Wartime Service Research Articles

Теоретичне підґрунтя публічного управління у сфері водопостачання та водовідведення

The sphere of water supply and drainage is a critically important component of the socio-economic mechanism, which is characterized by numerous challenges that were actualized in wartime. Aim of this paper is to analyze the main theoretical approaches of public management in the field of water supply and drainage in order to identify the main principles and tools that affect the efficiency and sustainability of the field. The tools of strategic planning, operational management and emergency response are considered as key components of successful management in this area. Emphasis is placed on the special role of developing fair tariff policies and financial support for infrastructure investments. The importance of the legal framework that regulates the sphere, ensuring compliance with environmental standards and protection of consumer rights is highlighted. The environmental aspect of resource management in the field, which includes modern methods of wastewater treatment and minimizing the negative impact on natural water bodies, is considered. It was emphasized that state intervention is a key factor in ensuring equal access to clean water, which is a basic human right according to the United Nations. The problem of natural monopoly in the field is considered through the prism of high capital investments and low elasticity of demand, which limit market competition. Strategies to stimulate competition and improve service quality are explored, including regulating tariffs and encouraging innovation. The example of Scotland, where water supply management is centralized through the creation of a single national company Scottish Water, reveals the effectiveness of such an approach in improving infrastructure and ensuring high quality services with public participation. The importance of a multidisciplinary approach to management in the field is emphasized, with a special emphasis on the stability of the service in wartime. The research may be useful to researchers, state and local authorities, and international organizations. Further perspectives of research include the study of the peculiarities of the application of the theoretical base in the solution of scientific and practical problems in the field in Ukraine during the war.

Echoes of Valor: Eponymous Physicians in the Field of Otolaryngology With Significant Wartime Service.

Echoes of Valor: Eponymous Physicians in the Field of Otolaryngology With Significant Wartime Service.

Wartime service provision and post-conflict state legitimacy: Perception-based foundation of sustainable development in Northwestern Pakistan

Promoting a peaceful environment is integral for socioeconomic reconstruction in conflict-affected societies. However, the absence of violence does not immediately result in national endeavors for development because a post-conflict state often lacks a popular base of state legitimacy owing to the wartime fragmentation of socio-political groups. Implementing a questionnaire survey in northwestern tribal areas in Pakistan, specifically the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas, this study explores how and why state legitimacy rises and declines as a result of wartime interactions between political actors and civilians. Empirical analyses of novel survey data reveal that wartime service provision is associated with post-conflict sustainable development regarding the civilian perception of legitimacy of the state. State legitimacy is strongly perceived by civilians who have received public services from the state and weakly by those who have been exposed to rebel services. We further disaggregate wartime service provision to explore the influence of providers and variety/types of services. The results indicate that the provision of a wider variety of wartime services impresses upon civilians’ perceived legitimacy; furthermore, while the delivery of basic and extra services beyond justice and security is associated with state legitimacy, the impact is conditional on service providers. State legitimacy has an important role in political stability and national collectivity needed for post-conflict sustainable development. As wartime civil–military relations persistently influence civilians’ perception of political legitimacy, post-conflict reconstruction needs to take locals’ experiences into consideration so that the development initiatives can be legitimate and sustainable.

Public service in wartime

The article is devoted to the organization of activities of public authorities under martial law. The normative legal acts adopted during the war regarding the peculiarities of the organization of labor relations of public servants and the activities of military administrations and their officials have been analyzed. The simplified procedure for admission to the civil service and the flexibility of the legislation in terms of civil service are highlighted. The opinion of scientists regarding the possibility of forming a personnel reserve and the formation of appropriate professional specialized lists of potential candidates for filling positions in the civil service was analyzed, taking into account the professional training of the specialist, his practical experience in the past, as well as the immediate place of work. Reservations were expressed regarding simplified conditions for appointment to civil service positions, which in a certain way violated the basic principles of civil service, namely stability, and professionalism. At the same time, the urgency of restoring the personnel reserve of the civil service was emphasized.The special administrative and legal status of regional military administrations is characterized, because, in addition to the specifics of formation and termination of activity, they are endowed with additional powers to introduce and ensure the implementation of measures of the legal regime and receive double subordination depending on the powers they exercise.It has been found that local self-government bodies (village, settlement, city council; its executive bodies and chairman) will continue to exercise the powers assigned to them by the Law of Ukraine «On Local Self-Government in Ukraine». There are no restrictions on such powers upon the introduction of martial law. Power decisions at the local level remain with local self government bodies, except for those where the military administrations of settlements are conducted.

