Uncivil War Research Articles

Book Review: Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966-1975 by Huw Bennett

Book Review: <i>Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966-1975</i> by Huw Bennett

Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975, by Huw Bennett

Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975, by Huw Bennett

‘Enemy Action’: The UK Ministry of Defence, Academia and the Historical Record

The publication of Uncivil War, Huw Bennett’s history of the early years of the Northern Ireland conflict, has highlighted an increasingly obstructive and uncooperative approach by the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) towards academic researchers. Geraint Hughes argues that the impediments the MoD is placing by restricting access to archival evidence on recent military conflicts is not only undemocratic, but also distorts public awareness of the complexities of these wars, and hampers the British armed forces’ own efforts to develop as ‘learning institutions’ that can use military history to support their own professional understanding of the challenges posed by contemporary warfare. He calls for a dialogue between the MoD and the academic community that addresses the balance between operational security and accountability, and contributes to a mutually beneficial relationship where scholarship can contribute to the armed forces’ own process of self and institutional education.◼

Gestalt Roots and Social Activism: An Interview with Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer

Gestalt Roots and Social Activism: An Interview with Carolyn J. Lukensmeyer

Office Warfare: Exploring the Role of Employee Political Affiliation in the Workplace

Despite the likely outsized presence of politics in the workplace, research on how one's political ideology or affiliation shapes their time at work has been extremely limited. Collectively, the research to date showcases that how employees present their political stance to others, and how similar their political stance is to their workplace peers, is likely to shape their time at work and erode important workplace outcomes. To advance research on the role of employee political stance in the workplace, we bring together four research teams all pursuing research questions related to how employees make conscious or unconscious efforts to manage their political ideology or affiliation to others at work. These works are likely to advance scholarship on the role of political stance at work, and also test the boundaries of identity management theories in considering political stance as a potentially stigmatizing identity characteristic. Distal Consequences of Expressing a Political Identity at Work Presenter: Ashley N. Robinson; The U. of Memphis Presenter: Alex Lindsey; U. of Memphis Presenter: Kristen Price Jones; U. of Memphis Fighting an Uncivil War: Does Passion for Politics lead to Consequences for Employees? Presenter: Hayden DuBois; U. of Texas At Arlington Presenter: David F. Arena; U. of Texas At Arlington Presenter: Karen Landay; U. of Missouri - Kansas City Presenter: Shona G. Smith; U. of Texas At Arlington Job Identification, Political Ideology, and Employee Well-Being Presenter: Ryan Scott Teschner; U. of Texas at Dallas Presenter: Riki Takeuchi; U. of Texas at Dallas Presenter: Nan Guo; U. of Texas at Dallas - Jindal School of Management COVID-19 Pandemic Protocols and the Surfacing of Political Identities at Work Presenter: Hoda Vaziri; U. of North Texas Presenter: Artemis Boulamatsi; U. of North Texas Presenter: Virginie Lopez Kidwell; U. of North Texas Presenter: Danielle Cooper; U. of North Texas Presenter: Julie Irene Hancock; U. of North Texas

Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War by Paul D’Anieri

Reviewed by: Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War by Paul D’Anieri Simone Attilio Bellezza D’Anieri, Paul. Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2019. xii + 282 pp. Maps. Tables. Notes. Index. £18.99 (paperback). This book, by Paul D’Anieri, vice president of the American Association of Ukrainian Studies, describes the gradual estrangement between Russia and Ukraine from its beginnings in the late 1980s until 2019. The author stipulates from the outset that this text is not a work of historical research but of political science, yet the volume’s eight chapters largely comprise historical narrative, rather than political science analysis. However, events are not narrated from the perspective of a historian, nor is the rationale behind what is chosen as a topic for analysis typical to a historian. Although significant proportion of the text is devoted to issues of international relations between Ukraine, Russia, the USA and the European Union, Ukraine and Russia could hardly be considered a treatise on diplomacy or the history of international relations. The gradual deterioration of Russian-Ukrainian relations is read in the broader context of Russian-Western relations at the end of the Cold War through the lens of the so-called ‘Security Dilemma’: when subjects under scrutiny perceive a danger and try to take action to shield themselves from external threats but, in doing so, only increase the perceived sense of threat from their neighbours, who in turn intensify their efforts to defend themselves in the event of an external threat, thus creating a vicious cycle that almost inevitably leads to confrontation. The story told by D’Anieri, however, is much more complicated than the simple juxtaposition of self-defence measures, as he takes pains to specify: while NATO’s expansion depended on fears that the failure of democratization in Russia rightly aroused in neighbouring states, post-Soviet Russia never accepted that Ukraine could become a distinct and independent nation-state, thus any measures aimed at founding and strengthening the Ukrainian state were (and are) perceived as a challenge to Russian supremacy in an area where Moscow believes it has complete sovereignty. Within this interpretative framework, established from the first chapter, the events of the last thirty years of Ukrainian history are examined. These events are interspersed — as already mentioned — by extensive analysis of international relations on critical issues which have created greater friction, such as Crimea, Ukraine’s renunciation of nuclear weapons and energy policy. Not being a work of historical research, this book does not offer any new insights as to how the events it describes unfolded, but the history of both the dissolution of the Soviet Union and that of post-Soviet Ukraine are masterfully summarized, demonstrating in-depth knowledge of existing scholarly literature. In presenting the history of the ‘divorce’ between Russia and Ukraine, D’Anieri rightly emphasizes the importance of Viktor Yushchenko’s [End Page 588] Orange Revolution, even going so far as to declare that ‘in some respects, the rest of this book is about the consequences of the Orange Revolution’ (p. 133). Equally acute attention is paid to the actions of Poland, which played a central role in favouring Ukraine’s rapprochement with the European Union, and to the analysis of Ukraine’s inclination to evolve towards a democratic regime. Although this topic is not completely ignored, a few more paragraphs on the evolution of Russia’s political and identity would have benefited an understanding of the conflict’s emergence, although admittedly, doing so in depth would have meant writing another book. Lastly, D’Anieri’s exercise in counterfactual history on the issue of whether war could have been avoided in 2014 is set out incredibly clearly as he highlights how the behaviours of both Viktor Yanukovych and Russia were decisive in precipitating the crisis toward armed conflict in the Ukrainian Donbas. It is, therefore, striking that in the final paragraphs, D’Anieri tries to identify possible solutions to the conflict, while admitting that Ukraine had found itself in a dead end. However, there is no suggestion that the war might escalate, showing how difficult it is, as D’Anieri...

Naked and Un-Ashamed: White Supremacy Rises Again in Leonard Scruggs's "The Un-Civil War: Shattering the Historical Myths"

Naked and Un-Ashamed: White Supremacy Rises Again in Leonard Scruggs's "The Un-Civil War: Shattering the Historical Myths"

Intergenerational National Service by, With, and for All Ages

Deep divisions existed in the United States well before 2020, but the risk they pose to American democracy brings new urgency to bridging them. We have entered a period that President Biden has called an “uncivil war.” In addition, our country’s current economic and social challenges, which also began well before this past year, have been inflamed by a pandemic that has already taken more lives than the two World Wars and the Vietnam War combined, and infected tens of millions more. Americans have witnessed the largest increase in poverty in six decades. School shutdowns are causing learning losses that could hobble an entire generation. Social isolation has exacerbated loneliness—most seriously affecting the mental health of younger and older adults.

Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War ed. by Lisa Tendrich Frank and LeeAnn Whites

