Wartime Service Research Articles

The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers by Elizabeth Cobbs

Reviewed by: The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers by Elizabeth Cobbs Jill Frahm (bio) The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers. By Elizabeth Cobbs. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2017. Pp. 370. $29.95 cloth) Elizabeth Cobbs's book, The Hello Girls: America's First Women Soldiers, is a welcome addition to the literature on women's overseas service during World War I. Although other books, including Susan Zeiger's In Uncle Sam's Service: Women Workers with the American Expeditionary Force, 1917–1919, Dorothy and Carl J. Schneider's Into the Breach: American Women Overseas in World War I, Lettie Gavin's Women in World War I: They Also Served and Lynn Dumenil's The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I include sections about the American telephone operators, The Hello Girls is the first book to devote a significant part of its narrative to their experiences. This is a very well-written, long overdue accounting of America's first women in combat. As Cobbs states in her introduction, "The Hello Girls explores how Americans mobilized for World War I, telephones transformed the United States, females joined the armed forces, suffragists fought for the vote, and women and men fought together for justice" (p. 7). In 1914, when the war began in Europe, the idea of women's suffrage was not widely accepted by political leaders in the United States, including President Woodrow Wilson. Among the objections to giving women the vote was their inability to serve their country in time of war. However, dependence on the telephone made the employment of American, bilingual female operators by the U.S. Army a necessity. Once in Europe, these women proved of immense value to Army operations; one group even served near the front at General Pershing's headquarters. At all levels, the operators impressed officers and men with their skill and professionalism. [End Page 552] Meanwhile, in the U.S., President Wilson shifted from being against woman suffrage to a supporter. Cobbs credits, in part, the heroic performance of American women in Europe for his transformation: "Wilson emphasize[d] two … reasons for his change of heart: international opinion and women's wartime service" (p. 119). Although the women's suffrage bill was defeated in 1918, with increasing support across the nation it finally made it through both houses of Congress and was ratified in 1920. Back in France, the operators received universal praise for their service, with many officers declaring them indispensable "uniformed women [who] performed beyond the call of duty" (p. 266). The operators began returning home shortly after the Armistice was signed in November 1918, with the last discharged on January 20, 1920. However, despite their excellent service, the operators were denied veteran's status and benefits. Led by Merle Egan Anderson and supported by almost all the officers with whom they had served, the operators fought for nearly 60 years until gaining recognition as veterans in 1977. Cobbs' very readable book draws on a variety of sources including previously unknown diaries that operators kept during their months overseas. Her use of the operators as a case study to illustrate how American women's wartime service influenced the suffrage movement is excellent. Although she might have used other American women to make her case, the operators are a great choice because they were the first women to serve in an official combat role with the U.S. Army. One point Cobbs might have been expanded upon is how the operators' role evolved during their time in France. When the operators first arrived, the Army envisioned them only handling routine calls, leaving higher-priority calls to men. As the women proved more efficient than the men, their responsibilities expanded until they connected all calls. This point would have bolstered Cobbs's argument of how the operators in France proved their value to both army operations and skeptical men. However, this criticism should not take away from my sincere [End Page 553] admiration for The Hello Girls. Cobbs's book is excellent and proves that fact can be far more interesting than fiction. The adventures of the Hello Girls and their connections to the...