“Almost entirely a medical war”: The South African Medical Corps in East Africa, 1940–1941

Abstract The first major theatre of operations during the Second World War in which South African forces fought was East Africa. Key to the South African role in the campaign was the formation of the 1st sa Infantry Division in 1940. A range of medical units were under command. Using a ‘bottom-up’ view, this article – using a range of personal accounts, which complement richly veined material at the Department of Defence Archives in Pretoria – examines the service they rendered against the backdrop of the policy framework and theatre challenges. It reveals the connection medical personnel experienced between the motives that animated other South African men and women to volunteer for wartime service – travel, adventure, patriotism – and their professional ambitions regarding the growth of medical science in the fluid and varied conditions of a modern war. Sometimes the learning curve was steep; progress depended on good leadership and innovation of practice under often-extreme circumstances. But, as this article contends, they adapted to local conditions, trained on the job, and gained experience and battle-hardiness as the campaign progressed. Steady improvement and the growing size and sophistication of the Allied medical deployment led to remarkably few admissions – and fewer fatalities – from preventable illnesses and diseases as well as improving practice in the treatment and evacuation of patients from vast operational areas characterised by exterior lines and rapidly lengthening supply lines.

Gertrude Atherton’s WWI Propaganda to the Home Front: Mrs. Balfame, The Living Present and The White Morning

Abstract Gertrude Atherton’s Mrs. Balfame (1916), The Living Present (1917) and The White Morning (1918) address the home front audience about the war front of World War I. Atherton chronicles American political transition from isolationism to new internationalism with her pro-Ally and pro-American agenda. In her novel Mrs. Balfame, Atherton reflects political polarization in American society during the U. S. neutrality and anti-German stance, referring to the impacts of war reports on public opinion. The Living Present underlines French women’s wartime services on the home front and transatlantic collaboration through Atherton’s recollections. In her novel The White Morning, German women’s suffering and sense of duty gradually carry them to the war front with women’s revolution that brings their war to an end with Prussian militarism and patriarchal oppression. Thus, Atherton’s propaganda literature encourages women’s political awareness and wartime mobilization for their postwar progress and demands as citizens.

‘My Village’: organising the world and structuring the colonial architectural archive

The problems of archives accumulated under colonialism are now well known. This paper uses aspects of the Percy Johnson-Marshall Collection at the University of Edinburgh to reflect on how to interpret the archive not only through what it records, or the relation between what survives and what does not, but in terms of alternative ways of understanding the archive’s conceptual structure. As an influential post-Second World War architect and planner, active in Britain and in international organisations, Percy Johnson-Marshall’s (1915–1993) attitudes towards the work of the welfare state were significantly formed by his colonial background and his reactions against that background. This article draws out the deeper meanings of his archive by deploying A. J. Greimas’ ‘semiotic square’, as interpreted by Fredric Jameson. Explaining it first via the legal thriller Dark Waters (2019), which has an archive as its narrative pivot, the semiotic square is then used to map the conceptual structure of the Johnson-Marshall Collection. Finally, the article focusses on ‘My Village’, a set of papers in the collection documenting a pedagogic project preparing Indian soldiers to reform their villages following wartime service. Here themes of organisation and disorganisation (good and bad villages) are specific articulations of the archive’s epistemology while the idea of collectivity is problematically related to them.

"If Ever a Wreck Came Back from Overseas She Was One": The Treatment and Pensioning of Psychologically Traumatized Nursing Sisters after the First World War.

