.

The Rootes group: From growth to take-over

This article focuses on how a disparate group of firms was put together by the Rootes brothers in the late 1920s and early 1930s through a series of takeovers and mergers, catapulting the brothers from being simply car dealers to becoming major manufacturers in less than a decade. The article considers the wartime and post-war experiences of the firm, before proceeding to examine why, within a relatively short time, the firm, despite further merger activity, declined in terms of product development, investment and profitability, and was saved from extinction only by being taken over by the American firm, Chrysler.

Whose Disability (Studies)?

This article is part of a larger inquiry into the production of disabled bodies due to violence. I examine processes of disablement in the global south, namely Iran and Iraqi Kurdistan, by wars launched and nurtured by both the local nation-states in the Middle East as well as the global north - the United States, Russia, and Western Europe. Utilizing a dialectical and historical materialist approach, I studied the Iran-Iraq war, the longest war of the 20th century. I explore how the disablement of global southern bodies in imperialist and nationalist wars is persistently naturalized – that is, attributed to the natural state of affairs in those regions, with the inevitable consequence that they cannot be connected to the violence of ongoing global and regional imperialism. This paper briefly touches upon the theoretical framework and methodology utilized to conduct this research, as well as the “problem” of disability in Iran. Subsequently, it goes on to extensively discuss the living conditions of the surviving Iranian veterans and surviving civilians of the Iran-Iraq war told through their own resilient voices. The veterans’ narratives expose their post-war experiences, including poverty, unemployment, inadequate medical-care, lack of medication due to the U.S.-imposed economic sanctions, and the presence of a dysfunctional disability-measurement system employed by the Iranian state. As a survivor of this war myself, I invite the reader to bear witness to how the violence of imperialism and nationalism not only renders people disabled, but also fetishizes their disablement by masking/mystifying the socio-political and economic relations that mediate the violent processes that render people disabled. By focusing on the veterans’ actual living conditions, this paper seeks to defetishize disablement, shifting the narrative of disabled veterans and civilians from tales of terrorism, heroism, living martyrdom, and patriotism, towards recognition of disability of/in human beings in need of care and support.

Exposing the War on Women: The Limits of Law and Power of Care to Address Sexual Violence in Contemporary Crime Drama

ABSTRACTA comparative reading of two recent crime dramas, The Fall (TF) and The Bletchley Circle (BC), demonstrates the limits of law and potential of care to address violence against women. TF, a Nordic noir, moves beyond a gender-blind account of crime yet relies on a liberal, state-centric response that blunts its political critique. BC, a hybrid cozy-period-detective genre piece set in post-World War II London, offers a new perspective on violence against women in crime dramas. First, juxtaposing men’s and women’s post-war experiences, BC frames violence against women as an ongoing war in which women remain comrades-in-arms. Second, it suggests that while the state has a necessary role to play as a coordinator of spaces, skills, and citizens, state action alone cannot end violence against women. Rather, citizen engagement through an ethic of care may offer a new way to address such harms.

Introduction: writing the history of colonial veterans of the Great War

ABSTRACTRecent years have seen an ‘imperial turn’ in the study of the Great War, with historians increasingly focusing on the colonial contribution to the conflict. One key set of historical actors has, however, yet to receive the attention they merit: colonial war veterans. This special issue asks what this overlooked figure can tell us about the global nature of the First World War and its impact on both politics and daily life in colonial societies. Bringing together scholars working on a range of different colonial spaces and a variety of aspects of the veteran experience, it offers a nuanced view of the many legacies, personal and political, of participation in the Great War for the subject-soldiers of the belligerent Empires. Covering topics such as post-war provision for veterans in the colonies, colonial veteran activism and the commemoration of colonial veterans, it highlights the contrasts and commonalities between post-war experiences of veterans in the Empire and that of their European equivalents. In doing so, it explores the fundamental tension between the stated commitment of post-war societies to the primacy of the veteran and their unyielding dedication to European racial primacy that underpinned the colonial project. Moreover, it examines how colonial veterans themselves seized on this tension and sought, with varying degrees of success, to exploit it to further their own financial, social and even political interests. The colonial veteran is considered here not only as a figure of historical interest in and of his own right but also as a prism through which we can reassess the complex intersections between race, citizenship, military service and welfare that shaped the post-war order in both colony and metropole.

Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville

Reviewed by: Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South by Diane Miller Sommerville Angela F. Murphy Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South. By Diane Miller Sommerville. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xvi, 429. Paper, $34.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4330-4; cloth, $105.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-4356-4.) Diane Miller Sommerville’s Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South examines the ways suicide was both practiced and received in the U.S. South during the decades before and after the Civil War. It is a remarkable work that helps us understand not only the shifting nature of American ideas about suicide but also the wartime conditions that provided context for those ideas, as well as the ways that race and gender helped determine them. Sommerville’s research makes liberal use of case studies as well as diaries, letters, newspaper accounts, coroner’s reports, and military and asylum records in order to examine individual motives for suicide attempts and to determine how society reacted to such attempts. Acknowledging the paucity of source material that gives a complete picture of individual thinking on suicide, Sommerville argues that an examination of the assigned motives for suicide that can be found in the documents can still reveal much about how both individuals and society approached the practice. In her research on these assigned motives, she is able to piece together how wartime suffering affected southerners’ thoughts concerning suicide, with a particular focus on the ways understandings of race and gender interacted with those thoughts. [End Page 927] The organization of the book is both chronological and topical, with each chapter delving into the experiences of a specific group during a specific period of time. The first two chapters analyze the wartime experiences of Confederate white men and women and how the pressures of and challenges to gender norms contributed to suffering and thoughts about suicide during those years. The next two chapters discuss suicide, first among enslaved southerners during wartime, and then among freedmen and freedwomen in the South after emancipation. In these chapters, Sommerville addresses not only the psychological struggles of black southerners themselves but also the ways white stereotypes about this population affected understandings of black suffering. Next, Sommerville moves to the postwar experiences of white southerners, with one chapter on veterans’ experiences, another on masculinity and financial ruin, and a third on women in the postwar world. She ends with an overview of the concepts of suicide and suffering during the nineteenth century. Sommerville’s work imparts several important arguments. First, she makes a strong case that the Civil War precipitated a shift in the way suicide was viewed by southerners. There was less judgment of the person who committed suicide as sinful and a greater understanding that the suffering brought on by war contributed to such acts. The war thus helped open the door to environmental explanations for psychological distress. Second, her work emphasizes the ways that the war destabilized notions of gender among men and women, white and black, which added new stresses that sometimes led to suicidal thoughts and actions. Third, Sommerville demonstrates that, although black southerners experienced their own particular brand of suffering during the war and its aftermath, racism caused most white southerners to dismiss black men and women’s suffering and to overlook psychological trauma among the black population to a disgraceful degree. Aberration of Mind is a worthy contribution to the scholarship on the experiences of ordinary citizens during the Civil War era and to the literature on the trauma of war. Angela F. Murphy Texas State University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Life, embodiment, and (post-)war stories: studying narrative in critical military studies

ABSTRACT This paper argues for an expanded conceptualization of narrative as a tool for research in critical military studies (CMS). Narrative provides a means of studying the human experience of war as simultaneously ‘embodied’ and ‘storied’, but only if the underpinning conceptual framework can address both aspects. The paper introduces a conceptual synthesis of war, narrative, and the body that aims to bridge existing work on narrative within CMS with nascent research on war and embodiment. Drawing on the socio-narratology of Arthur Frank, three core ideas are offered as the basis for an embodied study of narrative in CMS. Together, these ideas demonstrate the value of narrative inquiry for providing detailed, contextualized, and nuanced analyses of war and post-war experiences. Stories are performative: they do things. War and post-war stories have personal and political consequences that affect how individuals and societies deal with war’s legacy and approach future conflicts. What kind of story we tell about war therefore matters deeply. Studying narrative in the form of embodied war stories expands CMS’s resources for critically engaging with matters of war, violence, and military experience.

