Surrounding World War Research Articles

Cripping the Archive: Analyzing Archival Disorder in the Yamashita Family Archives and Karen Tei Yamashita’s Letters to Memory

This article outlines a crip archival analysis of Karen Tei Yamashita’s creative family memoir Letters to Memory (2017) and the separate Yamashita Family Archives; the analysis revolves around the concept of disorder. The book and digital archives move the daily lived experience of incarceration out of chronological order, encouraging new connections across a massive collection of materials: letters, photographs, federal surveillance documents, paintings, sermons, and other ephemera surrounding World War II Japanese American incarceration. Their respective acts of assembling and retelling destabilize the dominant narrative of a resolved family or national trauma to reflect divergent embodied experiences of distress and disability effected by racial debilitation. Offering concentric analysis of textual and archival reordering via Asian American studies, disability studies, and digital humanities, this article adds alternative dimensions to the ongoing legacy of incarceration by inviting readers to create new constellations of meaning through examining temporal and embodied disorder. Reading the physical book and digital archives together also acts as a model for how literary studies scholars might complicate our attention to embodiment beyond narrative analysis, by thinking about disability and madness in the design and structure of texts and digital media. Through cripping the archive, the author calls for a reconceptualization of mad and disabled bodyminds as not only content to be examined, but also users and creators whose disorder animates alternative ways of knowing personal and state violence.

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

Seeger Lecture, Society for Ethnomusicology Virtual Meeting 2021

The Impact of the WWI Agricultural Boom and Bust on Female Opportunity Cost and Fertility

Abstract Using variation in crop prices induced by large swings in demand surrounding World War I, we examine the fertility response to crop revenue increases from 1910 to 1930. Our estimates indicate that agricultural price increases reduced fertility, explaining about 9% of the overall decline in fertility over the period. The effect persists years after the collapse of the war boom. Importantly, we show that fertility declines were concentrated in farm women and fertility declined along intensive and extensive margins. Combined, the pattern of estimates is consistent with agricultural women experiencing an increase in the opportunity cost of their time.

Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination

Performing Tsarist Russia in New York: Music, Émigrés, and the American Imagination

Conversational Roles, Generational Differences and the Emergence of Historical and Personal Memories Surrounding WWII during Familial Discussions

ABSTRACT We examined whether and how conversational roles shape the extent to which details and recollections surrounding World War II (WWII) emerge in family conversations. Each family was tasked with collaboratively discussing four topics surrounding WWII specific to Belgium. We then conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The former compared the collaborative recall with each family member’s individual recall; the latter focused on the conversational roles and dynamics within each family. While the results suggest that familial discussions lead to more “old” (from the individual recollection) recollections than “new” recollections, about 40% new recollections did emerge; however, with fewer personal details surrounding the discussed recollections. Although, the extent to which more details and new recollections emerged during the conversations across families depended on the conversational roles adopted by each discussant. Our results are discussed in terms of the importance of conversational roles in understanding when and how memories may emerge within a conversation and, in turn, transmit across generations.

Analyzing Schoenberg’s War Compositions as Satire and Sincerity: A Comparative Analysis of Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte and A Survivor from Warsaw

This paper presents a comparative analysis of Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte op. 41 (1942) and A Survivor from Warsaw op. 46 (1947) to show that Schoenberg’s compositional decisions for each piece reflect the public’s (and his) change of attitude regarding the historical events surrounding World War II. In particular, I argue that Ode frequently features humorous depiction of the Nazi regime through various types of musical satire whereas Survivor’s overall compositional planning and execution are more in line with his other compositions without a satirical tone, for example, the String Trio op. 45. The analyses in this paper show humorous elements in Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon and demonstrate how these elements are avoided in Survivor from Warsaw to make space for the sincere criticism of the Nazi party and to raise awareness for the survivors. I begin by interpreting satirical passages in Ode as instances of incongruent juxtapositions and then examine the different ways the incongruence manifests. I then discuss the leitmotivic partitioning of various twelve-tone row forms in Survivor to show the compositional congruence between the text, musical textures, and partitioning schemes. Given the change of compositional mood between Ode and Survivor (in addition to the historical evidence), this paper speculates that Schoenberg’s motivation for composing Survivor was to rectify the narrative tone he adopted in Ode.

Why Does the United States Have the Best Research Universities? Incentives, Resources, and Virtuous Circles

Around 1875, the US had none of the world’s leading research universities; today, it accounts for the majority of the top-ranked. Many observers cite events surrounding World War II as the source of this reversal. We present evidence that US research universities had surpassed most countries’ decades before World War II. An explanation of their dominance must therefore begin earlier. The one we offer highlights reforms that began after the Civil War and enhanced the incentives and resources the system directs at research. Our story is not one of success by design, but rather of competition leading American colleges to begin to care about research. We draw on agency theory to argue that this led to increasing academic specialization, and in turn, to more precise measures of professors’ research output. Combined with sorting dynamics that concentrated talent and resources at some schools—and the emergence of tenure—this enhanced research performance.