During the First World War, 2845 women served as nursing sisters with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. After the war, some women developed nervous and mental conditions that they said were caused by their wartime service and applied for military pensions and treatment. So how were these women treated by doctors and pension boards? Men who suffered from psychological trauma were frequently labelled as "cowards" or "malingerers." Many of the symptoms typically associated with nervous cases, such as hysteria, were viewed as inherently feminine at the time but we know little about how this criterion was applied to female veterans. One hundred forty-three nursing sisters who applied for pensions reported that they suffered from mental and nervous illnesses. An examination of veteran pension files suggests that psychologically traumatized women were also judged based on gendered stereotypes and encountered similar barriers to male veterans in trying to prove that their conditions were attributable to their service. These findings reveal the unique challenges and trauma women faced long after the war had ended.

Asian American Spies: How Asian Americans Helped Win the Allied Victory, by Brian Masaru Hayashi

Brian Hayashi has written a consistently informative and often frustrating study of Asian Americans and their wartime service with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). While Hayashi’s deft writing makes his monograph read like an espionage thriller, it is no mere adventure tale as it offers a detailed examination of the OSS, Asian American communities, and the fluid nature of loyalty, especially in wartime. Here, in examining how loyalty is developed and understood by multiple communities, Hayashi excels, and his work eclipses even that of Masayo Umezawa Duus’s Unlikely Liberators (2006). These strengths notwithstanding, the book does not, as the subtitle promises, tell the story of how Asian Americans helped win the war; instead, it often leads readers down a winding path to a disappointing historical dead end. Hayashi begins with a thorough review of the historiography of the OSS and uses Chinese, English, Japanese and Korean language sources to bring to life the work of heretofore historically marginalised Asian American agents serving both stateside and overseas. Chapters One and Two examine the creation of the Office of Strategic Services, its basic structure and the functions of its various sections, as well as how the OSS became, by the standards of wartime America, ‘an ethnically and racially inclusive organization’ (p. 17). Here, Hayashi does an outstanding job of guiding readers through the labyrinthine process that William Donovan, head of the OSS, and others followed to identify and recruit agents from Chinese, Japanese, and Korean communities. These chapters offer a solid look at figures such as Donovan and Cornelius Vander Starr, whose wartime business, C.V. Starr and Company, grew into today’s multinational finance and insurance corporation, American International Group. These chapters also produce some highly useful and unexpected nuggets of information as, for example, when Hayashi concludes that Japan’s rapid conquest of British Burma and Malaya resulted in part from the Secret Intelligence Service’s preoccupation with ‘suppressing nationalist movements within their empire’ (p. 20). Equally impressive is his coverage of COMINTERN recruitment within the Asian American community and the contribution of Japanese leftists to the Allied victory.

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

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

Mission of Baron Joseph Maria von Neuhaus in Russia in 1742—1746 and the Organisational Problems of Diplomatic Service in the Middle of the Eighteenth Century

The article, based on unpublished materials from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, reconstructs the details of the stay in St. Petersburg and Moscow of Minister Plenipotentiary of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VII Baron Joseph Maria von Neuhaus, who came to prevent Empress Elizabeth Petrovna from entering the War of the Austrian Succession on the side of Austria. Neuhaus’ mission was accompanied by a number of difficulties, the main one was to obtain permission from the Russian court to present his credentials. The absence of Elizabeth Petrovna’s imperial title in the letter of credence deprived Neuhaus of the opportunity to be accredited at the Russian court for a year and four months, and consequently of his public status, that made any negotiations impossible. The article also analyses the organizational and financial problems of diplomatic and courier service in wartime, and the peculiarities of etiquette formulas in official correspondence between Russia and the Holy Roman Empire.

