War Memorial Research Articles

Transforming Non-Memory into Memory: Photographic Representations of Korean Pipokja in Kim Hyoyeon’s Gamgak isang (Abnormal Sense)

Abstract: This essay examines Kim Hyoyeon’s photographic series Gamgak isang (Abnormal sense) (2018–2021), which explores the memories of Korean A-bomb victims ( pipokja ) living in Hapcheon, South Korea. Starting from the artist’s own memory of her grandmother, Kim’s work focuses on the lives of the victims and their descendants, who retain painful memories as a form of physical and psychological suffering. The essay examines the historical contexts in Japan and South Korea that rendered memories of Korean A-bomb victims invisible and mute. On the basis of such historical analysis, it discusses the ways in which Gamgak isang breaks down grand narratives into units of personal memories in order to make sense of what happened to the individual victims. Focusing on the ways in which the series sheds light on the realm of the familial, the essay also analyses how it suggests the potential for creating a new form of postmemorial kinship through visual means. Such discussions will lead to the proposition that vernacular memories can eventually offer a transnational lens to view the memory of the Asia-Pacific War and its aftermath, thus letting us think outside the traditional boundaries of nation-states.

In Defense of Prewar Japan: Promoting the Past in Studies of Crime during the Asia-Pacific War and Allied Occupation

Abstract: While scholarship on the memories of the Asia-Pacific War is extensive, less information is available on the way individuals defined, imagined, or idealized the prewar period. This article examines studies relating war to civilian crime on the main islands, illustrating the role of the prewar period in assessments of wartime and postwar society. Contributing to positive views of prewar Japan detached from the "undesirable past" of the war, the authors of these studies anticipated some of the concerns, interpretations, and aspirations of postwar political and academic notables as well as postbubble social critics calling for the revival of so-called traditional values.

The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 by Kathleen Diffley

Reviewed by: The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876 by Kathleen Diffley Catherine V. Bateson (bio) The Fateful Lightning: Civil War Stories and the Magazine Marketplace, 1861–1876. By Kathleen Diffley. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021. Pp. 268. Paper, $36.95.) Second-book syndrome is a mountain to overcome and doubly hard when the second book in question comes in the middle of a proposed trilogy assessing American Civil War and Reconstruction magazine fiction. That is the task Kathleen Diffley sets with The Fateful Lightning, a follow-up to Where My Heart Is Turning Ever: Civil War Stories and Constitutional Reform, 1861–1876 (1992). Previously, Diffley focused on [End Page 263] how northeastern periodicals expanded expressions about citizenship and liberty. The Fateful Lightning covers the same comparable period, following on from its predecessor while standing alone (you can read this book without reading the first). By marrying national context with divergent country-wide perspectives, the fictional Civil War stories examined in The Fateful Lightning “helped engineer a master narrative that was nonetheless open to regional challenges” (3–4). While maintaining an urban focus, Diffley notes how distinctive cultures “magazine by magazine” emerged around the country; the “four periodicals and the cities in which they arose” covered in this book offer “varying gauges of continued political unrest, emerging social opportunity, and dickering regional agendas as Reconstruction first unfolded” (6). “A latticework of intersecting print culture concerns materializes,” Diffley argues, that highlights how postwar memory making and emancipation reflections were prominent in areas beyond Washington, D.C., and the South (19). The Fateful Lightning’s four central chapters tour the print culture of midcentury periodicals, from Baltimore’s Southern Magazine (1886–75) and Charlotte’s The Land We Love (1866–69) to Chicago’s Lakeside Monthly and San Francisco’s Overland Monthly. Each of the four main chapters is divided into three sections. The first is an opening contextual discussion that lays the groundwork for the periodical being examined, its editorial focus, city (and region) of publication, and central wartime and Reconstruction story themes. This section includes snippets of article outlines and comparisons to the other magazines. The second section is a full short story complete with contemporary two-column-style periodical presentation. The brief third section critically analyses the short story’s meaning. The railroad runs like a literal and imagined metaphor across the whole book. “In magazine after magazine, story after story . . . the fictional platforms from which local heroes depart . . . were almost always cast as hurried and heterogeneous, crammed . . . with a hodgepodge of strangers” (103), who would meet in carriages, waiting rooms, and depots and share their stories of the civil conflict with messages for the Reconstruction present. The four main terminus/starting points reveal examples of how the lines between public and private blurred in mid-nineteenth-century cultural outputs. National changes and encroaching modernity come to the fore: “the medium was the message, and, thanks to federally funded postal routes [and ever-growing railways], the message spread” beyond the parlor into the zeitgeist (65). Yet the message was not necessarily about progress. Diffley develops a theme in chapter 4 that regards photography and the advent of thinking [End Page 264] stereoscopically in terms of wartime images and memory. This interesting framing works well for the entire study. By taking an enhanced look into the wider realm of Civil War–and Reconstruction-era historical scholarship, Diffley delves into how the nation’s competing immediate wartime memories evolved before Reconstruction ended. Take The Land We Love covered in chapter 2; its very name is revealing. The “land” stresses the moonshine and magnolia image of the Old South; unsurprisingly, Diffley notes that “in the immediate aftermath of defeat, [the periodical] would also become the magazine forum of choice for chronicling Confederate military action and kindling a fleeting nation’s Lost Cause” (63). This study shows that “during the 1860s and 1870s, the fraught terrain of postmemory coalesced almost immediately” to sanitize a vanished southern (and national) image before the Lost Cause became embedded (80). Drawing on David Blight’s Civil War memory and Marianne Hirsch’s postmemory scholarship, Diffley makes this point well. Indeed, she...