Tadeusza Kudlińskiego lektura Biblii, czyli "Gniew o Soszannę"

The novel Gniew o Soszannę was wriitten in the period 1947–1962. It came out in 1963. The writer had some difficult war and postwar experiences. First, he was repressed by the Nazis and then by the Stalinist authorities. These experiences became a source of the novel from the days of the former Israel. The story is based on the episode from the Bible, Jeph’s History. He made an unheard of Yahweh’s oath and he had to sacrifice his own daughter. However, Kudliński’s novel goes beyond the colorful of the biblical story, it carries deeper reflections on human life and relationships with Yahweh. It is also a settlement with totalitarianism. From the formal point of view, it is an apocryphal narration based on Kudlinski’s principle of «symultaneity», thus realizing the ‘three-times principle’ of spatial composition. The character becomes a collective hero. Kudliński’s work fits into the search for a modern novel form in Polish literature of the twentieth century.

‘Terra Straniera’: migration and transnationalism in Italy, Canada and Argentina

This article examines the post-war migration experiences of Italian Campani to Argentina and Canada. It employs oral testimonies as well as written sources from three different countries to reflect upon the concept of transnationalism as a useful theoretical tool, and to reflect upon its use in understanding the development of ethnic identity. While observing the transnational space of Italian communities in the Americas, the article seeks to understand the ways in which transnationalism took hold in everyday life, exploring its presence in the ways in which Campani used language, food and music to negotiate their own ethnic identities.

Letters from Rose Macaulay to Katharine Tynan

ABSTRACTThe article presents and discusses thirteen previously unpublished letters from Rose Macaulay to the Irish poet and novelist Katharine Tynan, who in 1913 initiated a correspondence and friendship when she wrote to congratulate Rose on winning a prestigious and valuable Novel Competition which she too had entered. Katharine continued to express admiration for Rose’s writing, especially her novels, not only in her letters to Rose (not preserved), but also in memoirs and articles. Rose in turn praised Katharine’s work, especially her poetry, emphasising particularly the comfort it gave her and others in wartime. She herself had lost several friends, including Rupert Brooke, and was anxious about her brother, who was serving in the army. Katharine’s two sons were in the army too. Rose took an interest in Katharine’s daughter, Pamela Hinkson, who was showing early promise as a writer. In 1925 Katharine sent Rose a novel, The Victors, by Peter Deane. When Rose replied, she did not realise that Peter Deane was a pseudonym used by Pamela, let alone that the sad story was closely based on the post-war experiences of Katharine’s elder son.

Uniwersytet i nie-inteligencka opowieść o PRL

This review of Agata Zysiak’s 2016 book Punkty za pochodzenie. Powojenna modernizacja i uniwersytet w robotniczym mieście [Points for Class Origin: Post-War Modernization and the University in a Working-Class City] offers a broad summary of the work and examines it as a general critique of Polish historiography on state socialism. Zysiak’s book opens a discussion on alternatives to national or intelligentsia-based narratives of the past by looking at the story of an unsuccessful experiment to construct a socialist university. However, the author of the review contends that this highly valuable book suffers from a lack of primary-source analysis and omits many post-war experiences.

Uprooted from Home: Analyzing Vietnamese Amerasian Diaspora in the Unwanted

<p><em>After the Vietnam War, approximately 100,000 mixed race children between Vietnamese women and American soldiers, who are called Amerasian, were born. The Vietnamese Communists fought against the US, and Amerasians who were part Americans became the enemy of the Vietnamese. Amerasians were raised fatherless in patriarchal society where the presence of the father was essential to one’s social status. They were taunted by their lack of the father. Vietnamese women who had children with Americans were regarded as prostitutes, and Amerasians were looked down by the Vietnamese as the children of prostitute. Many reasons combined, Amerasians were mistreated in post-Vietnam War society, and humiliated as “bui doi</em><em>,</em><em>” the dust of life. </em></p><em>This paper will explore Vietnamese Amerasians’ experiences of war, loss of home and father, diaspora, and trauma by reading Kien Nguyen’s autobiography. The home functions in the novel as the symbol of the family’s destiny. Nguyen’s trauma of postwar experiences was augmented every time he was uprooted from his home. By tracing the changes of Nguyen’s home, we will understand the transition of his life. The US was his last home after the diaspora from Vietnam, and I will examine if the US really healed his trauma of the war.</em>