Comparing Risks of Firearm-Related Death and Injury Among Young Adult Males in Selected US Cities With Wartime Service in Iraq and Afghanistan

In 2020, homicides in the United States saw a record single-year increase, with firearm injuries becoming the leading cause of death for children, adolescents, and young adults. It is critical to understand the magnitude of this crisis to formulate an effective response. To evaluate whether young adult males living in parts of 4 major US cities faced a firearm-related death and injury risk comparable with risks encountered during recent wartime service in Iraq and Afghanistan. In this cross-sectional study of young adult males aged 18 to 29 years living in the top 10% most violent zip codes in each domestic setting (as measured by fatal shooting rates), fatal and nonfatal shooting data for 2020 and 2021 were aggregated at the zip code level for 4 of the largest US cities (Chicago, Illinois; Los Angeles, California; New York, New York; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Wartime mortality and combat injury rates for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were used to assess relative risk. The relative risk of firearm-related death and nonfatal shootings in each setting as compared with combat death and injury in the comparator setting. Of 129 826 young adult males aged 18 to 29 years living in the top 10% most violent zip codes in the 4 cities studied, 45 725 (35.2%) were Black, 71 005 (54.7%) were Hispanic, and 40 355 (31.1%) were White. Among this population, there were 470 homicides and 1684 firearm-related injuries. Young adult males living in the most violent zip code of Chicago (2585 individuals aged 20-29 y) and Philadelphia (2448 individuals aged 18-29 y) faced a higher risk of firearm-related homicide than US soldiers who were deployed to Afghanistan, with risk ratios of 3.23 (95% CI, 2.47-4.68) and 1.91 (95% CI, 1.32-3.46), respectively. In expanding the analysis to the top 10% of the cities' most violent zip codes, the risks in Chicago likewise exceeded those of combat death faced by military service members, with a risk ratio of 2.10 (95% CI, 1.82-2.46), and the risks in Philadelphia were comparable with those of deployment to war 1.15 (95% CI, 0.98-1.39). Nonfatal shooting risks were comparable with, or exceeded, the injury risk of combat in Iraq, producing a combined annual firearm risk of 5.8% in Chicago and 3.2% in Philadelphia. However, these findings were not observed in the most violent zip codes of Los Angeles and New York City, where young men faced a 70% to 91% lower risk than soldiers in the Afghanistan war across fatal and nonfatal categories (eg, fatal shooting in most violent zip code in Los Angeles: risk ratio, 0.30; 95% CI, 0.26-0.34; nonfatal shooting in top 10% most violent zip codes in New York: risk ratio, 0.09; 95% CI, 0.08-0.10). The risk of violent death and injury observed in the zip codes studied was almost entirely borne by individuals from minoritized racial and ethnic groups: Black and Hispanic males represented 96.2% of those who were fatally shot (452 individuals) and 97.3% of those who experienced nonfatal injury (1636 individuals) across the 4 settings studied. In this cross-sectional study, for young adult men in several of the communities studied, firearm violence carried morbidity and mortality risks that exceeded those of war. Health equity requires prioritizing effective responses.

War-Time Military Service Can Affect Partisan Preferences

Does war-time military service affect partisan preferences? We argue that military service increases the salience and potential costs of war. Therefore, soldiers who serve during mismanaged wars will associate the ruling party with incompetence and be less likely to support the ruling party in the future. To test our argument, we analyze almost 50 years of Israel National Election Studies. Employing a regression discontinuity design, we show that compared with respondents who were too young to serve in the Yom Kippur war, respondents just old enough to serve report lower support for the Labor party well after the war ended. This effect is likely driven by soldiers’ unwillingness to support a party they associate with security incompetence. We further show that the negative effect of military service does not materialize in well-managed wars, contributing to the literature on the political consequences of war and attitude formation.

The Black Badge of Courage: The Politics of Recording Black Union Army Service and the Militarization of Black History in the Civil War's Aftermath

Abstract Scholars have detailed how Black activists looked to public forums to secure Black soldiers’ valor in American memory following the Civil War. This article reveals that they were not the only operators preserving African Americans’ wartime contributions. Rather than gravitating toward orations or monuments like other prominent activists, William Wells Brown and Frances Rollin turned to the power of history during Reconstruction. Drawing together trends of antebellum historical writing and nationalism among African American intellectuals and leaders, Brown and Rollin constructed heroic, textual accounts of Black Civil War soldiers. Brown contended that the soldiers were crucial not only to abolition but also to rescuing the Union. With his The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), Brown contributed to a more inclusive version of American nationalism. Rollin added an ethnographic argument, crafting a muscular retelling of Martin Delany's wartime service. Rollin's Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (1868) affirmed Black pride and annulled burgeoning racial tropes. As a result, by the 1870s, Brown and Rollin helped assure African Americans a place in the body politic and crafted an enduring symbol—the Black badge of courage—that cemented military service as a central theme of Black historical writing.

