Pre-war Years Research Articles

War, Politics and Memory: <em>Russian Historians Reevaluate the Origins of World War II</em>

The myth of the Great Patriotic War, including the role of the USSR in the origins of World War II, continues to be a key element in the national identity of the Russian people. Previously, Soviet authorities mandated a narrative depicting the Soviet Union sincerely and unambiguously working for peace and against Nazi expansionism in the prewar years. This interpretation criticized the Western Powers for their alleged complicity in Hitler's aggression. After the collapse of the USSR, several competing views have appeared. The Putin and Medvedev administrations, as well as the popular national-patriotic school, maintain much of the former Soviet interpretation. Other Russian historians, many of them politically liberal, indict Stalin for mishandling the prewar crisis or even for promoting the onset of war for imperialistic or revolutionary purposes.

The First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII by Ellen Eisenberg

today's classes on the West. But that isaminor quibble. Who can saywhat Pomeroy might have included had he started this project at least tenyears earlier? Itmight be added thatPomeroy's chapter notes alone comprise a total of nearly 120 pages and are themselvesfilledwith additional comments and information. The book also includes an up-to-date supplemental bibliog raphyprepared by historian David M. Wrobel. An excellent index concludes thevolume and adds to itsenduring usefulness as an important reference tool. Though The American FarWest in the20th Century is an advanced and no-nonsense approach to thehistory of the region, itcould be read profitablyby anyone seeking in-depth knowledge of themodern West. The book belongs on the scholar's bookshelf along with theother landmarkpublications thathave done somuch to spur and advance thinking about the West. We are indebted toPomeroy, Etulain, Wrobel, Howard Lamar, who wrote the fore word, and Yale University Press forcollectively creating a highlyuseful and attractiveaddition to the Western history library. Carlos A. Schwantes University of Missouri-St. Louis THE FIRST TO CRYDOWN INJUSTICE? WESTERN JEWS AND JAPANESE REMOVAL DURING WWII byEllenEisenberg Lexington Books, Lantham, Md. 2008, Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. 204 pages. $24.95 paper. Eisenberg's book recounts a story littleknown in standard works on Japanese American internment, namely the role of the Western Jewish community. Her thesis is simple: one would suppose that Jews,themselves thevic timsof discrimination, would have sidedwith the JapaneseAmerican community as itfaced discrimination and eventual internmentduring World War II. This was not the case, however, and herwork laysout the reasonswhy. Briefly,this work describes the Jewishcom munities in Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. The communities had worked hard to constitute themselves and had strong ties to one another, focused around the syna gogues and businesses. The passage of the Alien Land Laws and the National Origins Act of 1924, ending immigrationofAsians to America, were early signs of discrimination against Japanese Americans. Facing discrimination itself,the Jewishcommunity remained silentbefore these discriminatorymeasures. In thedays following PearlHarbor, the leading rabbi inSeattle urged his congregation to remain calm and be assured thattheUnited Stateswould ultimatelyprevail. JapaneseAmericans were more fearful. While only the Issei feared overt discrimination, the Nisei were cautiously optimistic. The Nikkei, relativelycalm, trusted their long tradition of loyaltyto the United Stateswould protect them. Some organizations, such as the American Civil LibertiesUnion, offered tentativesupport,but only a few came to theirdefense once Execu tiveOrder 9066 was announced and plans for removalwere publicized. The Jewishcommu nities, it should be noted, put great emphasis on their "whiteness," and this caused them to feel their "differentness" from the Japanese Americans. The Jewish community, being solidly behind thewar effortand supporting PresidentRoosevelt inallhiswartime measures to defeatNazi Germany, became overwhelm inglyanti-Japanese. There was some tendency to differentiatebetween the Japan-born Issei and the citizenNisei, butmost concluded the Japanese communitywould sticktogetherand sidewith Japan. Although the prewar years were crucial in the formation of ethnic communities, the year 1942was most significant in the shaping of attitudes between the two groups about internment.The attitude of the Jewishpress 472 OHQ vol. 107, no. 3 was critical. Instead of sidingwith theoutsid ers, the press chose to remain silent, not from ignorance but ratherfromdiscomfortwith the concept ofmass internment. Support for the war remained the primary sentiment. Exceptional individuals, however, do stand out for theiropposition to internment.They spoke forthemselves and not foranyorganiza tion.The makeup of the individual communi ties played a role.Where the Jewishand the Japanese American communities were physi cally close and people knew each other, there tended to be feelings of support for citizen Nisei. Personal ties and religious connections also helped forman opposition to internment. The Bay Area Fair Play Committee voiced strongopposition to internment; its member ship included college faculty and students as well as religious leaders.The ACLU did not for mally oppose internment,although a number of its members did. The Nikkei community in theBay Area was close to its white and Jewish neighbors,many ofwhom opposed internment and helped theirneighbors. Seattle had a large Nikkei population, and itsJewishcommunity members were individually sympathetic. Still, therewas no organized opposition to intern ment, although Christian groups such as the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) helped departing and returningNikkei. The...

Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China, 1941–1945 (review)

Reviewed by: Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China, 1941–1945 Mark Wilkinson Captives of Empire: The Japanese Internment of Allied Civilians in China, 1941–1945. By Greg Leck. Bangor, Pa.: Shandy Press, 2006. ISBN 0-9772141-0-9. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Pp. xvii, 738. $115.00. In 1941 the Japanese not only erupted across the Pacific against American and British military forces, they also swept through colonial enclaves in China from Hong Kong to Harbin, where thousands of “enemy” civilian nationals suddenly found themselves “in the bag.” Over 13,000 men, women and children who had come to China as a part of the western pursuit of profits, souls, or adventure in the prewar years were interned in two dozen camps in Hong Kong, Shanghai, and north China, including Greg Leck’s British mother and grandfather, who worked for the Chinese Maritime Customs Service. Leck started this project to learn his own family history, but has ended up compiling a detailed, respectful collective memoir of the internment camp experience, told largely in the words of the internees themselves. He has interviewed or corresponded with scores of survivors and consulted memoirs, camp diaries, correspondence, and official reports available in the Imperial War Museum, the National Archives, and elsewhere. Leck briefly surveys the “halcyon days” of prewar Shanghai and other foreign enclaves, and then describes how foreign communal agencies, such as the British Residents Association (BRA) helped their nationals navigate the uncertain period from the onset of war through actual internment, which occurred for most in 1942 through March 1943. Brief chapters survey different aspects of camp life, describing inadequate, cramped housing, food that was frequently spoiled or vermin-infested, and guards who were generally callous and inattentive to the needs of these thousands of non-combatants. Leck does not unduly demonize the Japanese authorities. But it is clear that in many camps, the captors co-opted and dominated supposedly independent elected camp councils. Some internees were indeed tortured or executed for real or imagined crimes. And the fear of such abuse hung over every confrontation about lousy food, communications with outsiders, and distribution [End Page 1316] of occasional Red Cross relief packages. A handful of internees did escape, but most languished in squalid conditions until liberation in August 1945. Leck captures the wide variety of residents, with former taipans, missionaries, beached sailors and itinerant entertainers scrabbling in trash heaps together looking for a few bits of unburned coal to use in their small, homemade stoves known as “chatties.” Generally, they tried to make the best of their circumstances. They schooled their children, maintained libraries, played sports, and entertained themselves as best they could. But there were also fights over food, graft, and camp love affairs. Leck’s overall thesis is that “In internment, they were an example of the strength of human endeavor in the face of adversity” (p. 26). The account is profusely illustrated throughout with photographs, line sketches, and watercolors of internees, camps, and all aspects of their constrained lives. Leck also describes each of the twenty-five camps, including diagrams, pictures and 200 pages of camp rosters, compiled with help from former internee Desmond Power. Leck has amassed a wealth of material on the internment experience. Hopefully he will deposit copies of his interviews and correspondence with a good archival facility, such as The China Hands Oral History Project, at California State University, Fullerton. Mark Wilkinson Virginia Military Institute, Lexington, Virginia Copyright © 2008 Society for Military History

“A Champion Had Come”: William Pitt Fessenden and the Republican Party, 1854–60

Republican senator William Pitt Fessenden’s antebellum career has been largely misunderstood by scholars of nineteenth‐century United States history. Though labeled by historians as a moderate or conservative in his later years as chair of the Committee on Reconstruction, in the prewar years Fessenden was a fiery antislavery radical. As a young lawyer in Maine, he quickly became a leading antislavery Whig, fought the Slave Power alongside John Quincy Adams in the US House of Representatives, and created the antislavery coalition that would send him to the United States Senate and become that state’s first Republican organization. In the Senate, Fessenden played a vital role in the debates on Kansas and the expansion of slavery and led radical Republicans in the attack on leading doughfaces Douglas, Pierce, and Buchanan. Moreover, his speeches and debates were read widely, influencing Republicans such as Abraham Lincoln and garnering support for him in the 1860 nomination. A study of Fessenden’s antebellum career is important, not only to achieve a better understanding of this important politician, but also because it provides insight into the meaning of prewar radicalism and how the term “radical” evolved dramatically during the years of Civil War and Reconstruction.

Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia: Essays in Honour of James D. White by Ian D. Thatcher (review)

reviews 561 incisive essay on the effect of defeat on tsarist foreign policy underlines the perceived imperative for a recueillement inRussia's external relations, but also shows how Russia's bureaucratic elite established a greater role for itself in the foreign policy-making process. Norman Saul's contribution on the peace talks inNew Hampshire charts their course, and isvery attuned to diplomatic nuances in examining the subtle changes that occurred in Russo-American relations startingwith the Portsmouth-Kittery talks. The translated chapters, in particular, would have benefited frommore careful copy-editing, which might easily have filtered out stylistic infelicities and grammatical and typographical errors. Although very nicely produced, and adorned with wonderful illustrations, at around ?130 each, the price for the two volumes isprohibitive. Overall, there can be no doubt as to the scholarly thoroughness and importance of the essays brought together in these two volumes. Scholars of the period will want to take note of them. Even so, a grain of doubt remains. Following Japan's victory in the war, a senior British diplomat comment ed that the rise of Japan had so upset the existing international order 'as a planet the size of Mars would derange the solar system'. The Russo-Japa neseWar was a regional conflictwith global ramifications, and itneeds to be seen in a global context. The essays reviewed here, excellent though they are, remain focused on the two antagonists on Mars, but pay little attention to the solar system. School of History T. G. Otte Universityof East Anglia Thatcher, Ian D. (ed.).Reinterpreting Revolutionary Russia: Essays in Honour of James D. White. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2006. vii + 219 pp. Notes. Index. ?45.00. Ian Thatcher has assembled an impressive collection of highly readable essays inhonour ofJames White. In his own Introduction, Thatcher highlights White's research on the Bolshevik seizure of power, which stressed that it was Trotskii's tactic of transferring power bloodlessly to the Soviets that triumphed, though Lenin's idea of an offensive on Petrograd dominated the historiography in order to preserve Lenin's primacy in the legend. On theTerror in 1905John Keep shows that itsobject of achieving po litical change succeeded only when strikes, riots and demonstrations forced the Tsar to concede reforms. Keep cites the revisionist view of terrorists as dangerous Utopians, often criminals in disguise, while he limits terrorism to 'violent individual or group action [. . .] designed to kill or harm per sons, rightly or wrongly, as members or supporters of an oppressive ruling establishment' (p. 22). The theme of Russian terrorism is continued in Jane McDermid's article on Mariya Spiridonova. Arrested for the assassination of a provincial governor, Spiridonova soon became a cause celebre when itwas reported that 562 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 she had been beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted under interrogation. The idea of 'a beautiful young woman, determined to "sacrifice" her lifeon the altar of the revolutionary cause' (p. 37), and suffering torture as a result, was taken up as a sensation in the Western press, which was more indignant at her mistreatment than either her killing of the governor or the sentence of death, which was commuted to twentyyears in exile. Revisiting the work of Leopold Haimson and the question of whether World War One was fundamentally responsible for the demise of tsarism, David Saunders broadens his focus beyond the immediate pre-war years and intoprovincial industrial centres.His research on the impactmade byRussia's nineteenth-century wars on industrial labour leads him to conclude that it was not the intensification of pre-existing trends that ended tsarism,but rather the 'equilibrium-punctuating catastrophe' (p. 57) that was the war. Rex Wade questions the terminal date of the Russian revolution. After surveying the wide range that generations of historians have applied ? October itself,theCivil War, NEP, Lenin's death, and even 1937-38 and the Great Terror, Wade settles for the dispersal of the Constitutional Assembly inJanuary 1918, arguing persuasively that that event 'transformed a political struggle into a military struggle, revolution into civilwar' (p. 85). Analysing Trotskii's role in the civilwar, Geoffrey Swain argues that it was his application of 'thoroughly un-Bolshevik' (p. 86) principles of organiza...