Reviewed by: Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War ed. by Lisa Tendrich Frank and LeeAnn Whites Lynn Kennedy Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War. Edited by Lisa Tendrich Frank and LeeAnn Whites. UnCivil Wars. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2020. Pp. viii, 306. Paper, $32.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5634-1; cloth, $99.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5631-0.) The household in nineteenth-century America was not only the site of familial relationships but also a central unit of economic and social organization; it thus provides an ideal lens through which to understand larger events and meanings. Household War: How Americans Lived and Fought the Civil War explores the diverse ways the Civil War household shaped the experiences of soldiers and civilians alike. Fundamentally, the edited collection suggests how the household and battlefield became intertwined, emphasizing "the reality [End Page 342] that households were both the sites of war as well as the basic social structures that underlay the Confederate and Union armies, polities, and economies" (p. 3). The inclusion of both northern and southern households further provides insight into the persistence of shared national values and into the complexity of relationships and loyalties created during this conflict. Organized into four sections, the essays survey the various functions of the household as a provider of emotional and material support, a basis for claims to social and political status, and a site of social challenge and control. Part 1 takes a psychological focus, considering how the private household relations of three well-known historical figures—Mary Todd Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, and Ulysses S. Grant—shaped their public behavior. Joan E. Cashin focuses on how the material spaces of the various households in which Lincoln resided reflected her broader experiences. Joseph M. Beilein Jr. argues that extant historiography has bifurcated Lee into either a general or a man, but that in fact these two elements of his identity cannot be separated. Brooks D. Simpson's essay suggests how extended kinship networks complicated household relations for Grant. The essays in Part 2 explore the connections that ordinary people, men and women, northerners and southerners, soldiers and civilians, drew between their households and the war. Jonathan W. White investigates the dreams of home recounted in the letters of soldiers, and how such dreams suggested the central role the household played in soldiers' lives, both consciously and unconsciously. These dreams provided both physical and emotional comfort to the soldiers and could also become a means for expressing anxiety around separation from their families. While White's work focuses on the psychological sustenance offered by the household, LeeAnn Whites's essay examines the essential material supplies that households contributed to the war. Both goods and money moved back and forth between the household and the battlefield. Whites also demonstrates how this supply chain maintained household inequalities in the war, as soldiers depended on what their families could send, and those whose households could not sacrifice such provisions undoubtedly suffered from the lack. Julie A. Mujic's work on Wisconsin households uses the letters written to state politicians to show how women responded to the war's disruptions "by shifting the place of the household, by flexing it and expanding it outward to encompass the battlefield" (p. 102). Even as women volunteered to send supplies and bring the caregiving function of the household to the soldiers, they expected the state to facilitate this interaction, thus using the exigencies of war to reframe the household's relationship to the state. Part 3 goes beyond emotional or material connections to explore the literal merging of the household and the battlefield, resulting in significant displacements and disruptions. Lisa Tendrich Frank argues that the forced removal of southern households in the path of the Union army was a deliberate military strategy "to blur distinctions that typically separated civilians from enemy combatants" (p. 138). Margaret Storey explores the flipside of this strategy, with the wives of Union officers setting up households in occupied territory. Such disrupted and constructed households both became symbols of the Union's control over this territory that went beyond a battlefield victory. Andrew K. Frank provides another...

The Fast and the Negative: Dialectics and Posthumanism

The article refers to the way the recent TV drama Brexit: The Uncivil War deconstructs the inherent contradictions of modern capitalism. Historically, both Marx and the avant-garde believed that acceleration or deceleration will aggravate the contradictions to the point of the collapse of the system. British cultural theory further expounds this issue by adding a curious philosophical perspective of the way capital deals with the abstraction of the real in the digital era. Their take on accelerationism subsequently created two competing aesthetic and political concepts: the left wing that endeavours to exploit the dialectical negativity in order to re-purpose the technological speed away from capital’s imaginary, and the right wing that embraces the acceleration of the forces of production to disclose the invasion of posthuman, machinistic Singularity.

Affinity, arming, consequences, and perceptions: an introduction

This article provides an introduction to the special issue on Political violence: affinity, arming, consequences, and perceptions. The issue contains panel analyses, theoretical investigations, and a quantification study. With respect to terrorism, four of the articles study perceptions regarding democratic skepticism, security effectiveness, refugee hosting risks, and financial well-being. Although much of the special issue addresses aspects of terrorism, some articles consider other political violence topics, such as UN peacekeeping, civil war, and war outbreak. This introductory article also summarizes each of the eight contributions.

UN involvement and civil war peace agreement implementation

Many studies argue that third-party guarantees, such as those of the United Nations, increase the chances that belligerents will sign peace agreements, but it is unclear how third-party involvement affects the implementation of such agreements. We unpack the relationship between UN involvement and peace agreement success by focusing on the risk of defections during the peace accord implementation phase. We argue that two types of commitment problems, namely involuntary and voluntary defections, emerge from the characteristics of the peace process itself as well as from new opportunities available to rebel groups. We expect that shifts in relative power and polarized voting lead to lower implementation scores overall, but that the deployment of UN troops has a mitigating effect, thereby increasing the prospects of sustainable peace agreements. Using data from the Peace Accords Matrix Implementation Dataset from 1989 to 2010 and personnel commitments to UN peacekeeping operations, we find evidence that large UN missions are better placed to support the implementation and longevity of the peace process.

Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. UnCivil Wars Series. Edited by David W. Blight and Jim Downs. Foreword by Eric Foner

Beyond Freedom: Disrupting the History of Emancipation. UnCivil Wars Series. Edited by David W. Blight and Jim Downs. Foreword by Eric Foner

Driven from Home: North Carolina's Civil War Refugee Crisis by David Silkenat

Reviewed by: Driven from Home: North Carolina's Civil War Refugee Crisis by David Silkenat Evan C. Rothera Driven from Home: North Carolina's Civil War Refugee Crisis. By David Silkenat. UnCivil Wars. ( Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. x, 290. Paper, $28.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5473-6; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4946-6.) Many historians have analyzed refugees during the U.S. Civil War. However, David Silkenat contends, most have failed to situate the experiences of a particular group within the broader refugee crisis brought on by the war. He asserts that the defining feature of the refugee crisis was diversity and that "Southerners of all races, genders, classes, and political alliances chose or were forced to move as a consequence of the Civil War" (p. 4). He explores five groups: African Americans and white Unionists who fled to Union lines, white pro-Confederates who sought refuge in the interior and the "refugeed" slaves they dragged with them, and daughters sent to boarding schools (p. 130). Because many rebels fled to North Carolina and many rebels and Unionists moved within the state, North Carolina is an appropriate location for studying the refugee crisis. Driven from Home: North Carolina's Civil War Refugee Crisis begins with an analysis of African Americans and white Unionists in eastern North Carolina. Fugitive slaves successfully served the Union as spies, to the point that they "became the eyes and ears of the Union army" (p. 29). Contact with slaves did not erase the prejudices of white soldiers, but it spurred many to revise their opinions of slavery. Prejudices about Unionist refugees proved pervasive. Many soldiers questioned the loyalty of white refugees who arrived after the [End Page 758] Confederacy instituted conscription, deriding them as "'poor white trash'" (p. 36). Many authorities believed white refugees were more dependent on aid than were black refugees. After considering eastern North Carolina, Silkenat examines white rebels and refugeed slaves in western North Carolina. Transporting slaves to the North Carolina Piedmont kept them away from the Union army, but many slaves resisted, either actively or passively. Tensions between refugees and local people became pronounced. Many refugees believed the locals took advantage of them because they had difficulties finding housing and food. Refugees did not understand or care that their presence drove prices up to exorbitant levels and "contributed to an economic crisis" (p. 130). Furthermore, while many people in the Piedmont embraced the peace movement, white refugees usually supported aggressive prosecution of the war. Silkenat also investigates female students in boarding schools and white southerners and their slaves who sheltered in the North Carolina mountains. North Carolina's female academies increased their enrollment as parents moved their daughters away from the war. Student refugees faced some hardships but fared better "than almost anyone else on the Confederate home front" (p. 173). Students' experiences gave them a skewed understanding of the war. Later in life, they promoted "a version of the Confederate experience that drew heavily from their atypical vantage point in the relatively safe and well-provisioned sanctuaries provided by female academies" (p. 183). Some South Carolinians fled to the North Carolina mountains, specifically the town of Flat Rock. Mountaineers hated refugee planters. Deserter gangs terrorized civilians, and planters "spent the final months of the war bunkered in their mountain estates" (p. 214). However, mountain refugees did not suffer "disease, overcrowding, and famine" like other refugees (p. 215). Furthermore, their fortunes allowed them to buy food, even at inflated prices. Silkenat concludes by arguing that surrender did not end the refugee crisis; it merely began "a new phase" (p. 220). This well-written and thought-provoking book has much to offer. Silkenat successfully illustrates the complexity of the crisis, the different groups of refugees, and how each group interacted with other refugees, soldiers, government officials, and aid workers. Furthermore, he provides an in-depth analysis of refugee communities and illustrates how the refugee situation became a genuine humanitarian crisis. Driven from Home would work well in advanced undergraduate classes and graduate seminars, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the history of North Carolina, the U.S. Civil War, or refugees. Evan...