Neurosurgery at Pearl Harbor: Ralph Cloward’s legacy

Ralph B. Cloward (1908-2000) was the sole neurosurgeon present during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Cloward operated on 42 patients in a span of 4 days during the attacks and was awarded a commendation signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945 for his wartime efforts. During the attacks, he primarily treated depressed skull fractures and penetrating shrapnel wounds, but he also treated peripheral nerve and spine injuries in the aftermath. His techniques included innovative advancements such as tantalum cranioplasty plates, electromagnets for intracranial metallic fragment removal, and the application of sulfonamide antibiotic powder within cranial wounds, which had been introduced by military medics for gangrene prevention in 1939 and described for penetrating cranial wounds in 1940. Despite the severity of injuries encountered, only 2 soldiers died in the course of Cloward's interventions. As the sole neurosurgeon in the Pacific Theater until 1944, he remained in Honolulu through World War II's duration and gained immense operative experience through his wartime service. Here, the authors review the history of Cloward's remarkable efforts, techniques, injury patterns treated, and legacy.

The deep roots of military service in neurological surgery: an academic genealogical analysis of the founding generation.

Throughout human history, advancements in medicine have evolved out of periods of war. The carnage of battlefield injuries provided wartime surgeons an unprecedented opportunity to study anatomy, develop novel techniques, and improve systems of care. As a specialty that was established and evolved during the first half of the 20th century, neurological surgery was heavily influenced by the experiences of its founders during the World Wars I and II. Utilizing the published Neurosurgery Tree, the authors conducted an academic genealogical analysis to systematically define the influence of wartime service on neurosurgery's earliest generations. Through review of the literature and military records, the authors determined that at least 60% of American neurosurgical founders and early leaders served during World Wars I and/or II. Inspired by the call to serve their nation as forces for good, these individuals were heralded as expert clinicians, innovative systems thinkers, and prolific researchers. Importantly, the service of these early leaders helped highlight the viability of neurosurgery as a distinct specialty and provided a framework for early neurosurgical education and expansion. The equipment, techniques, and guidelines that were developed during these wars, such as management of craniocerebral trauma, peripheral nerve repair, and hemostasis, set the foundation for modern neurosurgical practice.

Peningkatan Kesadaran Mahasiswa Terhadap Sejarah Bangsa Melalui Program Kerja Bakti Di Makam Pahlawan Desa Sagu Baru Kecamatan Lawe Bulan Kabupaten Aceh Tenggara

Socialization activity was need to do by student at Desa Lawe Sagu Baru Aceh tenggara. Purpose of this activity to increase bonding and solidarity between student university and community. Beside that this activity was doing to increase awareness of student about hero service in wartime. Some activity was doing like painting wall, cutting grass, cleaning rubbish like plastic, bottle, can and fall leaves. With this social activity, student invite community to directly involve to maintain cleanliness dan take care Makan pahlawan which in Desa Lawe Sagu Baru Aceh Tenggara.

Review: Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age, by James L. Nolan, Jr.

Review: <i>Atomic Doctors: Conscience and Complicity at the Dawn of the Nuclear Age</i>, by James L. Nolan, Jr.