Who’s in control? Varying and changing translations of ‘birth control’ in Japan

ABSTRACT This article examines how the Japanese conceptualized ‘birth control’ in the twentieth century by analyzing the various terms its supporters used to describe contraception. The Japanese translations reveal the core ideas that defined the Japanese birth control movement, specifically eugenics and Neo-Malthusianism, during the tumultuous decades surrounding World War II as Japan competed for hegemony in the Pacific. The use of different terms over the decades reveals the struggles among Japanese leaders and intellectuals to ‘control’ the reproductive fate of the Japanese race.

Why Does the U.S. Have the Best Research Universities? Incentives, Resources, and Virtuous Circles

Around 1870 the U.S. had no research universities of note, while today it accounts for the largest number in the world. Many accounts attribute this transformation to events surrounding World War II. In contrast, this paper traces its origins to reforms that began in the 1870s. We first explain the origins of the American system's weakness at research. We then present an agency theory framework that highlights ingredients necessary for enhanced research performance. These include specialization and meaningful performance metrics. We then discuss reforms that put these ingredients in place. For example: the introduction of specialized and advanced teaching and the ensuing rise of disciplines/departments; the creation of academic journals; the introduction of selective admissions. Throughout, we emphasize the role played by the U.S. university system's free market orientation.

Why Does the U.S. Have the Best Research Universities? Incentives, Resources, and Virtuous Circles

Around 1870 the U.S. had no research universities of note, while today it accounts for the largest number in the world. Many accounts attribute this transformation to events surrounding World War II. In contrast, this paper traces its origins to reforms that began in the 1870s. We first explain the origins of the American system's weakness at research. We then present an agency theory framework that highlights ingredients necessary for enhanced research performance. These include specialization and meaningful performance metrics. We then discuss reforms that put these ingredients in place. For example: the introduction of specialized and advanced teaching and the ensuing rise of disciplines/departments; the creation of academic journals; the introduction of selective admissions. Throughout, we emphasize the role played by the U.S. university system's free market orientation.

La etapa fundacional de la Sociedad Filarmónica de León (1907-1914)

Llamada originalmente Sociedad de Conciertos de León, la Filarmónica leonesa compartió con otras asociaciones análogas españolas muchas de sus características, aunque desde sus inicios realizó una labor educativa y filantrópica que la hicieron peculiar. Nacía con la meta de que en la ciudad se pudiera escuchar música clásica tocada por reconocidos intérpretes, así que para lograr su objetivo participó en la creación de la Unión de Sociedades Filarmónicas. Las condiciones ventajosas obtenidas de esta alianza, hicieron posible que en la localidad se conociera una parte importante del repertorio clásico-romántico a través de grandes músicos extranjeros y nacionales, entre los cuales ocuparía lugar destacadísimo la Orquesta Sinfónica de Madrid. Las circunstancias generadas por la Primera Guerra Mundial, hicieron que en estos años el número de conciertos descendiera drásticamente, por lo que el presente artículo aborda únicamente la primera etapa de la asociación leonesa.

Financing investment spikes in the years surrounding World War I

In the period surrounding World War I, US firms sharply increased investment in fixed assets and working capital to accommodate large increases in demand associated with the war. Concurrently, the US adopted an excess profits tax, which created a tax bias in favor of equity financing. Despite this tax bias, firms in need of external funds largely issued debt, not equity, to finance investment spikes when the excess profits tax was in effect. Further, we find these firms systematically reduced debt after the war, whereas other firms did not. The results support models that link the dynamics of firms’ financing decisions with the dynamics of their investment opportunities and are inconsistent with models that emphasize taxes as a primary determinant of financing decisions.

Pamphlets of the Committee on Public Information and the Construction of an American National Identity during World War One: An Event-Frame Analysis

In 1917, the United States was far from a cohesive entity. Using the events surrounding World War One as a natural laboratory to trace the construction of a unified American identity, this article adds to the debate on the political sociology of identity frames and nationalism. Using an event-frame - model to analyze the discourse reflected in pamphlets disseminated by the Wilson administration, I demonstrate how identity frames evolved and increasingly relied on enemy images to strengthen the in-group coherence of American citizens. Thus, paying attention to the political dynamics of frame evolution is crucial in understanding the emergence of salient identities.