On the Reversal of Return and Dividend Growth Predictability: A Tale of Two Periods

A disconcerting, albeit generally accepted, finding is that aggregate stock return is predictable by dividend yield but dividend growth is unpredictable. I show that part of this lack of dividend growth predictability stems from how dividend growth is constructed. I then document a dramatic reversal of predictability in the 134 years during 1872-2005: stock return is largely unpredictable in the first seven decades, but becomes predictable in the postwar period; dividend growth is strongly predictable in the prewar years but this predictability disappears in the postwar years. New evidence on the predictability of long-run return and dividend growth is also documented.

Doing Justice to the Cold War: A Review Essay

January/February 2008 · Historically Speaking 19 Doing Justice to the Cold War: A Review Essay William Stueck ^^ uring the summer of 1986 a group ^H of U.S. scholars selected to partici- ^^ pate in a conference on the Cold War in Beijing traveled to Washington for a briefing . There they learned that die origins of the Korean War were off limits for discussion. Jonathan Pollack, the scholar assigned to write the paper on the war, was not to mention that the fighting had started widi a North Korean military offensive across the 38th parallel. Two years later, at a conference of American and Soviet scholars at Ohio University, the two groups sparred over who had initiated the fighting on June 25, 1950 that began the Korean War. The senior members of the Soviet delegation insisted that it had been South Korea whereas the Americans were adamant that North Korea had been the initiator. Suddenly a young Soviet historian broke in: "I think we should all agree that North Korea attacked South Korea and move on to more important issues." For a moment the conferees fell into stunned silence.' How times have changed since the 1980s! The Cold War has ended, North Korea no longer can dictate what is said by scholars in China about the outbreak of the Korean War, and large bodies of documentation from the former communist nations have become available, thus settling once and for all such issues as who started the shooting in Korea in June 1950. Many mysteries remain, of course, as do many disagreements on interpretation. But no one can reasonably deny that over the last generation Cold War scholarship has been enormously enriched. The five books reviewed here represent some of the most ambitious work published by senior scholars over the last three years. The complaint has been made that, too often, historians treat World War II as the gateway into the Cold War rather than a distinct and important entity unto itself.2 Stalin's Wars clearly avoids such a complaint , as Geoffrey Roberts devotes the bulk of his space to the notion that the Soviet dictator was "a very effective and highly successful war leader" between 1941 and 1945, especially as the conflict progressed . Since this review focuses on the Cold War, I will limit my comments on this book to Roberts's second and third arguments, namely that Stalin "worked hard to make the Grand Alliance a success and wanted to see it continue after the war" and that his "domestic regime [in his last years] was very different from the Soviet system of the prewar years." Roberts makes a strong case that Stalin sought to perpetuate the Grand Alliance after the war. He did so, Roberts asserts, because he needed peace to rebuild his country, because U.S. loans could help in this process, and because he believed that the Americans and the British would accept his primarily defensive goals beyond his borders. Thus he showed considerable flexibility in negotiations and often retreated when faced with U.S. resistance. With the unveiling of the Marshall Plan in mid1947 , however, after the Americans and the British had persistendy revealed insensitivity to his legitimate security concerns and an unwillingness to grant him the gains that superior Soviet contributions to the war effort entided him, he determined that his only choice was to rally his country and die international communist movement to staunch resistance. Even then, from 1949 to his death in 1953 he pursued a measure of détente with the West and, with the exception of Korea, adopted a course of "restraint " that not only sought to maintain peace but looked to a resolution of the critical German question . Roberts does not claim that the United States alone was responsible for the breakdown of the Grand Alliance. Yet he does argue that the United States failed to see "that beyond the alleged communist threat was an opportunity to arrive at a postwar settlement that could have averted the cold war and avoided the ideological warfare that obscured the paradoxical truth that Stalin was the dictator who defeated Hitier and helped to save the world for democracy." Most Cold War historians...