Надання послуг з охорони психічного здоров'я на основі штучного інтелекту для підвищення резилієнсу українських військовослужбовців та ветеранів: заклик до співпраці

Russian aggression disrupted delivery of mental healthcare services for veterans in Ukraine. These causes required to create some new solutions about artificial intelligence based (AI-based) psychological services for Ukrainian defenders. Specialists from the Centre for veterans’ mental health “Forest Glade” of Ministry of Health of Ukraine have created a Telegram-based bot (Lisova Poliana Bot) to reach the specific needs of veterans and servicemen. Such form of AI-based service achieved positive feedback from soldiers, officers and volunteers and helped to partially unload the psychological service in wartime without excluding the Ukrainian defender from it. Therefore, AI solutions have a potential to be integrated in healthcare system. Given the great potential of artificial intelligence in the provision of services during the war, further comprehensive research and cooperation at the international level can be promising. We invite international researchers to cooperate in creating and delivering AI-based consulting tools for Ukrainian defenders.

New Perspectives on William Demby: A Special Issue of African American Review

New Perspectives on William Demby:A Special Issue of African American Review Melanie Masterton Sherazi (bio), Ugo Rubeo (bio), and James C. Hall (bio) Introduction Following his service in Italy during World War II, William Demby (b. 1922) returned to live in Rome in 1947. Inspired by Giorgio de Chirico's paintings that he viewed often at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum in his youth and by Roberto Rossellini's films, Demby considered a move to Rome as the "gritt[ier]," less obvious choice than Paris for an artist.1 Rents were cheap in a city rebuilding itself from the rubble of fascism and war and a revolutionary antifascist current flowed through the artistic circles into which Demby landed, rather serendipitously, upon his postwar return. He was invited almost immediately to live in a flat on Via San Teodoro overlooking the Ancient Forum with a group of Italian leftist and Communist artists and filmmakers, including Renzo Vespignani and Marcello Muccini. There, he got back to work on his debut novel in progress, Beetlecreek, and was driven to complete it as an artist living among other serious artists. From his bohemian flat across from Rome's ancient ruins, Demby took a writing sojourn in the Palazzo Ca' Dario, an elegant, late fifteenth-century residence on Venice's Grand Canal, where Peggy Guggenheim was living just a few doors down.2 Of his first novel's extraordinary composition history, Demby himself acknowledged that some positive astral conjunction might have worked in his favor, recalling that "it all came together in a palace in Venice; and the first thing I know is that I had finished a novel" (qtd. in Micconi 131). Beetlecreek was, in fact, a novel several years in the making: Demby had work-shopped it before the war as Margaret Walker's student at West Virginia State College, then an HBCU.3 He continued drafting it during his service in Italy and while completing his studies at Fisk University under the mentorship of Robert Hayden.4 The spectacular Italian settings of Beetlecreek's composition are at odds with the novel's eponymous, fictional town in the segregated, Depression-era US South. Moreover, Demby's own mobilities signal the dizzying quality of his lived experiences in this period: a move with his family after high school from an integrated neighborhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Clarksburg, West Virginia; his later wartime service in Italy in an African American troop; his settling into a flat overlooking the ruins of Ancient Rome; and his aforementioned retreat in a Venetian palace on the Grand Canal—all in the span of just a few years.5 In these ways and more, Demby's life and work resisted the entrenched racist norms of Jim Crow America. This special issue of African American Review appears in the centenary year of Demby's birth on Christmas Day in 1922. Although he was honored with an Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006, Demby's body of work has struggled to gain a lasting foothold in the African American literary canon and in classrooms, perhaps for the very fact of his living off the radar for decades in Italy. In actuality, Demby often traveled between Italy and the United States while working and visiting family. The issue aims to energize new directions in the study of the overdetermined workings of literary reputation and of place, genre, and style in [End Page 111] the shaping of an African American canon. Presented largely in chronology with Demby's artistic career, which spanned over sixty years, the issue's essays celebrate and contend with his work's generative eclecticism and transnational orientations. Italian Contexts Just a few months after Beetlecreek's appearance in 1950, another fortuitous event happened to propel Demby's early career when the major Italian press Mondadori's "Medusa" series—widely acclaimed, and dedicated to the works of "Great Narrators of All Countries"—published Festa a Beetlecreek as Series No. 243 in its signature emerald-green hardcover. Demby's novel's translator, Fernanda Pivano, was a young intellectual from Turin who, though not an academic, was already on her way to becoming one of Italy's leading Americanists...