Modeling Maternal Factors for Predicting Birth Outcomes in Ghana

This study was conducted to identify the various maternal and neonatal factors that influence birth outcomes. Maternal and neonatal factors are key determinants of birth outcomes and the health of a newborn baby is very crucial in the first six months of the baby’s life. Neonatal mortality and low birth weight are worrying problems for stakeholders in the health sector. Logistic regression and multilevel regression were used to study various factors that influence birth outcomes. Secondary data was therefore collected from the War Memorial Hospital, Navrongo for the purpose of the study. The results show that weight, birth weight, gestation weeks and hemoglobin were observed as significant risk factors for birth outcomes whilst age, weight, hemoglobin, mode of delivery and gestation weeks were identified as significant factors that influence birth weight. The study identified weight, hemoglobin, birth weight, gestation weeks and age as factors that influence birth outcomes in the Kassena-Nankana Municipality.

Fighting for Real: Truth and American War Memory

Abstract This essay-review considers two recent books on the subject of American veteran memoir—Stephen Cushman’s The General’s Civil War (2021) and Myra Mendible’s American War Stories (2021). Surveying military conflicts centered on the US Civil War and the more recent wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan, both authors examine a range of veteran nonfiction writing, and with the explicit purpose of speaking to US audiences in our own time. Given the United States’ severely divided political culture today, both authors see the lessons and hard truths expressed in veteran memoir as rife with possibilities for addressing American social divisions in the twenty-first century. Along the way, a preoccupation with the very themes of “truth” and “reality” exposed by war representation leads both authors, though for very different reasons, to meditate on the need for new epistemological frameworks that, given the limitations of a waning postmodernism, would restore a fresh commitment to both. While very different philosophies of history shape the perspectives of each author, the revivified commitment to truth-telling unites their accounts.[A] . . . central theme . . . in . . . US military history and the literary portrayal of war is the renewed commitment to historical veracity, expanded factuality, and representational depth—in short, a fuller, more capacious picture of both the truth and reality of war-making.