The history of neurosurgery in Kiev in the pre-war years (the language of archival documents)

The history of neurosurgery in Kiev in the pre-war years (the language of archival documents)

Civil war and world war in Europe: Spain, Yugoslavia, and Greece, 1936-1949

Introduction and Historical Background PART I: PRE-WAR SOCIETIES AND STATES Social and Economic Contours of the Pre-War Years Politics, Parties, National Questions, and Militaries PART II: STATES AND SOCIETIES AT WAR: SPAIN, YUGOSLAVIA AND GREECE AND THE INTERNATIONAL POWER STRUGGLES OF 1936-1949 Becoming Domestic and International Battlegrounds The Rise of the Communist Parties Soviet and British Positions and Policies, 1936-1944 The Decisive Phases Roads to Victory and Defeat Conclusion Epilogue

The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln (review)

The Political Style of Conspiracy: Chase, Sumner, and Lincoln. By Michael William Pfau. (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2005. Pp. 248. Cloth, $59.95.)Reviewed by Frederick J. BlueThe controversy over the Slave Power Conspiracy divided antebellum Americans and has continued to divide historians who write about the ultimate cause of the Civil War. In this volume, a scholar of rhetoric adds his input to the ongoing controversy. The result is a study that will interest those who study the prewar years, but may receive greater attention from those in the field of rhetorical studies.It is Michael Pfau's contention that the claim of a Slave Power Conspiracy passed out of the hands of those on the fringe of sectional division to those in the mainstream during the 1840s and 1850s, in large part due to the efforts of Salmon P. Chase, Charles Sumner, and Abraham Lincoln. The proponents of conspiracy argued that southern slaveholders and politicians conspired with northern Democrats and Whigs to control national politics and permit the expansion of slavery and the increase of their political and economic power in the process. In so doing, the conspirators threatened the basic principles of the Republic established by the Revolutionary founding fathers. Among the earliest proponents of such a claim were the Garrisonians, who argued from a fringe position in society and who were often dismissed as irrational fanatics. Richard Hofstadter and David Brion Davis described their ap- proach as the paranoid style, which used arguments that, if not false, were at least questionable.While some conspiracy theories remained the view only of extremists, others, argue Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood, moved from the fringe to the mainstream in America and, as such, entered the two-party system. Such was the direction of the Slave Power Conspiracy. Looking at the opposite poles of fringe and center, Pfau contends that the process of winning minds to the theory was a rhetorical one. Critics suggest that William Lloyd Garrison used lurid and exaggerated imagery to describe a vast and sinister effort that began with a proslavery Constitution. His was a holy war, says Pfau, which not only disdained politics but degenerated into Garrison's withdrawal and the violence of John Brown.While this was taking place, political antislavery activists moved the debate first into third-party politics and then into the two-party system. Some might question Pfau's choice of the three leading Republicans, especially when he suggests that the three were leading contenders for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860; Sumner did not seek the office, nor did he receive serious consideration.Yet the speeches Pfau chooses to analyze are central in the Slave Power Conspiracy evolution. Beginning with Chase, Pfau shows how the Ohioan began to move away from the periphery of Liberty party politics with his 1845 Address of the Southern and Western Liberty Convention in Cincinnati, distancing the party from its more reform-minded religious element in an effort to form a coalition with northern antislavery Democrats. It was a secular approach stressing civic and republican ideology, in which Chase showed how southern aristocrats had strayed from their Jeffersonian roots. By 1854, when Chase joined with five other Free Soilers in authoring the Appeal of the Independent Democrats, the issue had become the Kansas Nebraska Act, the crowning proof of Slave Power Conspiracy. …

FORGOTTEN OFFERINGS: MESSIAEN'S FIRST ORCHESTRAL WORKS

The prevailing image of Messiaen in the 1930s is of an organist-composer. One of the first things learnt about him is that he was organist at the church of the Trinité in Paris, having been appointed at the spectacularly young age of 22. As the earliest (though not the first) of Messiaen's works to have been published, the short organ piece Le Banquet céleste (1928) is, quite rightly, the focus of close examination for its precocious assurance. The 1930s were punctuated by the substantial organ cycles La Nativité du Seigneur (1935) and Les Corps glorieux (1939), so it is no surprise to find Felix Aprahamian's article for the fifth edition of Grove describing Messiaen as being a ‘French organist and composer”, and later observing that ‘although it was as a composer of organ music that in pre-war years Messiaen's name first attracted attention, he had already composed a quantity of vocal music’. Fifty years later, Paul Griffiths similarly observed that ‘Organ works featured prominently in his output of the next decade [1930s], but so did music about his family’. According to Harry Halbreich, ‘one can say that before 1940, Messiaen was essentially an organist-composer’, while, Malcolm Hayes concludes his chapter on the early orchestral music in The Messiaen Companion by stating that ‘to judge from the idiom of his works written in the 1930s, he had once seemed destined to spend his creative life within the narrow confines of the organ loft’.

Translating Nietzsche, Mediating Literature: Alexander Tille and the Limits of Anglo-German Intercultural Transfer

Dr. Alexander Tille (1866–1912) was one of the key-figures in Anglo-German intercultural transfer towards the end of the 19th century. As a lecturer in German at Glasgow University he was the first to translate and edit Nietzsche’s work into English. Writers such as W. B. Yeats were influenced by Nietzsche and used Tille’s translations. Tille’s social Darwinist reading of the philosopher’s oeuvre, however, had a narrowing impact on the reception of Nietzsche in the Anglo-Saxon world for decades. Through numerous publications Tille disseminated knowledge about British authors (e.g., Robert Louis Stevenson, William Wordsworth) in Germany and about German authors (e.g., Johann Wolfgang von Goethe) in Britain. His role as mediator also extended into areas such as history, religion, and industry. During the Boer war, however, Tille’s outspoken pro-German nationalism brought him in conflict with his British host society. After being physically attacked by his students he returned to Germany and published a highly anglophobic monograph. Tille personifies the paradox of Anglo-German relations in the pre-war years, which deteriorated despite an increase in intercultural transfer and knowledge about the respective Other.