The traces of World War I in Brussels

The hundredth anniversary of World War I has put the spotlight on this period once again. The media coverage of the commemorations is unprecedented and even surprising for a conflict which has remained in the memorial shadow of the even more deadly World War II. While there was every reason to believe that the Great War was only a distant memory, it must also be noted that it is still the object of true curiosity on the part of the general public. The hundredth anniversary has also led to a number of publications, most of which are in keeping with the revival of historical research surrounding World War I for the past twenty years or so. The case of Belgium – the scene of fighting in a territory which was almost completely occupied – has thus been well studied. However, while several recent studies have used Brussels as a framework, a global summary specifically devoted to the capital does not exist. This synopsis thus summarises the material traces and immaterial heritage of the conflict in Brussels. The aim is therefore not to trace the history of Brussels during World War I or to present the latest works on this subject, but rather to answer some simple questions asked by the inhabitants of Brussels today: What remains of World War I in the capital? Who is interested in it, and why? How does this conflict resonate today in Brussels’ memories? How are they reflected in the urban space? In other words, this synopsis reverses the historical temporality to observe the results of the sifting of time.

Paying with their bodies: American war and the problem of the disabled veteran

Christian Bagge, an Iraq War veteran, lost both his legs in a roadside bomb attack on his Humvee in 2006. Months after the accident, outfitted with sleek new prosthetic legs, he jogged alongside President Bush for a photo op at the White House. The photograph served many functions, one of them being to revive faith in an American martial ideal - that war could be fought without permanent casualties and that innovative technology could easily repair war's damage. When Bagge was awarded his Purple Heart, however, military officials asked him to wear pants to the ceremony, saying that photos of the event should be soft on the eyes. Defiant, Bagge wore shorts. America has grappled with the questions posed by injured veterans since its founding, and with particular force since the early twentieth century: What are the nation's obligations to those who fight in its name? And when does war's legacy of disability outweigh the nation's interests at home and abroad? In Paying with Their Bodies, John M. Kinder traces the complicated, interwined histories of war and disability in modern America. Focusing in particular on the decades surrounding World War I, he argues that disabled veterans have long been at the center of two competing visions of American war: one that highlights the relative safety of US military intervention overseas; the other indelibly associating American war with injury, mutilation, and suffering. Kinder brings disabled veterans to the center of the American war story and shows that when we do so, the history of American war over the last century begins to look very different. War can no longer be seen as a discrete experience, easily left behind; rather, its human legacies are felt for decades. The first book to examine the history of American warfare through the lens of its troubled legacy of injury and disability, Paying with Their Bodies will force us to think a new about war and its painful costs.

Why Breastfeeding?: Natural Motherhood in Post-War America

This article explores the history of breastfeeding in postwar America and places it within a larger framework of the intersections of science, culture, and gender. Through an exploration of the history of breastfeeding at its nadir, it argues that the movement back to the breast that became visible in the 1970s was rooted in the emergence of the ideology of natural motherhood in the decades surrounding World War II. Natural motherhood relied upon a scientific understanding of nature and motherhood in which interconnected physiological and emotional processes unfolded instinctually in the bodies of mothers and infants along a largely predetermined pattern. Through an analysis of scientific and prescriptive literature on family, child rearing, and sexuality, and the letters of women themselves, this article seeks to understand the persistent choices of mothers to breastfeed in this period and asks what meaning the practice held.

Whose Spain?: Negotiating “Spanish Music” in Paris, 1908–1929 by Samuel Llano (review)