Stolen childhood. War memories of children and young people from 1945-1946

The article analyses a collection of school essays of world-wide uniqueness, written by Polish children and young people in the years 1945–1946. This collection consists of two independent collections. The first is the 99 wartime memories of pupils from Greater Poland schools, created between May and September 1945. The second contains over 1,200 war memories written by pupils from schools in the Kielce region (south-eastern part of Poland) in the second half of 1946. A common feature of wartime memories is that the young authors combine elements of private written forms with elements of text intended to function in the public space (public literary forms). They smoothly switch between confessional style, full of dramatic details related to the war, and the style typical of a school essay, the aim of which was to test language skills and proficiency in creating a story based on real events. The themes in both collections were imposed on pupils by a programme of writing campaign for writing war memories. Thanks to the conditions provided by the educational system of the time, pupils usually honestly and directly described the traumatic war experiences which they had participated in. In the article, wartime memories in the form of a school essay are treated as a record of a microhistory, containing many details related to local wartime events, such as round-ups, public executions, secret education, and Nazi violence against adults and children.

Putinism beyond Putin: the political ideas of Nikolai Patrushev and Sergei Naryshkin in 2006–20

ABSTRACT This essay adds to previous research of Putinism an investigation of the political thought and foreign outlooks of Russia’s Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev and Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin, with a focus on their statements between 2006 to 2020. The paper outlines Patrushev’s and Naryshkin’s thoughts regarding the United States, Ukraine, and the idea of multipolarity/polycentrism. We then introduce Patrushev’s critique of liberal values and color revolutions, and Naryshkin’s statements on the memory of World War II and Western institutions. The salience of these altogether seven topics is interpreted with reference to three classical topoi in Russian political thought: the Slavophile vs. Westerners controversy, the single-stream theory, and the civilizational paradigm. Our conclusions inform the ongoing debate on whether to conceptualize Putinism as either an ideology or a mentality.

Au nom de la mère. Reconfigurations du modèle spiegelmanien du témoignage dans deux récits graphiques sur la guerre civile espagnole

This paper examines two French graphic novels which reconstruct the Transpyrenean memory of the Spanish civil war: Le Convoi by D. Lapière and E. Torrents (2013), Dolorès by B. Loth (2016). Both works reshape the narrative model of war testimony created by A. Spiegelman in Maus, where the memory of a traumatic past is transmitted between generations within the family circle (postmemory), combining both personal life story and collective History. Focusing on the narratological device of the voice, three major changes are highlighted: the non-actorialization of the author-narrator (unmaking of the autobiographical identity), the feminization of the recipient of the testimony (not a son but a daughter who listens on behalf of a silent mother), and the extension of the family circle beyond a particular family through condensation or displacement. The paper discusses these points studying the stories as well as the paratexts and argues that the specific combination of the three major changes in each graphic novel produces different ways of disjunction between the subjective and the political dimensions of trauma, in other words, between the intimate and the collective sides of History.

Commemorative vigilance between totalitarianisms: Slovakia’s 'Victims Warn' sculpture, from counter-monument to anti-monument

Near the end of World War II, a diverse coalition of Slovak political parties and citizens orchestrated an insurrection against the Nazi occupiers and their Slovak client government. While it ultimately failed to liberate Slovakia, the narrative of the Slovak National Uprising of 1944 become central to the Slovak memory wars which have followed. Virtually all post-war political regimes have sought either to uphold the legacy of the uprising or to attack it as an anti-state action. Such memory wars extend to monumental commemorations of the uprising—most notable is Jozef Jankovič’s 1969 monument entitled 'Victims Warn'. The monument’s surreal, humanistic style and counter-monumental social message offended communist sensibilities and it was quickly removed. Since its restoration to the central courtyard of the Slovak National Uprising Museum in 2004, it now increasingly functions as an anti-monument to nationalist political narratives, including those related to NATO, Russia, Ukraine, and the legacy of the wartime Slovak state. This paper tracks the monument’s transition from counter-monument to anti-monument, and also looks at commemorative vigilance issues that currently threaten to alter the monument’s original meaning, its spatial context, and Jankovič’s original artistic vision.