Bengt Str�mgren: Interstellar Glow, Helium Content, and Solar Life Supply, 1932?1940

Abstract This paper examines a significant period in the career of the Danish astronomer and astrophysicist, Bengt G. D. Strömgren (1908–1987), in particular, it focuses on his time spent at the University of Chicago and at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin between 1936 and 1938 and his subsequent return to Denmark in the spring of 1938. The years from 1932 to 1940 were a verdant time for new theories of chemical composition in stellar interiors, of nuclear energy production in stars, and of interstellar hydrogen glow (HII regions/Strömgren Spheres), and Strömgren was actively involved in, if not initiating, much of this research. This paper looks at Strömgren’s scientific contributions and aims to provide an insight into the relative states of US and European astronomy at the time by examining the intellectual and social development of astrophysics as Strömgren both experienced it and helped to make it happen in the eight pre-war years.1 My analysis of this phase in Strömgren’s life, both at the University of Copenhagen and the University of Chicago, is based upon newly uncovered archival materials from both sites.2 Strömgren’s interaction with scientific figures such as Otto Struve, George Gamow, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, Hans Bethe, and von Weizsäcker also helps to highlight the significance of this period.

Why Air Forces Fail: The Anatomy of Defeat (review)

Reviewed by: Why Air Forces Fail: The Anatomy of Defeat Michael S. Neiberg (bio) Why Air Forces Fail: The Anatomy of Defeat. Edited by Robin Higham and Stephen J. Harris . Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2006. Pp. 382. $39.95. Since their inception, air forces have held out the enticing prospect of using their high-tech weapons to fight new kinds of wars. In the 1920s, air theorists like Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell promised that air forces could win wars by striking deep into the heart of the enemy. More recently, the United States relied on "shock and awe" to clear away both the military and psychological impediments to victory in Iraq. Despite the promises of such dazzling victories, air power alone has rarely delivered anything close to the promise. The editors of this volume claim that only Israel in 1967 and the United States in the two Persian Gulf wars began wars with air dominance that they maintained throughout the course of a conflict. In those cases, of course, the brief nature of the war meant that the Israelis and Americans did not need to test the long-term durability of their air prowess. This volume is refreshingly dedicated not to understanding why air forces succeed, but why they fail. Turning the problem on its head in this fashion allowed coeditors Robin Higham and Stephen Harris to divide their case studies into three categories: air forces that had no realistic chances of meeting their missions (the dead ducks); those that had initial success they could not sustain (the hares); and those that suffered badly at the outset of wars, but recovered sufficiently to contribute to victory (the phoenixes). The themes that emerge prove "the falseness of the axiom" (p. 344) that airpower's advanced technologies somehow exempted it from the problems faced by land and sea forces. Indeed, what emerges here is a vision of technology [End Page 234] creating its own hazards. An advanced technological military system creates its own need for sophisticated infrastructures, including trained pilots and mechanics, auxiliary technologies such as radar, and well-developed manufacturing plants. They also require consistent, wise procurement choices by officers and politicians alike in an environment of rapidly changing technologies. Air power, in particular, changed so rapidly that technologies on the cutting edge in 1925 were hopelessly outdated by 1935. Thus the editors conclude that success depends "not so much on the technology as on the prescience, understanding, and management of that resource" (p. 4). The essays themselves follow a carefully developed and well-thought-out format that includes analyses of not just military factors, but social, political, and cultural factors as well. Each essay also includes suggestions for further research and an extensive bibliography. The authors are internationally recognized experts in their areas, including John Morrow on the Central Powers in World War I, Anthony Christopher Cain on France in World War II, and Mark Parillo on the United States in the Pacific theater during World War II. Small wars and small powers are also represented through essays on the Arab air forces of 1973 (by coeditor Higham), the Argentine air force in 1982 (by René De La Pedraja), and Poland in 1939 (by Michael Alfred Peszke). The picture that emerges from these individual efforts is one of air forces called upon to fulfill missions they had not envisioned, hampered by poor decisions in prewar years, and often dependent on the success of others, such as the ability of armies to protect airfields from invaders. Those air forces with strategic space such as Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union in World War II adapted, while others failed to adjust to changing realities. These failures were multicausal and owed as much to flawed vision as to a failure to keep pace technologically. Possessing superior technology, in other words, was not the same as knowing how to use it to maximum advantage in the crucible of war. This thought-provoking and informative volume adds greatly to our understanding of how air forces are (and are not) subject to the same constraints as more conventional forces. The book might have benefited from the inclusion of discussions of more controversial...

The "B" Movie Goes to War in Hitler, Beast of Berlin (1939)