The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West by Matthew Christopher Hulbert

Reviewed by: The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West by Matthew Christopher Hulbert Brent M. S. Campney The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West. By Matthew Christopher Hulbert. UnCivil Wars. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. Pp. x, 327. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5002-8; cloth, $84.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-5001-1.) "My purpose," writes historian Matthew Christopher Hulbert in The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory: How Civil War Bushwhackers Became Gunslingers in the American West, "is to analyze the cultural politics behind how Americans have remembered, misremembered, and re-remembered narratives of guerrilla warfare in rhetoric, historical scholarship, literature, and film, at reunions, and on the stage" (p. 4). Focusing on the American Civil War on the Kansas-Missouri border, Hulbert argues that the long-standing historiographical emphasis on the eastern theater has obscured the irregular violence in the West. "The segregation of homefront violence—that is, of various types of guerrilla warfare—from traditional concepts of battlefield violence … has served a broader moral purpose that is unmasked through a study of guerrilla memory," he argues (p. 5). "On one hand, this distinction has effectively 'othered' irregular violence as uniquely uncivilized and awful; on the other, it has preserved the glories of the regular war by robbing it of its own true awfulness in memory" (p. 5). The author positions his work as a western extension and critique of David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, Mass., 2001) and Caroline E. Janney's Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill, 2014). Whereas Blight and Janney explored sectional reunion and reconciliation in the eastern states, Hulbert looks at how combatants and contemporary observers, as well as later scholars and artists, struggled to tell their own stories of the war against the constraints of a master narrative developed by those who believed their interpretation of "the regular war" defined the Civil War (p. 12). He also examines how some of the most notorious pro-Confederate guerrillas—Jesse James in [End Page 995] particular—came to be remembered as western gunfighters and bank robbers rather than as Civil War fighters. Hulbert argues that the fictitious contemporary dime novels published after the war "systematically transformed Jesse James; they downplayed the formative Civil War elements of his biography; they placed him, with increasing frequency, in murderous showdowns along the frontiers of Mexico and Texas; and they simultaneously made him over as a sixgun-slinging desperado of the southwestern frontier and as the proprietor of a vast Texas ranching operation" (p. 199). The book is capacious in its breadth and depth, examining, among other subjects, the brutality of the guerrilla war in Missouri and—to a significantly lesser extent—in Kansas. The author also explores the active but often ignored roles of women, the efforts of pro-Confederates and Unionists to control "guerrilla memory" in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the commemorative reunions of those who fought on one side or the other, and the interpretations offered by more recent films on the border war, such as The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Ride with the Devil (1999), and True Grit (1969) (p. 4). Hulbert is a strong and engaging writer capable of capturing and maintaining the attention of his readers. Nevertheless, he has a tendency in places toward overstatement. For example, while any reader would agree that the slaughter of some two hundred civilians and Union soldiers in Lawrence, Kansas, and the burning of the town were atrocities, many readers would surely object to Hulbert comparing the incident to genocide. By the early twentieth century, he writes, "Many of the 'old time' residents of Lawrence, Kansas, wore their survival of the 1863 massacre like a badge of honor—not unlike survivors of the Third Reich's 'final solution' several decades later" (p. 109). Still, The Ghosts of Guerrilla Memory is an important book that should be of interest to scholars of the Civil War, the American West, and memory and popular culture studies. Brent M. S. Campney University of Texas Rio...