Hitler’s Antisemitism and the Horizons of the Racial State

Eve Rosenhaft Hitler’s Antisemitism and the Horizons of the Racial State Roman Töppel’s prodigious literary detective work has provided the most definitive account of the sources behind the ideas that feature in Hitler’s chapter “Volk und Rasse” from Mein Kampf. Regarded by both scholars and contemporaries as the key section, “Volk und Rasse” is the eleventh chapter of the book’s first volume in which Hitler laid out, in Töppel’s words, “the real essence of the National Socialist world view.”1 Hitler not only identifies the central conflict in world history as that between Aryan and Jew, Töppel notes, but he also elaborates on the threat posed by the Jewish presence in terms of blood and “race.” Töppel adduces detailed evidence for Hitler’s long-observed intellectual “dilettantism” in questions of race and racial theory, marked by his tendency to pick and choose arguments while simply ignoring aspects of theories that might run counter to his own argument. Examples of this include his selective use of the work of Hans F. K. Günther, who expressly rejected the term “Aryan” as well as stereotypes about the physical appearance of Jews, and his dismissal of the idea put forth by Günther and other völkisch race theorists that the Jews were to be understood as a Volk but not a race. Likewise, Hitler continued to insist on the degenerative effects of miscegenation in spite of arguments to the contrary in (among other works) the Grundriß der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene (1921) by Erwin Baur, Eugen Fischer, and Fritz Lenz, which is otherwise an important source for “Volk und Rasse.” Additionally, Töppel finds evidence to explain the unsystematic character of Hitler’s thinking in his reading habits, which are documented in eyewitness testimonies and his surviving private library. Hitler’s thinking on “race” was inconsistent, derivative, and intellectually vacuous, even by the standards of a pseudoscience devoted to the study of a wholly constructed category. Although all this will come as no surprise to most readers, Töppel nonetheless provides some valuable food for thought in exposing the genealogy of “Volk und Rasse.” By investigating not only the sources for the chapter, but also the circumstances of its composition, he confirms its originary character. The scholarly consensus has been that Hitler’s antisemitism was a product of his wartime and postwar experiences, yet the fact that “Volk und Rasse” was first drafted in 1922–23, before his imprisonment in Landsberg that 1 Roman Töppel, “Volk und Rasse.” In Search of Hitler’s Sources, in this yearbook, pp. 71–110, here p. 77. 112 Eve Rosenhaft provided the impetus and time to write the rest of the first volume, bespeaks how urgent a business it was for Hitler’s own politics to think through his antisemitism that was still inchoate at that stage. Töppel thus exposes the way in which Hitler’s reflections on blood and race in this part of Mein Kampf serve as a retrospective structure for rationalizing and giving articulate voice to his hatred and fear of Jews. As Töppel puts it, given that Hitler’s antisemitic statements were significantly more radical than those of any of the thinkers on whose work he drew, what Hitler was doing in “Volk und Rasse” was to use their ideas to cobble together “his own, murderous ideology, whose central theme was a relentless hatred of Jews.”2 Hitler was giving his visceral antisemitism the argumentative bones and muscle that could make it the basis for an entire political program. As valuable as it is to see Hitler’s Weltanschauung thus anatomized, Töppel’s analysis is particularly useful in provoking some wider questions about the character and operation of National Socialism. Among these are questions about the functions of reading, ideas and “ideas” in fascist movements, but what I would like to focus on here are questions raised by the indications that in this chapter Hitler is using pseudoscientific principles of “race” to rationalize a pre-existing antisemitism. These questions interrogate the place of this chapter – and Hitler’s ideas more broadly – in the construction of a “racial state.” Where...