The “B” Movie Goes to War in Hitler, Beast of Berlin (1939) Cynthia J. Miller (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The press kit for Hitler, Beast of Berlin (1939) urges theater owners to promote the film "boldly, and without reservation." Courtesy of Author's collection During the 1930s, the neighborhood movie house was a place of refuge for many—the pressures and strains of the world vanished amidst the laughter, thrills, and chills of the Golden Era of the "B" movie. In the world outside, people were weighed down with the burdens of the era—living with memories of the family, friends, and neighbors who died in World War I; struggling to survive the effects of the Great Depression; and cautiously witnessing the strife of the Spanish Civil War—but once inside the movie house doors, the tensions of everyday life melted away as the "Bs" brought low-budget action, suspense, comedy, and melodrama into the lives of the movie-going masses. With a shriek, a pratfall, or a fiendish glare, "B" movies served up extra helpings of the over-the-top escapism that Americans craved. By the end of the decade, however, the boundaries between the world of the cinema and the world outside began to erode. The question of whether or not to once again become involved in Europe's recurring struggles was beginning to polarize popular sentiment, and, as the conflicts in Europe and Asia escalated, the film industry once again engaged with the more serious affairs of the world. Hollywood's "Poverty Row," known for its quick, low-budget "B" productions pandering to desires for over-the-top entertainment, produced a small film, Hitler, Beast of Berlin (1939), that played a striking role in the national tug-of-war over military preparedness. While other films of the interwar era whispered words of fear or caution in the ears of American moviegoers, Beast of Berlin screamed—it mocked, shocked, and menaced in defiance of the Third Reich. Dismissed by critics as an artistic flop, but a masterful work of propaganda (Crowther, Morrison, Thirer), Beast of Berlin combined images depicting life inside the Third Reich and slap-in-the-face, exploitation-style public relations to create one of the first few blatantly interventionist films of the pre-war years and also one of the first to openly cast the Nazi regime in a villainous light. The film brought vivid, tangible oppression onto the screens and into the lives of theater-goers in support of U.S. involvement in the European conflict. Produced by Ben Judell in 1939, Hitler, Beast of Berlin was one of the inaugural efforts of the small, independent Producers Distributing Corporation (PDC)—which, in 1943, would become the infamous Producers Releasing Corporation. When the German invasion of Poland (September 1939) produced widespread concern in Hollywood, Judell's low-budget studio was one of the first to act, and it did so in sensationalist form, setting aside other projects to rush into production of Hitler, Beast of Berlin, based on the novel and screenplay, Goose Step (n.d.) by Broadway producer-director Shepard Traube. In line with the studio's lowbrow dedication to "high entertainment and exploitation values" (Fernett [End Page 58] 99), Judell changed the title to the more dynamic Hitler, Beast of Berlin, hoping to capitalize on the notoriety of the 1918 film, Kaiser: Beast of Berlin, which, during the previous world-wide struggle, had incited audiences to anti-German riots in several cities. Subsequently the PDC project became Beasts of Berlin, but as public sentiment mounted in favor of the Allied cause, the "Hitler" title shouted at audiences from marquees and lobby posters. At the time of its official release date (Oct. 15, 1939), Beast of Berlin was a 'hot' item, regardless of its "B" status. Cited as pro-war, inflammatory, and offensive to Germany—it was quickly sanctioned by the Production Code Administration (PCA) and censorship boards in several states. After a month of editing and title-changing, it reopened to reviewer praise as the first fiction feature to depict the terrors of life inside the Fuhrer's Reich. Hollywood and Intervention Before 1936, the idea of...

Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine. L'église russe de Paris et ses fidèles des origines à 1917 by Nicholas Ross (review)

350 SEER, 84, 2, 2006 Slezkine convincingly argues that the Jews were in no way a target of the purgesof I937,and theirprominence among the repressedis simplya resultof the significantJewish contingent among the Bolshevik old guard. Slezkine traces the roots of state-sponsoredanti-Semitism to the immediate pre-war years, when Stalin sought to win over Hitler by imitating his racial politics. During World War Two, paradoxically, the Nazis's anti-Semitic ideology spilled over into the Soviet occupied areas, which preparedthe wide popular base for post-war anti-Jewishcampaigns. Slezkine sums up the Soviet period as the rise and fall of the Jews, whose new 'golden calf (the Revolution) propelled them to the heights of power and eventuallyalmost crushed them. The Russian-JewishRevolution aside, the twentieth century is proclaimed theJewish century for several additionalreasons:this is the age of Marxism, Freudianism, capitalism, anti-Semitism (or, shall we add, the culmination thereof in the Holocaust), and American Liberalism, and Slezkine rightly seesJews at the inception or at the centre of all of these diversephenomena. This is the Jewish century also because of the rebirth, after a hiatus of two millennia, of theJewish state, and Slezkine does in fact turn his attention to Israel toward the end of the book. His attention is cursorythough, ignoring any specifics or complexities of the Middle Eastern context and repeating a few unflatteringbut 'politicallycorrect' opinions encountered frequentlyin the Westernpress.Israelemergesin Slezkine'snarrativeas a nationalisticstate of Zionistpioneers, athletes and soldiers,'self-consciouslyWestern in the face of "Oriental darkness"and ideologically Apollonian in the face of Western Mercurianism'(p. 364). Israel is portrayed as benefiting from special status as a 'countryto which standardrulesdid not apply'(p. 366) on account of the Holocaust. In any event, the topic of Israel is soon dropped, as the author launches into a paean to the truly 'Mercurian'society of the United States, where meritocracy has become part of the state ideology. While this rosy pictureof the 'land of opportunity'seems grotesquelyanachronisticin view of the current prevalence of cronyism in the American political establishment, one is compelled to agree that, during the Jewish century',Jews have in fact fared better in America than elsewhere. The strengthsof Slezkine'sbook are in rich factual information, sophisticated argumentation,and a fresh look at a number of thorny issues, such as the natureof anti-SemitismorJews and the Revolution. Both engagingand at times infuriating, nheJewishCentugy cannot fail to capture a wide intellectual audience. School ofSlavonic andEastEuropean Studies MAIA RUBINS University College London Ross, Nicholas. Saint-Alexandre sur-Seine. L'igliserussede Paris et sesfdeles des origines a I9I7. Collection historique de l'Institutd'etudes slaves, 41. Les Editionsdu Cerf,Paris,2005. 320 pp. Illustrations.Figures.Tables. Notes. Bibliography.Index. ?30.00 (paperback). This is the firstpartof a two-volumehistoryof the RussianOrthodox community in Paris.The second volume will takethe storyas faras the I96os. Central REVIEWS 35I to the narrativeis the community'smain place of worshipin the French capital , the church of St Alexander Nevsky. Built in i86i in a quirky,composite half-Byzantine,half-Kolomenskoestyle, the church is situatedin a small side street,just a few minutes walk from some of the city's famous landmarkson the Champs-Elysees. The opening chaptersconcentrateon the pre-historyof the church, which Nicholas Ross correctly sets in the broader contexts of Russia's tepid, sometimes rockydiplomaticrelationswith Francein the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries until more durable and closer ties were established in the I89os. Prior to the construction of the church and its immediate precursor, the chapel of St Peter and Paul, which occupied rented accommodation in rue Meslay (I8I9-3I) and rue Neuve de Berry(I83I-6I), celebrationof Orthodox rituals was very much a makeshift affair, usually held in rooms of the Ambassador'sapartmentswith minimal ad hoc refurbishments.The quest to find more suitablepermanent lodgings for worship was encouraged by monarchswho recognized the symbolicweight of religiousritesand ceremoniesas a means to enhance Russia'spolitical presence abroad and, as relationswith France became either more propitiousor triumphalist,they actively pursued the matter through decrees, appointing archpriests,priests and deacons as 'emissariesfor the faith'. In I757, for example, shortly after signing a treaty with France and Austria,ElizabethPetrovnaorderedthat 'chapelsbe sent' to European capitals where the Ambassador...

