War Border Research Articles

Three Cities after Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction across Cold War Borders

Three Cities after Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction across Cold War Borders

Three Cities after Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction across Cold War Borders by Andrew Demshuk (review)

Three Cities after Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction across Cold War Borders by Andrew Demshuk (review)

Sport across Cold War borders in the 1970s and 1980s

Sport across Cold War borders in the 1970s and 1980s

Three Cities After Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders by Andrew Demshuk

Three Cities After Hitler: Redemptive Reconstruction Across Cold War Borders by Andrew Demshuk

The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border by Christopher Phillips

Reviewed by: The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border by Christopher Phillips Michael S. Green The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border. Christopher Phillips. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. ISBN: 978-0-1951-8723-6. 528 pp., cloth, $34.95. Mention border areas in nineteenth-century America, and western scholars might cite the borderlands field that focuses mainly on old Spanish colonies that now comprise much of the Sun Belt. Others will point to the border states in the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln's statement on emancipation that he wanted God on his side but needed Kentucky. Identifying western border states seemed easy: Kentucky and Missouri, slave states that remained in the Union. But Christopher Phillips's remarkable new book should make all who study the nineteenth century think differently and deeply about the Civil War's border regions and perhaps borderlands history. The Rivers Ran Backward focuses on those traditional border states, and the lower northern border—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Kansas—then considers the west. According to longstanding arguments, "Once settled, the new states west of the Appalachians formed a fixed boundary between freedom and slavery, extending the border that inevitably produced the war. None of these beliefs is, or was, accurate" (5). Phillips explains, "This book is about how a traditional western political culture that traditionally accommodated slavery was transformed by the era of the Civil War—its coming, its lived experience, and its memory—into the cultural politics of region. It explains how slavery could organize the life of an entire region even as it became the foundation of the conflict while being at once its least attributed and most unreconciled cause among those white residents who endured it" (9). To explain how the Civil War did and did not shape the region, Phillips travels a necessarily long and winding road from the early nineteenth century into the early twentieth. He examines how upper southern border states never relied so heavily on slavery as deeper and coastal southern states did, how slavery affected [End Page 92] the culture of the North's lower western border, how regionalism developed and its effects, and how historical memory shaped the Civil War's outcomes on the western border. A rich series of character portraits, statistics, descriptions, and analysis shows how slavery existed north of what traditionally has been considered the institution's northernmost boundary and how it and responses to it shaped race relations and politics. It seems as though every page has facts or analysis that historians of the era and its numerous subfields, as well as scholars of place and the places Phillips discusses, will find useful and thought-provoking. Even a book this brilliantly researched and ambitious cannot do it all. Phillips states—maybe warns—that it "is largely organized chronologically and topically, moving back and forth as events occurred across the interior rivers, central to the region's history, between the middle border's slave and free states," which makes it difficult at times to follow a complicated story (10). For example, James Rollins appears as a proslavery Whig urging his West Point–cadet son to say "that you belong to neither section—that you are a true son of the great West" but never reappears as a border state unionist who votes and speaks for the Thirteenth Amendment—a niggling point, but the kind of information that might have done more to unify the story (94). The anecdote brings up Lincoln's role: Phillips calls him the "central figure" in the traditional narrative and "a lifelong resident of the border states of this region"; increasing his presence might have better underscored the evolution of the people, issues, and place (5). One way he puts Lincoln at the center is in the 1858 Senate debates: he sees the debates in the context of Illinois as part of the western border region is welcome, but calling Lincoln "still a Whig in a Democratic world" that year misstates his political evolution, the region's, and the result (Lincoln won more votes and legislators than Stephen Douglas) (102). More substantively...

Exopolis reloaded: fragmented landscapes and no man’s lands in a North-Eastern Italian border region

This paper examines a ‘landscape of power’ in the marginal northeastern corner of Italy, near the Italian-Slovenian border. The landscape is centred around the small town of Gradisca and its highly contested centres for asylum seekers and marked by the concomitant presence of a giant shopping mall, the largest Italian war memorial, and an aestheticised wine district. The result of participant observation, visual and textual analysis, and selected interviews, this study reflects on the transformation of a former cold war border area into a mix of carceral, hospitality, commercial, residential, rural spatialities that seem to be entirely disconnected with each other and linked instead to broader regional, national and international geographies. This fragmented landscape, dominated by massive ‘fortified’ enclosures and with gradually deterritorialised in-between spaces, described here as no man’s land, may be provocatively analysed as an Italian exopolis.