The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I by Lynn Dumenil

Reviewed by: The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I by Lynn Dumenil Dorothea Browder The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I. By Lynn Dumenil. ( Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 340. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-3121-9.) Lynn Dumenil has written an indispensable study of U.S. women's experiences and efforts during World War I based on extensive secondary literature and primary sources. The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I covers political activism, home front mobilization, war service abroad, wage earners, and visual representations in popular culture. Skillfully interweaving social, political, and cultural histories, this study is likely to find a place on scholars' shelves and widespread use in their syllabi. Dumenil explores how the war and women activists shaped one another, arguing that the war both accelerated the development of the "new woman" of the 1910s and limited the extent of her liberation (p. 6). In an era when military service defined citizenship, activists invoked women's role as the "'second line of defense'" to support a range of goals (p. 1). The book explores the wartime experiences, activities, and rhetoric of activists and radical figures involved in movements for women's reform, racial justice, suffrage, labor, peace, child welfare, socialism, anarchism, civil defense, civil liberties, and more, along with government volunteers and bureaucrats, preparedness advocates, doctors and nurses, college students, social workers, war reporters, factory, clerical, railroad, and telephone workers, and movie stars, among others. The fascinating final chapter on visual representations concludes not only that "government propaganda portrayed white women's war contributions primarily as extensions of maternal and domestic duties" but also that popular culture as a whole, despite portrayals of ambitious, strong women, reflected the period's ambivalence (p. 254). It is an extraordinary accomplishment to be able to discuss all these subjects within the same book in a coherent and lively narrative. Dumenil explains that [End Page 500] middle-class and elite white women's groups "dominated the volunteer effort" and left the most extensive records, but she also focuses, to a lesser but substantial extent, on African American women's accomplishments (p. 59). The extraordinary level of detail and great number of groups discussed here justify this focus. Immigrant women and women of other ethnicities appear mostly as subjects for reform and occasionally in war work auxiliaries but rarely as political actors. Same-sex relationships are little covered, despite great shifts that were underway in that period. The book's coverage is impressive, though. A number of groups took advantage of wartime opportunities to advance prewar agendas, though their success was limited by male hostility, racist resistance, persistently gendered notions of citizenship, and reformers' own ambivalence about wage-earning women's physical abilities and family roles. Attuned to women's roles in the changing relationship between individual and state, the book includes not only white new women seeking rights and freedoms and black women seeking racial justice but also women participating in hypernationalism, vigilantism, and what historian Chris Capazzola has termed "the duty of hatred" (Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen [New York, 2007], 185). Information about such women is woven throughout several parts of the book and extends into the epilogue, forging links to the recent upsurge in scholarship on right-wing and white supremacist women in the Ku Klux Klan and other 1920s movements. The book's well-chosen illustrations include Half-Century Magazine's striking March 1917 cover of an elegant black woman draped in the American flag as Lady Liberty. The illustration's caption, "Maid in America," simultaneously drew attention to black women's occupational segregation even during a wartime labor crisis, defended their sexual virtue, and emphasized African Americans' citizenship. Black women led responses to racial violence and discrimination, lobbied for war work resources for black communities, publicized black women's economic contributions, and advanced civil rights arguments based on wartime service and democratic ideals. "Though black women hoped that war service might prove a path to equal citizenship," Dumenil observes, "they were repeatedly denied opportunities to demonstrate their patriotism...

Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality by Judith Giesberg

Reviewed by: Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality by Judith Giesberg Jim Downs (bio) Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality. By Judith Giesberg. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. 135 Cloth, $29.95.) In Sex and the Civil War, historian Judith Giesberg contributes to the social and cultural history of the Civil War and Reconstruction by [End Page 346] investigating the circulation of pornography and its prohibitions. Drawing on newspapers, court records, and manuscript collections from the Kinsey Institute to the YMCA archives to some of the extant pornographic books and illustrations that soldiers circulated throughout Union camps, Giesberg raises profound questions about sexuality and desire, masculinity and its discontents, and the technologies and networks that the Civil War engendered. As Giesberg acknowledges in her introduction, beginning in the 1990s historians Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber transformed the study of the war by offering analysis of gender and sexuality in two anthologies, Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War (1992) and Battle Scars: Gender and Sexuality in the American Civil War (2006). While some recent scholars have continued to investigate the war by exploring the relationship between racism and gender—most notably Thavolia Glymph in Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (2008) and Hannah Rosen in Terror in the Heart of Freedom: Citizenship, Sexual Violence, and the Meaning of Race in the Postemancipation South (2009)—few have interrogated the meaning or implication of the sexual lives of soldiers. James McPherson's For Cause and Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997), for example, ranks as an excellent book on white masculinity during the war, but sexuality generally remains absent from the historiography. Giesberg centers sexuality as a category of historical analysis by keenly uncovering how the Civil War inadvertently facilitated the distribution of pornography. Letter writing that stretched across the nation provided the channels to also distribute pornography. Congress established low postal rates that New York erotica dealers capitalized on to send material through the mail. The wartime invention of photography enhanced the production of pornographic images. Giesberg thus argues that "the history of pornography and antipornography in the United States began at the moment of crisis ushered in by war, when what it meant to be a man and how boys should go about becoming men were openly and heatedly debated" (63–64). Giesberg also smartly recognizes that the Civil War produced a bureaucracy that opposed the circulation of pornography, but that opposition left a paper trail that reveals insights about how people in the nineteenth century thought about sex and desire. The courts-martial records, in particular, include references to the books, images, and stories that nineteenth-century Americans consumed; they also suggest how the sellers and creators of pornography imagined the fantasies that would most arouse readers. According to Giesberg, soldiers became enchanted by pornographic stories [End Page 347] of women who rejected traditional forms of nineteenth-century domesticity and who instead showed an interest in sex. The protagonists in wartime pornography, which the courts confiscated, illustrate women working in brothels, initiating sex, enjoying sex, and even engaging in flagellation. Throughout Sex and the Civil War, Giesberg deftly reads against the surviving evidence, which is largely about the prohibition of pornography, in order to offer a depiction of how nineteenth-century Americans thought about sex and how representations of sex circulated during the war. Yet Giesberg does not shy away from the polemical debates surrounding pornography and instead offers a compelling analysis of how legendary reformer Anthony Comstock began his campaign against pornography during the Civil War. She follows Comstock's career from December 30, 1863, when he mustered into the Seventeenth Connecticut, to the 1883 publication of his book Traps for the Young, which embodies his moral crusade against urban vice. In tracing his biography, Giesberg reveals how Comstock lied about participating in military combat in the swamps of South Carolina. Giesberg is at her best when deflating the mythology that Comstock spewed about his wartime service; she cogently explains how he exploited this fictional past, which enshrined his honor, to...

Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American Writer by Christopher Kiernan Coleman

Reviewed by: Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American Writer by Christopher Kiernan Coleman John Casey Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American Writer. By Christopher Kiernan Coleman. ( Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 296. $49.95, ISBN 978–1-62190–179-2.) Ambrose Bierce has remained an enigmatic figure for generations of scholars. They have generally felt it is safe to assume that Bierce's participation in the Civil War shaped his life and writings and fueled his cynical view of the world and his biting wit. Despite this scholarly assurance, not much is known about Bierce's wartime service, and even less is known about how specific events during the war might have changed his attitude toward himself and the world. Bierce did not leave behind a rich collection of Civil War–era letters and diaries, or even a war memoir. Those attempting to understand Bierce and his relationship to the war are thus compelled to piece together a narrative from his published fiction and nonfiction writings along with whatever fragments of unpublished materials they find in the archives. Literary scholars such as David M. Owens, in The Devil's Topographer: Ambrose Bierce and the American War Story (Knoxville, 2006), have used fragmentary evidence of Bierce's war service to demonstrate how it shaped his fiction. Christopher Kiernan Coleman attempts something similar in his biography of Bierce, piecing together a book resembling a war memoir that Bierce was unwilling or unable to write. Along with the writings we would expect Coleman to discuss in the book, such as "What I Saw of Shiloh" and "Killed at Resaca," he adds the reminiscences of soldiers who fought with Bierce in the Ninth Indiana Volunteer Infantry and the Army of the Cumberland. He also includes the remembrances of Bierce's family and friends, particularly those of his brother Albert Bierce. Blending these narratives allows Coleman to create a plausible account of Ambrose Bierce's war service and to complicate our understanding of how it affected him later in life. The examination of Bierce's early life and the last years of his military service raises tantalizing questions for Bierce scholars. Coleman's choice to make Bierce's life part of the history of the Ninth Indiana better situates Bierce within his community. We see Bierce not as "'Bitter Bierce'" but rather as "Brose" and view his wartime experiences through the eyes of his peers rather than simply his own (p. 27). The author's decision to place Bierce's life in the context of his peers raises the question for readers of whether Bierce's oft-commented-on cynicism was a sign of the war's effect on his character or a persona he consciously designed after the war to market his writings. Coleman also includes in an appendix a transcription of a diary Bierce kept during General William Tecumseh Sherman's Carolina campaign. This transcription not only is of great value to scholars unable to view the original but also complicates our knowledge of Bierce's demobilization. Though he supposedly mustered out in January 1865, Bierce's diary suggests that he did not [End Page 175] leave the army until March of that year. Given Bierce's obsession with details, the omission of an explanation for this discrepancy seems odd. It does, however, present a more accurate picture of the often confusing process of Civil War demobilization than the one commonly assumed by contemporary readers. Ambrose Bierce and the Period of Honorable Strife: The Civil War and the Emergence of an American Writer does not quite achieve the status of a posthumous war memoir for Lieutenant Ambrose Bierce to which it aspires, but it has much to offer in its portrait of the Ninth Indiana and of the Army of the Cumberland during the Civil War. It also offers some fresh glimpses into Bierce's service as a small piece in that big war. John Casey University of Illinois at Chicago Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

Dad 'never said much' but… Young Men and Great War Veterans in Day-to-Day-Life in Interwar Britain.

This article explores whether, how, and what young men in interwar Britain heard about the Great War from its veterans. Oral histories are used to enable the first detailed examination of the hitherto largely unexplored topic of the intergenerational transmission of representations of the Great War in interwar Britain. It shows that although many veterans were reticent about their war experiences, young men heard about Great War experiences from veterans more frequently than has previously been acknowledged. What they heard was heterogeneous, like representations in popular culture, but tended to emphasize positive and rewarding elements of wartime service rather than disillusion. While veterans' narratives could be fleeting and ephemeral, this examination of their character shows they should be considered an important component of the wider body of representations of the Great War in interwar popular culture through which young men might 'know' about the Great War. As well as examining what young men heard, consideration is given to alternative ways that young men learned about familial service, and to what triggered veterans' narratives and why some remained silent. Reasons for the trope of the silent veteran are suggested, and its strength in contemporary popular memory is illustrated in discussion of the 'discomposure' it could cause some interviewees.