The Logic of Bushwhacking: Civil War Guerrillas on the Missouri Frontier

The Logic of Bushwhacking:Civil War Guerrillas on the Missouri Frontier Aaron Astor (bio) Joseph M. Beilein Jr. Bushwhackers: Guerrilla Warfare, Manhood, and the Household in Civil War Missouri. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2016. 364 pp. Appendices, bibliography, notes, and index. $34.95. Matthew M. Stith. Extreme Civil War: Guerrilla Warfare, Environment, and Race on the Trans-Mississippi Frontier. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016. 232 pp. Illustrations, map, bibliography, notes, and index. $43.50. One of the most profitable sub-fields to emerge in the study of the U.S. Civil War is the role of guerrilla warfare. Prior to the late 1980s, most scholars paid little attention to the irregular conflict that emerged behind Union (and occasionally Confederate) lines. The exceptions were those accounts of prominent personalities like William Clarke Quantrill, John S. Mosby, and Champ Ferguson; or quasi-guerrillas like John Hunt Morgan and Nathan Bedford Forrest. With the publication of Michael Fellman's Inside War: The Guerrilla Conflict in Missouri during the American Civil War (1989), the modern study of guerrilla conflict took shape. Fellman portrayed the guerrilla war in Missouri as a nihilistic struggle of all against all, with never-ending cycles of revenge and grotesque personal violence leaving the entire Missouri countryside a charred ruin. Even more poignant was Fellman's assessment of the psychological impact of the war upon much of the civilian population, which descended into madness as longtime friends and kin became opportunistic killers. Ordinary men and women of every household began to doubt their own identities in this world turned upside down. The previously ignored Provost Marshal General papers offered Fellman and later scholars a window into this "inside war," contested by civilians, militiamen, guerrillas, and official soldiers alike. Since Fellman's Inside War, historians of the guerrilla-war experience have considered a range of new questions: How militarily decisive was guerrilla war? What were the motives and methods of the guerrillas? How were guerrilla bands organized, led, and supplied? What is the relationship between guerrillas, conventional armies, and criminal gangs? How did armies combat [End Page 431] guerrillas and how effective were counterinsurgent operations? In what ways did the guerrilla phenomenon differ in each region? How did civilians experience and survive persistent guerrilla war? And how has the popular memory of the Civil War reflected the guerrilla conflict within? Scholars approaching these questions have gone down three historiographical paths. First are those that examine the operational and strategic relationship between guerrilla war and the military effort as a whole. Robert Mackey's The Uncivil War: Irregular Warfare in the Upper South (2004) and Daniel Sutherland's A Savage Conflict: The Decisive Role of Guerrillas in the American Civil War (2009) catalogued the typologies of guerrillas in operation, and assessed their military significance. Blurring the lines between civilian and military spheres of operation, guerrillas proved a persistent thorn in the side of federal military strategy. They made necessary more support troops to guard supply lines and to police the occupied territory. They also invited a harder and occasionally brutal response to the civilian population, enough to grind down morale and food supplies for the conventional Confederate armies. This literature built on earlier studies of Civil War brutality, including Mark Grimsley's Hard Hand of War (1995) and Charles Royster's The Destructive War (1993), both of which looked at conventional military operations against civilians. A second field examines the exteriority of guerrilla warfare in particular locales. These studies take a holistic approach to certain regions and account for the experiences of all participants and victims. They detail guerrilla depredations, physical devastation, counterinsurgent practices, and civilian responses in particular geographic locations, with the aim of drawing a general portrait of life in guerrilla-torn regions. Brian McKnight's Contested Borderland: The Civil War in Appalachian Kentucky and Virginia (2006), Noel Fisher's War at Every Door: Partisan Politics and Guerrilla Violence in East Tennessee (1997), and Jeremy Neely's The Border Between Them: Violence and Reconciliation on the Kansas-Missouri Line (2007) exemplify this regional approach, taking in matters of topography, military organization, civilian atrocities, and regional peculiarities. A third field probes the interiority of guerrilla culture—the...