Seeing the Forest and the Trees: Western Forestry Systems and Soviet Engineers, 1955–1964

This article examines the transfer of technology from Finnish enterprises to Soviet industry during the USSR's period of technological modernization between 1955 and 1964. It centers on the forestry sector, which was a particular focus of modernization programs and a key area for the transfer of foreign techniques and expertise. The aim of the article is to investigate the role of trips made by Soviet specialists to foreign (primarily Finnish) enterprises in order to illustrate the nontechnological influences that occurred during the transfer of technologies across the cold war border. To do so, the article is divided into two parts: the first presents a general analysis of technology transfer from a micro-level perspective, while the second investigates the cultural influences behind technological transfer in the Soviet-Finnish case. This study contends that although the Soviet government expected its specialists to import advanced foreign technical experience, they brought not only the technologies and expertise needed for modernizing the industry, but also a changed view on Soviet workplace management and everyday practices.

Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North by Steve Longenecker (review)

Reviewed by: Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North by Steve Longenecker Daniel Walker Howe Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North. By Steve Longenecker. (New York: Fordham University Press. 2014. Pp. xiv, 246. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-8232-5519-1.) Steve Longenecker clearly loves the subject he writes about here, and the reader benefits accordingly. He treats the religious life of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, during the years immediately before, during, and after the great battle that made the small town famous. Gettysburg religious life—or rather lives, for diversity is emphasized—displayed remarkable variety, and Longenecker treats every denomination he covers with interest and respect. Each of the varieties of Gettysburg Christianity was represented by a single congregation. (There was no synagogue.) The records of these parish churches form a substantial part of the sources for this study. The author also delves into the histories of individual families and persons, enabling him to alternate between chapters describing general developments and brief divertimenti focused on particular individuals, usually obscure, often with poignant stories. He points out that Gettysburg had many immigrants and children of immigrants, so that ethnic differences often compounded religious ones. The most conspicuous development identified by Longenecker among the mainstream evangelical Protestant churches—Presbyterian, Methodist, and Lutheran—is their gradual religious “refinement,” a response to the growing prosperity of the middle class in Victorian times. This refinement took such forms as more expensive physical plants and clerical training, pipe organs, choirs, and Sunday schools. But much of the author’s interest lies in the denominations that were not exactly mainstream. Among Gettysburg’s various denominations were the Roman Catholics, most of them German by birth or ancestry. Longenecker describes them as “on the edges of the mainstream” (p. 87). He goes on to describe the distinctive qualities of Catholic religion that put them on that edge, including emphasis on sacraments, [End Page 955] devotions, use of Latin, and especially authoritarianism rather than republicanism. He goes on to discuss antebellum anti-Catholicism and the Know-Nothing political party, which drew support from both the major parties, Whigs and Democrats, of that era. He illustrates both Catholic and anti-Catholic opinion from sermons and the printed media. But in the end, he concludes that the most remarkable thing about Gettysburg Catholicism was the degree of toleration it received from the Protestant majority. The absence of antislavery in American Catholicism he attributes to Catholic reluctance to jeopardize this measure of tolerance by supporting an unpopular cause. Other denominations outside the Gettysburg mainstream included the Dunkers and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion church—both ethnic denominations, for the Dunkers were overwhelmingly German. Dunkers got the name from their practice of immersion baptism, in which the convert was dunked three times for Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Faithful to the simplicity of early Christianity, they remained resolutely aloof from the growing refinement of mainline evangelical churches. They practiced feet-washing to affirm the equality of all members—although Longenecker notes that some white Dunkers shrank from kissing black converts after washing their feet. The AME Zion parish, small and impoverished, nevertheless provided local blacks with a supportive religious community. But it took a big hit when the great battle came to Gettysburg. Many of its members fled the area, fearful of the invading Confederate soldiers, who would capture and enslave black people they found, even those legally free. The refugees did not necessarily return to Gettysburg afterward; yet the church somehow reconstituted itself and survived into postwar times. Longenecker has produced a beautifully written book, beginning with its charming introduction. He finds Gettysburg interesting not only for its own sake but also as reflecting its region, “the Lower North.” More broadly, he also finds Gettysburg an example of the United States as a whole and of the process of modernization, which Gettysburg illustrates on an intimate scale. But while using local history to illustrate broad themes, such as the process of middle-class refinement, the author retains his interest in the idiosyncratic and individual. Longenecker has written a democratic history from the ground up and deserves our congratulations...

Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in Antebellum and Civil War Border North by Steve Longenecker (review)

Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in Antebellum and Civil War Border North by Steve Longenecker (review)

Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North

Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North

Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North by Steve Longenecker (review)

Reviewed by: Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North by Steve Longenecker Rita Roberts (bio) Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North. By Steve Longenecker. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. Pp. 239. Cloth, $45.00.) In Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North, Steve Longenecker argues that [End Page 320] Gettysburg is important for more than the battle that occurred there two years into the war. Religious sites, such as Cemetery Hill, the Lutheran seminary, and the “technically secular” site, the Peach Orchard, provide “powerful memories, not just for three bloody days in July 1863, but for their embodiment of the small-town North and their ability to touch themes vital to nineteenth-century religion” (2). Two of these themes, refinement and race, Longenecker shows, reflect national trends, while the third theme, diversity, foretells or anticipates American life into the next centuries. Religious, ethnic, and racial diversity was unusual for an antebellum rural region but “signaled a coming pattern for all of the United States” (4). Without doubt those three days in July impacted Gettysburg residents, Longenecker asserts, yet trends in religious life serve as a better barometer for understanding the town and the border North in the antebellum and Civil War era. Introducing each theme with a “divertimento” of individuals or families to illustrate his points, Longenecker demonstrates that religious life in Gettysburg was vibrant but routine. The communities were more interested in local issues than in the grand reforms of the day, and while some community members paid attention to issues like temperance and abolition, they did not allow these issues to dominate. Instead, religious refinement took center stage before and during the Civil War. Borrowing heavily from Richard Bushman’s The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, and Cities (1992), Longenecker shows that churches were preoccupied most with exhibiting their emerging middle-class status with new standards of behavior and improved church facilities. Genteel religion required an educated clergy and refined congregants who dressed fashionably but without ostentation and drank moderately but not to excess. Interdenominational committees were more engaged in social reform activities like Sabbath-keeping and temperance, while Gettysburg congregations “usually got refined rather than reformed” (38). Gettysburg Methodists illustrate well the national trend in refinement as the denomination moved quickly toward conformity with mainstream religion. Revivals, camp meetings, and classes, the hallmarks of Methodism in its early years, declined and were replaced with a more polished, dignified liturgy that viewed the emotionalism of the past with suspicion. Dignified Sunday schools eventually replaced classes, and stress on sudden singular conversions slowly ebbed as children were nurtured “along a path of gradual new birth” (46). Likewise, discipline waned in Methodism. Reflecting the trend in middle-class standards nationally, congregants were less concerned with behaviors that in earlier years would have meant suspension or even expulsion. [End Page 321] Just as the middle class throughout the nation pursued material goods in their quest for symbols of respectability in their homes, churches, and cemeteries, Gettysburg congregants did the same in creating garden cemeteries with winding lanes in rural pastoral solitude. The more inclusive new cemeteries mirrored an evangelicalism of a forgiving God available to all, stressing acceptance of all classes, denominations, and sects. Catholics and African Americans, however, were conspicuous by their absence. Structural improvements of churches complemented cemeteries, and music was now more refined. While costly, refinement was deemed requisite by a middle class bent on signaling sophistication. The “Dunkers,” or the Church of the Brethren, were the exception that proved the rule as they remained uninterested in higher education and committed to nonconformity, still stressing simplicity in dress, architecture, and discipline. Longenecker asserts that diversity in Gettysburg religion anticipated national trends, marking “the town and region as uncommonly modern” (2). In extensive detail, the author explores doctrinal and denominational diversity. In this period, denominational variety and doctrinal diversity within Protestantism held sway as Lutherans, Associate Reformed, German Reformed, Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics, Dunkers, and the African Methodist Episcopal Zion churches all existed within this small northern border area. Heterogeneous Protestants added doctrinal diversity in their debates...

Abdus Salam center cultivated science, transcended politics

The story by Jermey Matthews (Physics Today, October 2014, page 20) about the role of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in the developing world was interesting and informative. It also evoked memories from 20 years ago, when I was a student in the ICTP postgraduate diploma program. I was the first Albanian student accepted into its condensed-matter-physics track, in the 1993–94 school year.I and probably many other former students will attest that these ICTP programs were an excellent opportunity for students to prepare for graduate school and receive a quick and intensive immersion in frontier topics of research. The ICTP also provided a life-changing experience for many students who were not able to pursue their physics dreams at home. Following the diploma program, I moved on to obtain a PhD in theoretical condensed-matter physics and eventually took a position in academia in the US.I also want to highlight the important role of the ICTP in bridging the East–West political divisions of the time. Even its location—in Trieste, Italy, close to the Cold War border in Europe—transmitted a sense that the place rose above challenges and brought people together. The institute clearly demonstrated that science transcends politics, and it inspired many physics students and faculty throughout Eastern Europe. That closing of political divisions is an amazing side of the story of the ICTP.© 2015 American Institute of Physics.