MAU MAU'S ARMY OF CLERKS: COLONIAL MILITARY SERVICE AND THE KENYA LAND FREEDOM ARMY IN KENYA'S NATIONAL IMAGINATION

AbstractScholarly and popular histories of Kenya largely agree that African Second World War veterans played a central role in the Kenya Land Freedom Army. Former African members of the colonial security forces have reinforced these assumptions by claiming to have been covert Mau Mau supporters, either after their discharge, or as serving soldiers. In reality, few Mau Mau generals had actual combat experience. Those who served in the colonial military usually did so in labor units or support arms. It therefore warrants asking why so many Kenyans accept that combat veterans played such a central role in the KLFA and in Kenyan history. Understanding how veterans of the colonial army have become national heroes, both for their wartime service and their supposed leadership of Mau Mau, reveals the capacity of popular history to create more useful and inclusive forms of African nationalism.

À la claire Fontaine : un poète gaélique au Maghreb

This article introduces the work of the multilingual Scottish poet George Campbell Hay (1915–1984) to a Francophone readership. After providing the necessary biographical and cultural background and outlining the main characteristics of Hay’s published work, the article focuses on Hay’s reading of French Resistance literary journals during his period of wartime service in North Africa, in particular Fontaine (founded 1939, Algiers), and identifies traces of their influence on Hay’s poetic discourse of heroic duty and his poetry of war, including his most celebrated poem ‘Bisearta’. It is suggested that the intellectual vigour of this Resistance writing played a significant part in the maturing of Hay’s philosophical thought and poetic discourse, and the development of his transcultural/translinguistic literary experiments. The article offers polished translations into French of two of Hay’s major Gaelic poems (‘Atman’ and ‘Bisearta’) as well as of shorter quotes from a variety of other poems.

Isaiah Berlin: Russo-Jewish Roots, Liberal Commitments, and the Ethos of Pluralism

Isaiah Berlin contributed significantly to the study of the history of nationalist ideas in modern Europe, to the revival among political theorists (and others) of interest in nationalism as a theory, and to the articulation of theories of “liberal nationalism” in the 1990s. Berlin was also a life-long Zionist, whose reflections on the impulses behind nationalism owed much to his reflection on the condition of Jews in the diaspora. While Berlin’s views on nationalism have long claimed attention, and while there has more recently been excellent work done on his Jewish identity and commitment to Zionism, the connection between both his liberalism and his views on nationalism, and his personal background and experiences, remains to be more fully explored. Deploying biographical reconstruction and textual analysis, I here undertake to draw such connections, emphasizing how Berlin’s personal condition and the response to nationalism that it influenced in turn shaped his liberalism. I conclude that Berlin’s experiences coming from a specifically Russian-Jewish background, as well as his position in British society, his wartime service in the British government, and his intellectual formation, significantly shaped his views on nationalism. I also suggest that both his response to nationalism and his advocacy of a distinctive liberalism reflect Berlin’s commitment (never made fully explicit) to a pluralistic ethos, which itself may be seen as a response to the condition of Jews (and other minorities and migrants) in the modern world.

Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America by William B. Kurtz

Reviewed by: Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic Americaby William B. Kurtz Mary C. Kelly Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. By William B. Kurtz. The North’s Civil War. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 236. Paper, $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-6886-3; cloth, $120.00, ISBN 978-0-8232-6753-8.) Nativism, reinforced by the massive influx of immigrants during the Irish famine of the 1840s, revitalized perceptions of American incompatibility with Catholic loyalty to Rome. Debates over manifest destiny, the [End Page 186]U.S.-Mexican War, abolitionism, and sectionalism exacerbated the Catholic Church’s embattled condition in the Civil War era. William B. Kurtz’s study of Catholicism at a pivotal juncture in American history effectively documents a tumultuous progression. Kurtz initially unscrambles bitter sectional tensions disrupting northern Catholic fidelities to church, region, and party before and during the Civil War. Most Catholics opposed prowar Republicans, he notes, but wartime service allowed War Democrats to enhance their prospects as “true Americans” (p. 43). Catholic colleges supported the Union army, while the reputations of New York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania regiments soared. Commanders Thomas F. Meagher and Michael Corcoran, alongside other soldiers, supported emancipation, temporarily affirming the compatibility between faith and patriotism. The more than six hundred nuns who bolstered the national Catholic profile more than “the actions of Catholic chaplains or soldiers” contributed much, Kurtz continues, but ethnic prerogatives continued to challenge assimilation prospects (p. 68). Bishops’ indecisiveness on emancipation neutralized the value of Catholic military service for many northerners, while debates over abolition sidelined the repeal movement for Irish Americans committed to their home-land’s independence. Catholic advocator Orestes A. Brownson’s prowar, pro-emancipation stance confronted the conservative stance of New York’s Archbishop John Hughes, who based his opposition in economic and faith concerns and not in mere “unprincipled obstructionism,” Kurtz argues (p. 109). The brutality of incensed Irish New Yorkers who lashed out against conscription in the 1863 draft riots is adroitly counterpoised against bishops’ efforts to renounce the violence and contextualize factors of “patriotism, disaffection, ethnicity, class, and racism” underpinning the clash (p. 110). The virtual erasure of Irish Catholic sacrifice in the Union army from contemporary culture is recognized, while Kurtz positions the failure to exempt clergy from the draft against Protestant hostility to Pope Pius IX’s “mostly humanitarian” appeal for an end to the war (p. 121). But Protestant antipathy to a cohort associated with such violence, and therefore seen as incompatible with America’s founding principles, eclipsed the pope’s call. Proposals for Catholic veterans to defend the Papal States against Italian nationalist forces seemed to confirm Catholic disloyalty as Thomas Nast’s cartoons kept draft riot memories alive. Kurtz concludes that while Knights of Columbus and Ancient Order of the Hibernians commemorations of Irish Civil War heroism asserted local and regional Catholic cultural empowerment, negative perspectives remained until their abatement during World War II. Several focuses merit additional scrutiny, including Father Edward Purcell and the Cincinnati-based Catholic Telegraph’s “fierce advocacy of the war and emancipation,” Horace Greeley’s anti-Catholic attitudes, curtailment of U.S.-Vatican diplomatic relations in 1867, and Catholic cohorts other than Irish or German (p. 123). Kurtz is unduly cavalier in citing Irish priority of church over radical nationalism, but deft in summarizing that “[s]upport for Ireland, the working class, and the church were not necessarily incompatible, and were in many cases simply three different but related parts of Irish Catholic Americans’ daily lives” (p. 132). His contention of Catholic aspirations to [End Page 187]“uphold law, order, and stability” also warrants further exploration, while the “separate Catholic America” of the title is somewhat disingenuous—Catholics arguably forged a distinct, rather than “separate,” religious culture in the modernizing United States (p. 91). Any book tackling such thorny topics should inevitably prompt such questions, however. Kurtz is to be commended for his masterful interrogation of the fusion of faith, national crisis, and ethnic identity at a critical moment in American history. This is a notable and welcome contribution to Catholic, Civil War...

Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. by William B. Kurtz

Reviewed by: Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. by William B. Kurtz Christian B. Keller (bio) Excommunicated from the Union: How the Civil War Created a Separate Catholic America. By William B. Kurtz. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Pp. 236. Cloth, $120.00; paper, $35.00.) William Kurtz's new study of Catholics in the Civil War era and how the conflict contributed to the creation of a separate Catholic identity justifies the lavish praise found on the book's back cover. It is a solidly researched study, balancing a healthy amount of archival sources and printed primary sources, period newspapers, and the best (although by no means all) of the secondary sources available. Kurtz, like Susannah Ural before him with her well-known The Harp and the Eagle: Irish-American Volunteers and the Union Army, 1861–1865 (2006), conducted a sizable amount of research overseas in Irish repositories, and he even managed to plumb the famous Auswandererbriefesammlung in Gotha, Germany, which was the source for Walter Kamphoefner and Wolfgang Helbich's edited and translated letter collection, Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (2006). But Kurtz also demonstrates in his work a careful rereading [End Page 333] of tried-and-true domestic primary source materials, especially ethnic and religious newspapers like the Boston Pilot and the Catholic Herald of Philadelphia. In so doing, he continues the trend of strong research that is evident in recent titles published by Fordham's series on the North in the Civil War. The book, which is also well written with a crisp prose that drags only in a few sections, is divided into eight chapters, a useful introduction and conclusion, and appendices on the known Catholic newspapers, priests who served as chaplains in the Union army, and female Catholic organizations that contributed nurses to the Federal cause. Kurtz's major thesis is that antebellum anti-Catholic nativism, borne of Anglo-Americans' fears of Irish and German Catholic immigrants changing American culture, prompted most northern Catholics initially to support the Union war effort to prove their loyalty and defend their faith through patriotism. But as the war progressed, casualties among Catholic soldiers mounted, emancipation and the draft became contentious issues (especially among Irish Catholics), and prejudice against Catholic immigrant soldiers continued unabated. Thus, by the end of the war, northern Catholics overall had undergone an alienating experience that only reinforced their allegiance to their faith and, in some areas, retarded their assimilation process into greater American society. In the postwar decades, Irish Catholic veterans attempted to varnish their often unpleasant wartime service by celebrating a more optimistic memory of their experiences under arms, one that frequently fused with a greater celebration of Irish ethnic contributions to the war. Kurtz explains how and why Catholics enlisted in Irish and nonethnic regiments alike, priests and nuns volunteered as chaplains and nurses, bishops politically bolstered home-front fervor for the Union, and newspaper editors became barometers (or directors) of Catholic opinion on the northern war effort. His first chapter, on the Mexican War and nativism against Catholics, is a significant contribution to the literature in its own right and sets the stage nicely for the rest of the book. The second chapter examines Catholic motivations and responses during the secession winter and first year of the war, including the lively dissension that existed among antiwar editors and clergy and those supporting the Lincoln administration. There is not a great deal of new material here that has not already been covered elsewhere, but Kurtz's inclusion of German Catholics in his analysis is refreshing and novel. Throughout the book, in fact, he carefully includes German Catholic perspectives wherever possible, even if the evidence base is weak or was difficult to access (which is no fault of the author). The third chapter, on Catholic soldiers in the Union army, is highly satisfying on one level and frustrating on another. Kurtz offers a superb analysis [End Page 334] of how Irish Catholics in blue felt about major wartime issues, such as the advent of black soldiers and prejudice exhibited by Protestants, but falls short in evaluating their actual battlefield...

“Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861–1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey

Reviewed by: “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861–1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey John D. Fowler “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861–1865. By M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2016. Pp. [xx], 503. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-544-0.) Since the Civil War ended, countless regimental studies have been published. The earliest were often sentimental reminiscences written by the members of a particular regiment. Later regimental studies were written by the descendants of those in the regiment or by antiquarians from the communities that produced the regiments. Finally, in the late twentieth century, professional historians began to research and write the stories of regiments. Using a wide variety of primary sources, especially census records and compiled service records, these scholars have been able to draw accurate conclusions about the individual soldiers who made up Civil War armies. By using quantitative analysis, they could use their data to compare units across states and regions. While regimental histories have something to offer students of the Civil War, it is these modern studies that have the most to offer. “Forward My Brave Boys!”: A History of the 11th Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, C.S.A., 1861-1865 by M. Todd Cathey and Gary W. Waddey is a mixture of the old and the new. Cathey and Waddey are descendants of men from the regiment. Their work contains a wealth of primary resources and recounts the wartime story of the Eleventh Tennessee Volunteer Infantry Regiment, composed of men from five counties in Middle Tennessee. The unit had an interesting combat history, participating in the major campaigns and battles of the western theater. As it stands, “Forward My Brave Boys!” is a well-researched wartime account of the regiment. The authors have written a fine history for those who want to know what the Eleventh Tennessee did during the Civil War. Yet the authors have produced a rather old-fashioned account in that it fails to place the regiment into any proper perspective. Absent is a meticulous search of the records that could have told us more about these men in the pre– and post–Civil War worlds. The men of the Eleventh Tennessee, [End Page 184] like all Civil War soldiers, were products of their communities, and the Civil War was only one part, albeit perhaps the defining part, of their lives. Focusing merely on the war years turns these soldiers into one-dimensional individuals. By examining community records, census records, newspapers, letters, diaries, and pension records for the soldiers and their families, the authors could have made the men themselves and not just their wartime service the focus. Moreover, through an exploration of their medical histories, prisoner of war experiences, and desertion incidents, a clear picture of the “real war” would emerge. The statistics that could be generated would allow the men to be placed in their proper context and would allow comparison with the men of other regiments. An examination of the records mentioned could also answer a number of questions useful to modern scholars. Did the men come from basically the same districts in their respective counties? How wealthy were the officers compared with the enlisted men? How old were the men on average? How large were their farms? What crops did they grow? How many came from urban areas? How did the men do economically after the war? How many were slaveholders? The answers to these questions and others would allow for patterns to be detected, and these patterns could be used to understand the world from which these men came. Cathey and Waddey’s work is well written and contains a wealth of primary sources, but not enough. Moreover, they did not extract enough information from the sources they did use. If one is interested in the wartime exploits of the Eleventh Tennessee Volunteer Infantry, this is an excellent book. Indeed, it is better than most regimental accounts. However, the work falls far short of the type of regimental history that modern scholars produce. The extra effort...