The Jewish Century by Yuri s> Slezkine (review)

REVIEWS 349 Slezkine, Yuri. TheJewishCentu?y. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 2004. x + 438 pp. Notes. Index. Ci8.95. YURISLEZKINEhas alreadywon recognitionwith his monographArctic Mirrors: RussiaandtheSmallPeoples of theNorth(Ithaca, NY, I and two co-edited volumes. His latest book, TheJewishCentugy, immediatelystimulatedenergetic critical debate for its provocative thesis, sweeping narrative of twentiethcentury history, bold statements and controversial conclusions. The book was awardedprizes by the Associationof American Publishers(2004) and the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (2005). In his introduction,Slezkineposits that the Modern Age is theJewish Age, while the twentieth century,as the culminationof modernity,is a particularly Jewish century. For Slezkine, Modernity entails, among other things, being 'urban,mobile, literate, articulate, [...] physicallyfastidious,and occupationally flexible' (p. I), all ostensiblytraditionalJewish qualities.The Jew, therefore , becomes the ideal prototype of modern man. Slezkine thus reversesthe conventional metaphor, expressed so eloquently particularlyby Tsvetaeva, casting Jews as eternal misfits, by highlighting the traits that make Jews strikinglyrepresentativeof contemporarysocieties. Many interpretive histories, especially those of Russia, have employed binary oppositions to flesh out the contrasting tendencies in the society they describe (e.g.James H. Billington's TheIconandtheAxe,London, I966). Slezkine drawsupon Greekmythology to illuminatehis viewpoint, classifying people as either Apollonians or Mercurians.As opposed to the conventional associationof Apollo with the Sun and the arts,it is thisdivinity'sarchaicfunction as the patron of agriculturethat is highlightedin his book. Apollonians, therefore, are settled, food-producing societies of farmers, herdsmen and warriors.Apollo is contrasted to Mercury, the god of trade and boundarycrossing ,while 'Mercurians'are entrepreneurialnomads who provide services for Apolloniansand engage in occupationsdeemed 'unclean',includingbanking and medicine. WhileJews clearlyfit the Mercurianprofile,theirnomadic, service-orientedlot is in no way unique, and Slezkine compares their social position to that ofJains, Gypsies, or overseasChinese. Having thus outlined his perspective,Slezkinenarrowshis focus to Russian Jews, whose story he traces from the Pale of Settlement through post-Soviet oligarchs. Here, Sholem-Alecheim's TevyetheMilkmanis brought to bear: just as Tevye's daughters break out of the traditional Pale environment to join revolutionarymovements or marry gentiles so, according to Slezkine's argument,did theJews leave the Pale of Settlement to embarkon one of the three 'messianicpilgrimages':to Palestine, to America, or, by embracing the Bolshevik Revolution, into Soviet urban life. Slezkine follows the imaginary descendents of Tevye's daughtersas they move through the Jewish century'. The most intriguingaccount in the book is that of the SovietJews. Slezkine presentsremarkabledata onJewish overrepresentationin the Revolution, the highest echelons of Soviet bureaucracy,and also in the secretpolice and gulag guards.Jewish allegiance to the Bolshevikcause is explained, predictably,by 'Mercurian'qualities, the fact that the Jews were not attached to the tsarist regime, and were keen to replace the Pale with a differentsociety. Another related issue thoroughly explored is the nature of Stalinist purges. Thus, 350 SEER, 84, 2, 2006 Slezkine convincingly argues that the Jews were in no way a target of the purgesof I937,and theirprominence among the repressedis simplya resultof the significantJewish contingent among the Bolshevik old guard. Slezkine traces the roots of state-sponsoredanti-Semitism to the immediate pre-war years, when Stalin sought to win over Hitler by imitating his racial politics. During World War Two, paradoxically, the Nazis's anti-Semitic ideology spilled over into the Soviet occupied areas, which preparedthe wide popular base for post-war anti-Jewishcampaigns. Slezkine sums up the Soviet period as the rise and fall of the Jews, whose new 'golden calf (the Revolution) propelled them to the heights of power and eventuallyalmost crushed them. The Russian-JewishRevolution aside, the twentieth century is proclaimed theJewish century for several additionalreasons:this is the age of Marxism, Freudianism, capitalism, anti-Semitism (or, shall we add, the culmination thereof in the Holocaust), and American Liberalism, and Slezkine rightly seesJews at the inception or at the centre of all of these diversephenomena. This is the Jewish century also because of the rebirth, after a hiatus of two millennia, of theJewish state, and Slezkine does in fact turn his attention to Israel toward the end of the book. His attention is cursorythough, ignoring any specifics or complexities of the Middle Eastern context and repeating a few unflatteringbut 'politicallycorrect' opinions encountered frequentlyin the Westernpress...