Religion, Wealth, and Geographic Location: The Loyalists of Newburgh, New York

Religion, Wealth, and Geographic Location: The Loyalists of Newburgh, New York Kieran J. O’Keefe (bio) It was April 9, 1777, and John Flewelling was on the run. Flewelling, a shoemaker and devout Anglican living in Newburgh, New York, in the Hudson River Valley, had decided to flee to British-occupied New York City. He was a Loyalist, and New York City offered protection from escalating Patriot persecution. Flewelling feared for his safety and organized an escape attempt among some of the community’s other Loyalists. They were to rendezvous at a location near the New York-New Jersey border where they would meet a pilot who had agreed to take the group of eighteen men to New York City. On the night of April 8, Flewelling put his plan into action. It was the night after the new moon, making it pitch black as he traveled south. As Flewelling neared where he was scheduled to meet the other Loyalists on April 9, he encountered a company of unknown men. Flewelling asked the men if they were also Loyalists seeking safety in New York City, and they answered yes. Flewelling invited the group to join him, telling them he was meeting other Loyalists and that he had procured a pilot. Upon reaching the rendezvous location, the unknown men revealed themselves to be Patriots. They had heard of Flewelling’s plan and determined to stop him. All eighteen Loyalists were arrested, and Flewelling was initially jailed twenty-five miles to the north in Goshen.1 Within a week Flewelling was sent to Kingston, where he was incarcerated in a prison ship on the Hudson River. On the evening of August 26, after more than four months in jail, Flewelling escaped the prison ship and trekked ninety miles south to New York City, arriving there safely several days later.2 [End Page 158] Newburgh and the Hudson Valley played vital roles in the American Revolution. The town was the site of General George Washington’s headquarters for much of the war, and was also the scene of the Newburgh Conspiracy in 1783, a threatened uprising among Continental Army officers. The Hudson Valley was often home to the Continental Army, which warily watched the British based just to their south in New York City. As a strategic location connecting the colonies with Canada, both sides vied for control of the region around Newburgh, leading to numerous battles, including Saratoga, White Plains, and Fort Montgomery. As Flewelling’s story indicates, the region also had an active and influential Loyalist population, but relatively little is known of these individuals. What are the origins of Newburgh’s Loyalist population? What were their wartime experiences? How did they adjust to life after the Revolution? Answering these questions enables us to better understand the Loyalist experience not only in the Hudson Valley, but throughout the thirteen colonies. The Newburgh Loyalists show that men loyal to the king were often from the lower ranks of society, and that geography, religion and wealth were critical to both the composition of Loyalist communities and their wartime and post-war experiences. Hudson Valley loyalism has received scant scholarly attention to date. Studies of loyalism in New York have generally examined either New York City or all of New York State. Alexander Flick’s Loyalism in New York and Philip Ranlet’s The New York Loyalists fall into the latter category.3 The authors disagree on the strength of loyalism in New York State, with Flick arguing that Loyalists comprised half the population and Ranlet arguing that they amounted to no more than 15 percent; but neither devotes much attention to Newburgh. Recent scholarship has considered loyalism more closely in and around New York City. Judith Van Buskirk’s Generous Enemies explores the interaction between the Patriot and Loyalist civilian communities there, concluding that these communities, despite living under governments hostile to one another, were in constant and frequent contact. Another recent work, Unnatural Rebellion by Ruma Chopra, examines loyalism in New York City itself. She argues that the Loyalist [End Page 159] community expected to work with the British as equal partners, only to be placed in a subservient role. The...

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Performing Race, Speaking the Body

Post-War Immigration Experiences of Survivors of the Korean War

ABSTRACTThe current study examined personal experiences of Korean American survivors of the Korean War who immigrated to the United States post-war. Seventeen Korean American immigrants ages 55–84 years old shared their experiences before, during, and after the Korean War, as well as their immigration experiences. All participants were residents of California, which is home to the second highest number of Korean immigrants in the United States. Through the use of consensual qualitative analysis (Hill, Thompson, & Williams, 1997), themes emerged from participant interviews that included the loss of identity, the American dream and unmet expectations, survival, and parenting issues (including intergenerational conflicts). This study provides key information about this population for clinical settings and suggests the importance in future research to understand the post-war effects on successive generations of Korean American immigrants.

A LIFESPAN PERSPECTIVE ON COMBAT EXPOSURE AMONG KOREAN VIETNAM WAR VETERANS

Although 320,000 South Korean army troops fought in the Vietnam War, few studies of Korean Vietnam War veterans exist. We used a lifespan developmental perspective to predict PTSD symptoms in later life among 450 male Korean Vietnam War veterans (Mage = 66.98, SD = 3.04). They completed mail surveys about prewar (prior stressors, childhood family environment), warzone (combat exposure, perceived control, unit cohesion, appraisals of military service), and postwar experiences (post-deployment stressors, social support, and PTSD symptoms). PTSD symptoms in later life were independently predicted by warzone (29.6%) and postwar factors (11.0%); some were protective (desirable appraisals and social support), but most were risk factors (combat exposure, unit cohesion, undesirable appraisals, and postdeployment stressors). While prewar variables accounted for 3.7% of the variance, they moderated the relationship between combat exposure and PTSD symptoms. The findings highlight the importance of a lifespan perspective on understanding the long-term impacts of combat exposure.

Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era by Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai

Reviewed by: Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era by Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai James J. Broomall Northern Character: College-Educated New Englanders, Honor, Nationalism, and Leadership in the Civil War Era. Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. ISBN 978-0-8232-7182-5. 288pp., cloth, $35.00. Recent scholarship on nineteenth-century Americans has overturned historiographical orthodoxy. Characteristics once deemed strictly regional, southern honor and northern intellectualism, for example, have been reconsidered in revealing studies such as Lorien Foote’s The Gentleman and the Roughs and Timothy J. Williams’s Intellectual Manhood. In Northern Character, Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai joins this growing chorus and points out that honor shaped northern men. Its manifestations were, of course, markedly different across region. Unlike their southern counterparts who were shaped by public reputation, northerners’ honor was rooted “in an individual’s subconscious” (64). Focusing exclusively on elite New England colleges and their graduates, Wongsrichanalai seeks to understand how young men’s “socialization on college campuses in the antebellum period and continuing through their wartime and postwar experiences reveals the formation and application of northern honor” (2). He achieves this goal admirably with a highly readable and original account of the experiences of forty-nine young men—an influential group of leaders deemed “New Brahmins”—capably placed in and understood through the social, political, and military milieus of the Civil War era. Chronologically driven, the seven thematic chapters that comprise Northern Character are framed by a robust introduction that includes layered and useful historiographical and methodological discussions. Wongsrichanalai has a firm command of his material throughout the work and writes with clarity and confidence. Internal thematic chapter divisions guide the material and frame [End Page 332] the discussions. Lengthy methodological or historiographical conversations are, rightly, relegated to the footnotes and, when appropriate, included within the main text. In recounting the character and social vision of the New Brahmins, Northern Character is intellectual and social history at its best. The New Brahmins saw the Civil War as a chance to “test their character,” which Wongsrichanalai defines as “an idealized internal standard of behavior consisting most importantly of educated, independent thought, and selfless action” (88, 62, italics in original). These young men felt obligated to protect the Union and hoped war would strengthen northern patriotism and resolve. Interestingly, like the soldiers found in Reid Mitchell’s The Vacant Chair, the New Brahmins were concerned with legacy, but rather than using domestic imagery to frame military service they instead looked to public obligations and national character. This finding is particularly revealing in explaining the ease with which white Americans reconciled in the postbellum era. The New Brahmins chastised southern gentlemen “for failing to develop the region and setting good examples for other southerners to emulate,” which resulted in civil war (113). Conversely, Confederate soldiers were deemed brave men who were fighting an “unjust war instigated by unnamed politicians” (126). Once down south, the New Brahmins saw ample opportunities for development and industrial improvement; these experiences directed their vision for Reconstruction. In the postbellum era, the New Brahmins prescribed character-based education, social reform, and political vigilance and hoped an active government would advance a limited Reconstruction policy (167). Wongsrichanalai is at his best when describing ideas and crafting an individual group’s generational experience. This difficult work has been accomplished admirably. Less developed is the book’s cultural reading of evidence and individuals. The author readily acknowledges the New Brahmin’s foibles but does not always apply the same scrutiny in considering their writings as cultural products. In projecting their attainment of character through letters home, the New Brahmins were constructing self-conscious portraits of themselves. In writing home from college, they proudly related how they disdained bad habits and focused exclusively on their studies, and once they took the field of battle they leveled claims of bravery, daring, and presence of mind that far surpassed their contemporaries (69–70, 137, 155–61). Granted, these were remarkable young men who held themselves to high codes of conduct, [End Page 333] but Wongsrichanalai might have better highlighted how the New Brahmins’ personal obsessions with public reputation directly shaped the construction and...