Introduction: Brothers and Sisters in Arms

IntroductionBrothers and Sisters in Arms Noah Riseman (bio) Around the world, the centenary of the First World War has accelerated what Jay Winter refers to as the memory boom of the twentieth century.1 Nations such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have invested significant taxpayer dollars into commemorations of the war, continuing processes of (falsely) positioning wartime service as central to each nation’s identity and development.2 In other nations, such as the United States, it is the Second World War that has led to similar mythologies about the goodness of the nation’s character and citizenry through ideas of “the Good War” and “the Greatest Generation.”3 Notwithstanding the criticisms of historians, war and conflict continue to form a central place within national collective memories. Being included within that memory is akin to being recognized as a member of the nation-state, with particular entitlements to be heard on matters of national or political importance. As military sociologists such as Morris Janowitz argue, minorities have often viewed military service as an opportunity to demonstrate acts of citizenship and, through such acts, to point to their military service in fights for civil and political rights.4 Scholars such as Warren Young and Ronald Krebs have debated the extent to which racial minorities may effectively leverage their position as service personnel or veterans to secure civil rights. Indeed, as both Young and Krebs argue, usually veteran or service member status alone is not enough to secure social change unless there are other catalysts within civil society that [End Page 5] make it in the state’s best interest to award civil rights to minority veterans (or, more widely, entire minority groups).5 Even so, racial minorities, including Indigenous peoples, have for their own reasons participated in the militaries of former or current colonial powers. I have written elsewhere about the rise of Indigenous military histories across the major Anglo settler societies of the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. The emergence of such histories, especially since the 1990s, has aligned with national reconciliation agendas, as well as efforts among Indigenous communities to commemorate the contributions of their forebears to their country’s defense.6 This project of historicizing Indigenous military service continues around the world, exposing the complex histories of Indigenous peoples who are constantly negotiating their statuses and military service, as well as their own traditions. More recent histories have been especially interested in the intersections between military service and themes such as colonialism, gender, race relations, and martial race theory.7 This special issue represents an extension of this new historiography, drawing scholars on Indigenous military participation from the nineteenth century until the present in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa. These articles derive from a conference hosted at Australian Catholic University in 2015 entitled “Brothers and Sisters in Arms: Historicising Indigenous Military Service,” and they represent some of the newest directions in this growing field. Dr. Teresia Teaiwa of Victoria University of Wellington began the conference with a captivating keynote address about the historical and continuing relationship between colonialism and militarism in the Pacific, with a particular focus on Fiji. Her sophisticated arguments drew together postcolonial theory, Pacific research methodologies, and gender studies. Teresia declined the invitation to contribute an article to this collection because she needed to focus on finishing a book about Fijian women and military service. It was with great sadness that I heard Teresia that passed away in March 2017 after a brief battle with cancer. Teresia’s work, and her unique approach as an oral historian using innovative and creative techniques to give voice to Pacific Islander women especially, inspired me as a historian. On behalf of all the contributors to this issue, I extend our deepest condolences to Teresia’s family and dedicate this special issue to her memory. The first article, by Mark van de Logt, returns to the American frontier to examine the role of Sahnish scouts in the wars on the Great Plains from 1865 to 1881. Van de Logt describes the relationships between the Sahnish and their white commanders, as well as their complex motivations to work for...

Construction planning of clinical nursing discipline and operating structure under the" nursing health camp" management model in military general hospitals

Military hospitals shoulder multiple tasks such as medical aid, emergent relief at wartime and medical service support. Nursing care, as an important part in the construction of hospitals, its development and construction directly affect the performance of function in strength building. How to give full play to the technology advantage of nursing science, nursing management potential, and improvement of nursing strength, we should make construction plans for nursing discipline, and set up construction and development platform for nursing discipline, to form the corresponding management structure and operational mechanism, so as to make the nursing management fully combine either at ordinary time or at wartime, and make the nursing research results fully reflected based on nursing health camp management mode. Key words: Hospital administration; Nursing administration research; Nursing health camp; Nursing discipline

The music of war: Seven World War 1 composers and their experience of combat.

The effect of World War 1 military service on composers has been neglected in comparison with poets and artists. This article describes the wartime service of Arthur Bliss, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney, EJ Moeran, Gordon Jacob, Patrick Hadley, and Maurice Ravel. The relationship between experiences of combat and the psychological health of these men is examined, with consideration being given to predisposition and possible causative influences of military service on their later careers, examined from individual and societal perspectives.

‘Left out in the Cold: Village Women and Agricultural Labour in England and Wales during the First World War’.