Steve Longenecker. Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North.

This volume posits that the religious life of the small town of Gettysburg in southern Pennsylvania exemplified national trends in microcosm. In particular, Steve Longenecker believes that the antebellum impulse toward refinement; denominational, ethnic, and racial diversity; and the experience of war illustrate larger truths about American religion in the nineteenth century. Although he promises that “[r]eligion among the memories of the Civil War in this famous but small place teaches big lessons about American life” (p. 6), much of the interpretation that follows is either well-known or strained. There was a general trend toward respectability among many of Gettysburg's religious congregations in the antebellum period, and the town had some religious and racial diversity. Longenecker charts a change both in the furnishings of their meeting places and in the conduct of their worship services. While church architecture and furnishings became more ornate and genteel to reflect Victorian middle-class values, church services moved away from the emotionalism associated with camp meeting revivals. Gas lighting, cushioned pews, and the rural cemetery movement were all signs that a search for refinement was “pervasive in the spiritual life of this small town” (p. 69). There were individual variations, of course, on this trajectory, but the general movement seems well-established. It does not follow, however, as Longenecker concludes, that “when people went to church, they usually got refined rather than reformed” (p. 38). Gettysburg's Dunker congregation self-consciously rejected sophistication, preferring a simpler life and simpler worship. The town's small African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ) congregation could not afford the trappings of gentility, even if they wanted them.

Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North

Journal Article Gettysburg Religion: Refinement, Diversity, and Race in the Antebellum and Civil War Border North Get access Steve Longenecker. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014. xiv, 246 pp. $45.00.) Journal of American History, Volume 101, Issue 4, March 2015, Pages 1276–1277, https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jav139 Published: 01 March 2015

Edith Sheffer. Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain.

The Berlin Wall still grips public attention as the iconic Cold War border. By shifting our focus to a less sensational border in a rural region dividing East and West Germany, Edith Sheffer's brilliant book reveals how geopolitical conflicts and state-imposed policing may have redrawn the map, but that “local actions actually constituted the border” (p. 37) and the Iron Curtain was actually an improvised “living system” (p. 167). The “Burned Bridge” was a medieval road, made of logs burned to prevent rot, connecting the toy manufacturing towns of Sonneberg and Neustadt bei Coburg. For Sheffer it becomes the perfect metaphor for the Iron Curtain, as the new Cold War physical and mental border severed these towns' interconnection, fatefully putting Sonneberg into the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and Neustadt into the Federal Republic (FRG). Starting in the 1940s and ending just after 1989, Sheffer's narrative demonstrates how average citizens' local responses normalized these new political fissures to make possible the Berlin Wall's erection and the inter-German border's closure in 1961.

Introduction: Border communities: microstudies on everyday life, politics and memory in European Societies from 1945 to the present

The 1989/1991 demise of European communist regimes created a powerful impulse for the investigation of memory cultures at Cold War borders and, subsequently, for reflections on the creation of new European border regimes. The four studies included in this special section investigate these two processes on a micro level of their dynamics in new and old borderlands from the perspectives of history, anthropology and political science. At the same time, they explore the relations between the everyday life experience of borderland communities and larger historical and political processes, sometimes going back to the re-drawing of European borders in the aftermath of the First World War.It is the hybrid nature of borders as at the same time separating and connecting (Anzaldúa 1987; Gupta and Fergusson 1997), as the place where “a transition between two worlds is most pronounced” (Van Gennep 1960 paraphrased in Berdahl 1999, 12) that makes them such an attractive and interdisciplinary site of research. It is of interest to geographers, historians, anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists (e.g. Donnan and Wilson 1994; Anderson 1997; Ganster et al. 1997; Breysach, Paszek, and Tölle 2003; Wastl-Walter 2010). Daphne Berdahl sees boundaries as “symbols through which states, nations, and localities define themselves. They define at once territorial limits and sociocultural space” (Berdahl 1999, 3). Border research distinguishes between “border,” “bordering,” and “borderland” or “frontier” (the term first defined by Turner 1921). While borders connote a dividing line, borderlands connote an area, and bordering refers to the process of border- and borderland-creation. Borders are established through a three-stage process of allocation, delimitation and demarcation: a territory is first placed (allocated) under the jurisdiction of a government, then an imaginary line is drawn (delimited) on a map, and finally the boundary is marked with physical markers (demarcated) in the terrain (Sahlins 1989, 2). Borderlands or frontier zones are “privileged sites for the articulation of national distinctions” (Sahlins 1989, 271), and as such are places where difference is produced and institutionalized through territorial sovereignty, but also constantly renegotiated by multiple actors.