In Honor of Sandra Messinger Cypess: Creator of Critical Dialogues

In Honor of Sandra Messinger Cypess: Creator of Critical Dialogues Priscilla Meléndez and Amalia Gladhart Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Machado de Assis, Jorge Luis Borges, Rodolfo Usigli, Javier Villaurrutia, Celestino Gorostiza, Salvador Novo, Octavio Paz, Elena Garro, Rosario Castellanos, Emilio Carballido, Griselda Gambaro, Carlos Fuentes, Myrna Casas, Cristina Pacheco, Sabina Berman, Nora Glickman: These are only some of the names of distinguished Spanish-American writers that surface when we examine the academic trajectory of Sandra Messinger Cypess—Sandy, to her friends and colleagues—professor emerita and former chair of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Maryland. It is a trajectory that culminates most recently in the publication of Uncivil Wars: Elena Garro, Octavio Paz, and the Battle for Cultural Memory (2012), as well as the co-edited (with Valerie Orlando) Reimagining the Caribbean: Conversations amongst the Creole, English, French, and Spanish Caribbean (2014), a distinguished record to which Sandy has continued to add since her retirement from the University of Maryland. Sandy’s journey as a critic is broad in scope and in depth. The impressive repertory of writers just mentioned hail from all parts of the continent—Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Southern Cone; from diverse periods—colonial times, the 19th century, the avant-garde, and contemporary writers; and from all genres. Sandy has moved with ease from the study of Spanish-American poetry to theatre and narrative, contributing as well to Sephardic and Jewish studies and, in particular, producing a body of influential work on feminist and female writers. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College and Master of Arts from Cornell University, Sandy earned her Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Illinois, writing her dissertation, “The Dead Narrator in Modern Latin American Prose Fiction: A Study in Point of View,” under the direction of Don Luis Leal. During her distinguished teaching career, first at SUNY Binghamton and then at the University of Maryland (with visiting [End Page 9] and invited appointments along the way), she mentored hundreds of students, both graduate and undergraduate. As a scholar, she has mentored hundreds more through her many publications and through her generosity as reader, reviewer, editor, panel participant, and moderator. Sandy’s pioneering role in the study of women writers and feminism—an area of study that touches on the personal and the political—opened the way for many of us as we have traveled in her footsteps. Inspired by her work, we have felt, in our own research and writing, that we were conversing with Sandy, learning from her, even arguing with her about some aspects of the texts. She has the admirable gift of writing scholarly prose that is at once rigorous and accessible, welcoming and at the same time challenging the reader so as to develop that ongoing conversation that is the essence of scholarship. Sandy has played a leading role in the development of Latin American theatre studies in the US, expanding the canon even as it was established. A member of the editorial board of LATR since 1978, she produced some of the earliest studies of Griselda Gambaro, among many other playwrights. Her book La Malinche in Mexican Literature (1991) is indispensable for scholars as well as students. A clear example of the depth and breadth of her work, this landmark book traces the historical and mythical figure of La Malinche throughout Mexican literature, from Bernal Díaz’s account of Malintzin’s role in the conquest of the Aztec empire to Chicana writers’ reformulation of the Malinche myth. Reflecting the central place that theatre occupies in Sandy’s body of work, two of the book’s nine chapters focus on dramatic representations of La Malinche. The first, “La Malinche on Stage,” treats selected plays that deal with the Malinche figure, focusing on Rodolfo Usigli’s Corona de fuego (1960), Salvador Novo’s Cuauhtémoc (1962), Celestino Gorostiza’s La Malinche o La leña está verde (1958), and Carlos Fuentes’ Todos los gatos son pardos (1970). Reinterpretations of the figure are addressed in the next chapter, “Re/visions of the Cultural Metaphor,” through the analysis of El eterno femenino by Rosario Castellanos (1975...

Lens of War: Exploring Iconic Photographs of the Civil War

Lens of War is the most recent publication in the University of Georgia Press's innovative UnCivil Wars series that includes other books devoted to the Civil War's environmental disaster; its widespread material destruction; its cowardice, knavery, and scavenging; its unseemly freaks; and even its amputated limbs. In this volume, J. Matthew Gallman and Gary W. Gallagher asked twenty-seven historians to choose a single Civil War photograph and reflect on it in a short essay. The result is a curious accumulation—a collection of essay sketches, each a glimpse or vignette of an aspect of the war through famous (and sometimes not-so-famous) pictures. The book contains no overriding narrative, sustained argument, or even an exploration of established themes—the editors suggest the essays can be read in any order—but instead provides a series of idiosyncratic and often-personal views. The pronoun “I” appears repeatedly. Lens of War is divided into five categories: leaders, soldiers, civilians, victims, and places. Although the main historical materials are photographs, which, as unique forms of representation, might invite a different kind of categorization, the vignettes are placed within a more familiar historiographic framework for the war. Those collected in the leaders section are, perhaps unsurprisingly, among the most conventional, in several instances bordering on the hagiographic. We view Alexander Gardner's famous 1865 close-up portrait of Lincoln, Mathew Brady's portrait of Ulysses S. Grant in 1864 after the Battle of Cold Harbor, Robert E. Lee on his horse Traveller, and Jeb Stuart in Confederate finery; in the accompanying essays we witness the rapture that these figures continue to cultivate in contemporary viewers. Several of the authors recall nostalgically how, as youngsters, they first came upon the pictures and how such moments of early delight and curiosity, even puzzlement and discomfort, led them to careers as historians. Reading such entries, one is constantly reminded of Roland Barthes's claim that photographs can carry a punctum, the tiny, almost-incidental details within pictures that rivet the gaze and become deeply mesmerizing and achingly personal—or, as he notoriously put it, the images harbor the “accident which pricks me, but also bruises me” (Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida, 1980, p. 27).