The Women’s Land Army (WLA), formed in 1917, has featured prominently in recent academic and popular account of First World War Britain. This interest reflects the attention the WLA drew from politicians, government reporters and contemporary commentators during and immediately after the war itself. Yet, the WLA, which at its peak had 16,000 women working on the land, was just one strand of wartime female agricultural labour, an auxiliary to the thousands of village women who worked throughout the war. Whilst the WLA received numerous plaudits for their participation, village women were ‘left out in the cold’, as one correspondent to The Times put it, in recognition of their wartime service. This article will place the rural woman worker back to centre stage. It will revisit the often-contradictory wartime estimates of the number of women working in agriculture in England and Wales before moving on to examine how regional farming structures and seasonal demands for labour shaped the use of women workers. It will show that even at the very local level, here utilizing records from the Bedfordshire Women’s War Agricultural Committee, demand and supply issues produced a fractured pattern. It will show that concentrating exclusively on the WLA leads to a distorted picture of women’s work on the land during the First World War.

The Dekemvriana through the Eyes of the British Soldiers

British soldiers who served in Greece after the country’s liberation in 1944 perceived the political crisis that led to the military confrontation of the Dekemvriana (December 1944-January 1945) in various ways, although their attitude was largely dictated by the official policy of their government. Their personal testimonies (personal and public letters, diaries, and reminiscences) reveal their own role and their experiences in the Battle of Athens. Furthermore, they provide us with interesting information concerning: the soldiers’ views of the two opposing camps (left-wing EAM and the provisional government’s anticommunist forces) and of the Greek people in general; their response to the British policy in Greece and to the reactions on the Home Front; and their own personal concerns about the dangers that they faced, the emotional or moral pressures that they felt, their impressions of foreign places and people, as well as their weariness with their wartime service.

Neutral Caregivers or Military Support? The British Red Cross, the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, and the Problems of Voluntary Medical Aid in Wartime

During the First World War the British Red Cross Society (BRCS) served as the coordinating body for voluntary medical aid giving in Britain. Among the many units which came within its purview was the Friends’ Ambulance Unit (FAU), formed by a group of young men whose desire to serve their nation in wartime conflicted with their pacifist principles. Both the BRCS and the FAU were wracked by ideological conflicts in the years which preceded and throughout the war. These struggles over voluntarist identity highlight the contested meanings of service and conscience in wartime. Through a critical examination of the language of official histories and biographies, this article will argue that the war formed a key moment in the relationship between the British state and voluntary medical aid, with the state’s increasing role in the work of such organizations raising questions about the voluntarist principles to which aid organizations laid claim. The struggles that both organizations and individuals within them faced in reconciling the competing pressures that this new relationship created form a legacy of the war which continues to have important implications for the place of medical voluntarism in wartime today.

Memories of Kinship in Keith Vaughan's Post-War Paintings

This essay explores the themes of memory and kinship in the art of Keith Vaughan after the Second World War. Vaughan's paintings, which, in this period, focus on the male body, both alone and in groups, are examined in terms of their flexible and expansive attitudes to time, relationships and sociality. They are considered alongside his pre-war trips to Pagham, his own wartime service as a conscientious objetor in the Non-Combatant Corps, and his post-war life in London: these experiences, often focused around fleeting moments of intimacy, recur in his art. Drawing on Vaughan's extensive journals, now held in the Tate archive, this essay traces the way in which the experiences and memories of these social bonds were negotiated, restated, and renewed in his art. His paintings are considered alongside a flexible, embodied kinship to trace how Vaughan registers the joys and difficulties of living as a homosexual in Britain in the 1950s.

JOHN BOLTON AND THE DISCOVERY OF DISCRETE RADIO SOURCES

John Bolton was born in Sheffield in 1922 and educated at Cambridge University. After wartime service in the Royal Navy, in 1946 he joined the CSIRO's Radiophysics Laboratory in Sydney and began work in the fledgling field of radio astronomy. Radio emission from our Galaxy had been discovered and studied during the 1930s by the Americans Karl Jansky and Grote Reber. It was thought that the emission emanated from interstellar space, but the mechanism was unknown. In June 1947, observing from Dover Heights near the entrance to Sydney Harbour, Bolton discovered that strong emission from the constellation of Cygnus came from a discrete point-like source. By the end of the year, with colleagues Gordon Stanley and Bruce Slee (a co-author of this paper), Bolton had discovered a further five of these discrete sources. However, the positions measured for them were not accurate enough to allow them to be identified optically with any known celestial objects. In 1948 Bolton organised a three-month expedition to New Zealand where there were observing sites superior to the one at Dover Heights. The new observations gave more accurate positions and allowed Bolton to identify three of the sources: one was a supernova remnant in our Galaxy and two were unusual extragalactic objects. This paper will document this remarkable chapter in the development of twentieth century astronomy.

Charles James Barton Anderson

As a boy, Charles James Barton Anderson lived at Aucharnie Farm near Huntly. He went to the local primary school at Forgue and then on to Huntly for his secondary...