Border Life on the Mississippi: Civil War Border Politics and Mark Twain's Humor

Border Life on the Mississippi: Civil War Border Politics and Mark Twain's Humor

Border Life on the Mississippi: Civil War Border Politics and Mark Twain's Humor

Research Article| January 01 2012 Border Life on the Mississippi: Civil War Border Politics and Mark Twain's Humor Joseph F. Goeke Joseph F. Goeke Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Studies in American Humor (2012) 25: 9–32. https://doi.org/10.2307/42573641 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Joseph F. Goeke; Border Life on the Mississippi: Civil War Border Politics and Mark Twain's Humor. Studies in American Humor 1 January 2012; 25 9–32. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/42573641 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressStudies in American Humor Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2012 Studies in American Humor2012Studies in American Humor Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Between Camps: Eastern Bloc "Escapees" and Cold War Borderlands

During the early cold war, the Truman administration fabricated a new legal status that helped consolidate the cold war border between east and westÑ"slave world" and "free"-by the act of transgressing it. This unique "person" was the escapee. Over the cold war's forty-five year duration, eastern bloc exiles achieved considerable prominence in the United States, whether as dancers, chess players, writers, or physicists. Yet the legal and intellectual ingenuity required to produce the escapee, and the complications this endeavor encountered, have evaded scholarly scrutiny. In the main, scholars have conflated this category with the refugee, commonly asserting that Washington not only molded international conventions to its own ends but reconfigured domestic immigration policy in the interests of opening U.S. borders to symbolically-freighted entrants from the eastern bloc. But on closer inspection, assumptions about the ease with which Washington manipulated cold war escapology appear unwarranted. Focusing on the United States Escapee Program (launched in 1952), this essay highlights the international and internecine conflicts that surrounded the orchestration of cross-border flight, the fabrication of a unique legal subject, "the escapee," and the production of meaning from this phenomenon. The exhortation to flight, delineation of a specific escapee identity, and disposal of its incumbents were processes simultaneously enabled and constrained by law. To encourage foreign nationals' exodus was a profoundly unorthodox practice of statecraft, destabilizing sovereign norms in its assault on territorial boundaries. Whether Washington wished to encourage a mass exodus of Soviet bloc citizens, or engage in a more restricted policy of encouraging elite defections, wavered in the balance. The most contentious question, however, remained how to employ, and where to resettle, individuals whose symbolic significance exceeded their desirability as putative citizens. The early 1950s constituted a moment when anti-communism and nativism found common cause. Thus for all that the escapee appears a privileged recipient of cold war patronage, reading the cultural narratives spun from escape against the conflicted circumstances of escapees' lives suggests something different. The intimation of inclusion extended by a "nation of escapees" often proved chimerical. Encamped between camps, suspended in both space and time, those who breached the iron curtain existed in precarious limboÑcaught between the administration's desire to promote escape and powerful legislators' disinclination to accommodate those who did so within the United States. Summoned to both defy and define cold war borders, escapees were commonly relegated to the shadowy interstices of sovereign space: the borderland where east and west, foreign and domestic, symbolic and material awkwardly overlapped.

On the Border of War and Peace: Polish Intelligence and Diplomacy in 1937–1939 and the Origins of the Ultra Secret. By Richard A. Woytak. East European Monographs, no. 49. Boulder, Colo.: East European Quarterly. 1979. v, 135 pp. Maps. Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York.

On the Border of War and Peace: Polish Intelligence and Diplomacy in 1937–1939 and the Origins of the Ultra Secret. By Richard A. Woytak. East European Monographs, no. 49. Boulder, Colo.: East European Quarterly. 1979. v, 135 pp. Maps. Distributed by Columbia University Press, New York. - Volume 42 Issue 2