The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War ed. by Brian Allen Drake

The Blue, the Gray, and the Green: Toward an Environmental History of the Civil War. Edited by Brian Allen Drake. UnCivil Wars. (Athens, Ga., and London: University of Georgia Press, 2015. Pp. [x], 250. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4715-8; cloth, $69.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-4714-1.) Consider, for example, the settlement of the Mississippi valley, Aldo Leopold wrote in 1949; [P]onder the fact that the cane-lands, when subjected to ... the pioneer, became bluegrass. What if the plant succession inherent in this dark and bloody ground had ... given us some worthless sedge, shrub, or weed? ... Would there have been any overflow into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri? ... Any transcontinental union of new states? Any Civil War? ... Is history taught in this spirit? (A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There [New York, 1949], pp. 205-7). In this vibrant collection of essays, twelve scholars bring Leopold's spirit of national environmental history to bear on the darkest of bloody grounds. For Civil War enthusiasts, scholars, and students in any field, these essays demonstrate historians discover when they bring their keen eyes, experience, and curiosity to places, themes, and topics outside their usual stomping grounds. The varied questions and methods of these scholars offer southern historians well-crafted vignettes about various wartime landscapes and communities, including mountains, battlefields, cotton fields, Piedmont tobacco barns, muddy roads, dense second-growth forests, cemeteries, and even deserts. Editor Brian Allen Drake provides an excellent introduction, his metaphors neatly capturing the collection's goals and limits: no sweeping and conclusive answer but instead methodological smorgasbord laid out to provide inspiration and models regarding what sort of distinctive contributions environmental history might make to Civil War history (p. 7, emphasis in original). The first essays address elemental topics: weather, human bodies, food, and disease. Kenneth W. Noe narrates how rain, drought, and fog shaped the war, listing key engagements on a spectrum delineating the effects of bad weather from No Effect to Maximum Effect (pp. 27, 29). Megan Kate Nelson contributes a beautifully argued reassessment of the Union retreat from Fort Fillmore, New Mexico, in July 1861, in which scorching heat and dehydration led to approximately one hundred deaths and a humiliating surrender. Nelson writes, we see the power of the landscape to shape human action.... Such conditions demanded adaptive responses from soldiers (p. 47). Timothy Silver's close reading of wartime Yancey County, North Carolina, follows Alfred Crosby's conception of portmanteau biota-- the animals, crops, and microorganisms humans carry along when they move--to reveal the ways bodies in motion between battlefield, army camp, and home carried labor and diseases to and fro, linking southern ecologies at multiple levels, from intestinal parasites to crop failures and mosquitoes to hog cholera (p. 52). Disease, Silver concludes, not just an ancillary story. It is the story (p. 62, emphasis in original). Continuing this focus, Kathryn Shively Meier frames the act of straggling in 1862 Virginia--short-term desertion in the face of exhaustion, hunger, mud, weather, and disease--as soldiers' pursuit of mental and physical relief and, most important, as bodily self-care in the face of enormous daily environmental challenges. …

Hun Sen's Cambodia. By Sebastian Strangio

In the 1960s, Cambodian head of state Prince Norodom Sihanouk unsuccessfully sought to distance his kingdom from the bloodletting of neighbouring states. Hard-pressed to enforce strict neutrality and inclined to believe that the United States would eventually quit the region anyhow, he edged strategically leftward, casting an ever more complicit eye on the growing number of Vietnamese combatants who sheltered and resupplied on Cambodian soil. American military planners responded in kind, targeting communist bases for cross-border raids and, in due course, backing a putsch that ousted Sihanouk, all but ending the authority of the Cambodian state. A very uncivil war followed. With stunning speed, troops of the newly proclaimed Khmer Republic lost the countryside to an expanding communist force, despite (or quite possibly because of) a relentless American air assault on rebel positions that constituted one of the heaviest aerial bombardments in the history of warfare. A victorious Khmer Rouge then declared the establishment of Democratic Kampuchea and began emptying its cities and forests of myriad enemies, hundreds of thousands of whom were put to death over the next three and a half years. The purge was still under way when Vietnamese troops intervened, occupying (or arguably liberating) the country and establishing a puppet administration led by a group of Khmer Rouge defectors. The struggle did not end there: deposed Khmer factions of all stripes regrouped on the border and, with liberal doses of economic and military aid from China and the United States, fought each other and the Vietnamese for the better part of the next decade. Indeed, by the time peace talks bore fruit in the late 1980s, Cambodians had been killing each other for some 20 years and roughly a quarter of the population, some 2 million people, had died for no particular end.