昭和恐慌後における佐々木要右衛門家事業の展開

The purpose of this article is to analyze the development of entrepreneurial activities of the Youemon Sasaki family at Shin'ichi in Bingo region which is located in the eastern part of Hiroshima Prefecture during the period after the Showa panic (1930-31) until the wartime (July, 1937-August, 1945). The author utilized such various materials as the oral history, the printed matters and the Sasaki archives to accomplish the above purpose.Youemon Sasaki, successful local wholesale merchant, were seriously hit by the Showa panic, and thereafter, the restructuring by the young leader, Gi'ichi Sasaki, became unavoidable. Gi'ichi closed the weaving factories established in 1915, began sewing business, came to sell new commodities such as wide cloths and garments to the local areas and continued seeking such gains as dividends and rents of land and houses.At the wartime Gi'ichi greatly committed himself to sewing business and kept the wealthy local businessman by becoming a salaried manager in Bingo Tokumen Kasuri Moto Haikyu Kabusiki Kaisha (Bingo Kasuri Distribution Company) and Huhaku Seihin Chuo Seizo Haikyu Tosei Kabushiki Kaisha (Cloth Goods Central Manufacturing Distribution Company). He also earned lots of money through dividends of shares during wartime.In recent years many economic and business historians in Japan are making great efforts to describe the local entrepreneurial activities in the prewar years, and this article is also included in such an academic trend.

How High School Drama Helped Me to Become a Sociologist: An Essay in the Sociology of Autobiography

How High School Drama Helped Me to Become a Sociologist:An Essay in the Sociology of Autobiography 1 Robert J. Brym (bio) After dinner, my parents assembled all the relatives in the living room. I then entered through a narrow hallway. Although I was barely four years old, I was unafraid. I wore a white shirt and dark brown corduroy pants. "Sha, sha," my father urged ("hush, hush"). When the room fell still, I sang a Yiddish song about young boys, "fresh out of their eggs," playing under the boughs of saplings. Whether I sang well or poorly I do not recall. I know I sang confidently, mimicking the expansive arm movements of performers I had seen on the Ed Sullivan Show. I also remember being surprised that I momentarily captured the attention of my normally raucous two- and three-year old cousins. When I finished, there was murmured approval and cheek pinching and lipstick staining my face. Then we drank tea and milk and indulged in my mother's pastries. My first public performance was a success. Although I seemed to take naturally to performance, there was actually little natural about it. My father taught me a repertoire and promoted bravado. My mother's unflagging love instilled self-confidence. Therefore, it only seemed natural to me that, at the age of five, I should jump, uninvited, onto the stage of a talent show at the synagogue and burst spontaneously into song. Why certain audience members thought I was obnoxious I couldn't imagine. And although some public school teachers apparently disapproved because I was Jewish, it [End Page 245] even seemed natural to me that I should be asked to play the lead role of Santa Claus in my grade two class play, advancing to the role of Narrator for the grade four Christmas pageant, presented in the auditorium before the whole primary school. Whether reading from the Book of Matthew or singing Unter di grininke baymelekh, performance always gave me pleasure. I enjoyed the attention and the prestige, to be sure. But it was also fun to escape the everyday world through an act of imagination and to pretend to be someone else; and it was exhilarating to be able to influence the emotional state of so many people all at once. For a decade — between the ages of five and fifteen — the real world grew malevolent. I felt less an actor than the object of other people's actions. But performance offered temporary escape and hinted at better possibilities that would be fully realized only in high school. In the 1950s and 1960s, Saint John was a largely working class city of 100,000 people. With only a small middle class, it lacked a university, a professional theatre, and even a bookstore. And while in other Canadian cities of similar size, such as St John's, Newfoundland, there was a rich folk tradition of music, theatre, and dance that drew sustenance from preindustrial times, I was never aware of any such heritage in Saint John. Although I was born in Saint John, I was a stranger there. My family's culture did not have a great deal in common with that of the 250 or so embourgeoisified and acculturated members of the Jewish community, and very little in common with that of the city's mainly English Protestant and Irish Catholic Gentile population. My father, a tailor, had grown up in Poland, where he was a young activist in the Labour-Zionist movement. He trained as an agricultural labourer in preparation for work on a kibbutz. He never made it to Palestine because in the pre-war years the British Mandate sharply restricted the entry of Jews so as not to upset the Arab majority. He escaped Poland just as the Nazis entered and spent the war years in a workers' battalion attached to the Soviet Red Army, driving camels in Kazakhstan, sewing uniforms in a Ural Mountain kolkhoz, and surviving the bombing of Smolensk and the siege of Stalingrad. Following the war and two years in an American-controlled detention camp in Germany, he embarked for the city where his only North American relative, a first...

Carolyn Malone, Women's bodies and dangerous trades in England, 1880–1914, Studies in History, Woodbridge, The Royal Historical Society and The Boydell Press, 2003, pp. xi, 169, £45.00, US$75.00 (hardback 0-86193-264-1).

Carolyn Malone, Women's bodies and dangerous trades in England, 1880–1914, Studies in History, Woodbridge, The Royal Historical Society and The Boydell Press, 2003, pp. xi, 169, £45.00, US$75.00 (hardback 0-86193-264-1). - Volume 49 Issue 4