Whose Spain?: Negotiating Music in Paris, 1908-1929. By Samuel Llano. (Currents in Latin American and Iberian Music.) New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. [xxii, 270 p. ISBN 9780199858460. $55.] Bibliography, index. In this thought-provoking study, Samuel Llano revisits, from a fresh viewpoint, much-maligned tendency of French critics in decades surrounding World War I to exoticize Spanish music. Llano establishes this new framework by building on work of Hispanists such as Emilio Ros-Fabregas, first scholar, to best of my knowledge, who located origins of critical trope known as mysticism, which first surfaced in writings by August Wilhelm Ambros, but over which early-twentieth-century French critics such as Henri Collet enthused far more voluminously (Emilio Ros-Fabregas, Historiograffa de la miisica en las catedrales espaiiolas: Positivismo y nacionalismo en la investigacion musicologica, Codex XXI 1 [1998]: 68-135). Llano also elaborates on rift between so-called Teutonic and Latin aesthetics, obsession among cultural spokespersons during that cataclysm some in France still call la Grand Guerre. In light of centenary of war, Llano's research is as timely as his insights are welcome. His coverage of postwar period also fills a lacuna in Spanish music scholarship while complementing, to some degree, pathbreaking studies such as Tamara Levitz's microhistory of Paris premiere of Stravinsky's Persephone (Tamara Levitz, Modernist Mysteries: Persephone [New York: Oxford University Press, 2012]). For all these reasons, Whose Spain ? received Robert M. Stevenson Award in 2013, a prize conferred by American Musicological Society for outstanding scholarship in Iberian music. It is clear that some daunting challenges present themselves. Critics such as Collet were not only verbose but obscure in their effusions on Spanish music. (Joaquin Nin-Culmell, composer and former student of Manuel de Falla, once rather generously described Collet to me as an odd bird.) Political and social subtexts and metaphors lurk at every turn, waiting to be unpacked. As Llano observes, one of Collet's meanderings anticipates the hybrid [racial] formulation of Spanish identity and history that historian Americo Castro would uphold, more famously and polemically, in his Espana y su historia (1948)--written in exile from Franco dictatorship (p. 28). The primary source materials Llano painstakingly collected, with their frequent flights of bombast, are thus backbone of his study, and discourse analysis, including translation, his primary tool. There is much to admire about ways in which Llano addresses these challenges. First, simply by approaching Spanish music from a French perspective, a new focus emerges. Refining term exoticism, which has become a catchword that masks a variety of practices and experiences (p. xvii), author provides a wealth of new factual information, discussing, for example, Semaine espagnole of 1919 (p. 22) and Alexandre Bailly's sets for Paris production of Manuel de Falla's La vie breve (La vida breve), which took place in January 1914 (pp. 141-42). The same can be said for discussion of homage to Falla held at Opera-Comique in 1928, event that been chronically misdated and thus overlooked. (The fact that author and I differ on feminist inclinations of feisty female protagonist of El amor brujo, mentioned on p. 204, only reflects richness of critical concepts in Falla's oeuvre that remain to be pondered.) Indeed, if any scholar were to write a monograph on Falla's relationship to France, Whose Spain? would serve as apt point of departure, since Llano describes highlights of composer's experience at a level of detail impossible in more comprehensive life-work studies. One hopes Llano might take up this project himself someday. Through eyes of Collet and other hispanisles, Llano also enhances our understanding of Lalinile in terms of Russian, French, and Spanish aesthetic sensibilities, which other scholars have discussed apropos Ballets Russes (pp. …

Tomorrow's house: solar housing in 1940s America.

In the years surrounding World War II, solar house heating was seen by many American architects, journal editors, and policymakers as a necessary component of the expansion into suburbia. As the technological and financial aspects of home ownership came to take on broad social implications, design strategies of architectural modernism--including the expansive use of glass, the open plan and façade, and the flexible roof line--were seen as a means to construct suburbs that were responsive to anticipated concerns over materials allocations, over energy-resource scarcity, and over the economic challenges to postwar growth. As this article demonstrates, experiments in passive solar house design were a prominent means for envisioning the suburbs as an opportunity for new kinds of building and new ways of living. The article documents these developments and places them in the context of related efforts to think about the future.

What’s Copenhagen Got To Do With Chemistry Class? Using a Play to Teach the History and Practice of Science

Through the reading, study, and performance of Copenhagen, a play by Michael Frayn, chemistry students see the application of nuclear chemistry content, acquire a better understanding of the continuum from scientific research to technology design, and also become aware of the many and varied interrelationships of science with history and humanity. This article describes a method to use the play in a high school chemistry classroom as a vehicle for cross-disciplinary integration of chemistry content through the context of history and the development of scientists as people. Students experience the lives of two scientists, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, as they negotiate their academic and personal relationships surrounding basic atomic research during the historical time period surrounding World War II and the creation of the atom bomb. In student group discussions, tangents of discourse move from the various scientists’ personalities and the iterative nature of scientific research, to questions of politics, ethics, and morality in a historic context as they discuss, debate, and decide upon ways to present the play so their peers will understand and appreciate the experience.

Orientalizing the Bayadère/Fabricating Mata Hari

This article analyzes how photographs of the spy/danseuse Margaretha Zelle fabricated her image of a bayadère or Hindu temple dancer named Mata Hari. Specifically, it looks at how they inflected some key paradigms of orientalia within the orbit of her elaborate pretence while destabilizing her identity when anxieties surrounding World War I were at their peak. A pivotal point of the discussion is the Nataraja, the iconic representation of the Hindu god Shiva dancing the Ananda Tandava or “dance of bliss” deployed to legitimize Zelle's transformation from a middle-class Dutch woman into the infamous Mata Hari, the exotic dancer. Specifically, the article examines how photographs of her debut recital colluded with the intersecting realms of her performance and Hindu iconography, to secure her iconicity. Last but not least, this article analyzes the conflation between the bayadère and Salomé in a studio portrait taken by Walery, a photograph that also cemented Zelle's self-styled identity as Mata Hari. In particular, it looks at how such images embodied her multiple alterities, endowing her with the possibilities of being Mata Hari while becoming the biblical bayadère, and anticipating in turn the violence of her execution in a grotesque reversal of the Salomé myth.