Military memorial heritage as a social phenomenon and an international legal problem: on the way to a solution

This article discusses conceptual approaches to understanding the problem of international legal protection of Soviet monuments, military graves and places of memory of the Great Patriotic War (military memorial heritage (MMH) sites) in the form of the formation of a new sub-branch of international law — military memorial law, the necessity of introducing the concept of "military memorial heritage" into legal circulation is justified, a mechanism for the legal protection of MMH sites is proposed. The article outlines some issues of the formation of a special International Charter "On the protection of the military memorial heritage", and reveals a number of its legal aspectsworked out in social practice by the tools of public diplomacy during the International Relay of Memory and Gratitude "The Fatherland of a Feat — to the Fatherland of a Hero".The material for the study is made up of the works of Russian and foreign scientists and social practitioners in the field of historical and social memory, considering monuments and memorial places symbolizing the exploits and victims of the Great Patriotic War as sites of a specific heritage of civilization that require special legal protection at both national and supranational and international levels. The experimental project in which the first regulatory standards were worked out in the field of perpetuating the memory of the defenders of the Fatherland in the projections of a number of inter-municipal agreements is the Russian electric power industry and the distribution power grid complex.By the methods of participant observation and independent legal expert review, during the implementation of more than 20 inter-municipal agreements established on the basis of the feats of citizens of the USSR during the Great Patriotic War (40 villages and cities with a population of 2 million people), as well as by monitoring the situation with the preservation of monuments in more than 200 villages and cities of about 10 countries of the world, a number of regulatory norms have been worked for the future international legal act in the format of a Charter (or Convention), their description is given and the author's version of the proposed structure is formulated.

Primary nephrotic syndrome in children in Cape Town, South Africa

Background. Histopathological patterns of childhood primary nephrotic syndrome (PNS) and clinical response to steroids have beenassociated with certain race groups in parts of South Africa. However, there are no recent studies of childhood PNS in Cape Town.Objectives. To describe the demographics, histological subtypes and steroid response of patients with PNS who underwent kidney biopsiesat Red Cross War Memorial Children’s Hospital (RCWMCH) over a 10-year period.Methods. Details of patients with PNS who underwent kidney biopsies in the Paediatric Nephrology Department at RCWMCH between2006 and 2015 were retrospectively recorded.Results. A total of 103 patients were included in the study. Most patients were either of mixed race (42%) or black (36%), with a mean age of6.8 years and a male-to-female ratio of 1.19:1. The most identified histopathological subtype was mesangioproliferative glomerulonephritis(MesPGN; 60% (n/N=62/103)). Of the patients with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS), MesPGN and minimal change disease(MCD) 45% (n/N=43/95) were steroid-resistant, and 54% (n/N=51/95) were steroid-sensitive. There was no significant associationbetween any race group and steroid response. Patients with FSGS were more likely to be black, while MCD was more common in mixed-race patients (p=0.04). There was no difference in the likelihood of being mixed race or black between patients with FSGS and MesPGN(p=0.472).Conclusion. MesPGN was the most common histopathological subtype found in our study. There was no significant association betweenrace and steroid response. Patients with FSGS were more likely to be black than mixed race when compared with MCD patients. Race wasnot otherwise significantly associated with any histopathological subtype

Patterns of Irish Civil War Memory in Later-Generation Oral Histories

No phase of Ireland's 1913–23 revolution has proven as challenging for social remembrance as the 1922–3 civil war. While the conflict structured party politics and fuelled political agendas for decades, its toxic memory was widely regarded as best forgotten. Yet, as Beiner has argued, even ‘when communities try . . . to forget discomfiting historical episodes’, they still ‘retain muted recollections’. Drawing on oral history interviews, this article examines civil war silences and selective memories transmitted across generations among families and communities impacted by the conflict. Themes to be touched on include silence; memories of incidents of violence and other traumatic experiences; partisan animosities and political reverberations of the period; and the material and physical manifestations of civil war memory. Consideration of these patterns illuminates complexities in nationalist memory in Ireland, while it suggests broader insights into how societies and communities make sense of divisive historical episodes.

The origins of the Anglosphere idea and the contestation of Australian nationhood, 1991–2007

This article shows how Australian politics played an under-researched part in the development of the Anglosphere idea. By examining the contestation of nationhood in Australia from the republic referendum of the 1990s until the mid-2000s, this article offers a new interpretation of the genesis of the Anglosphere idea. The article suggests that debates about national identity in Australia and the Anglosphere idea are co-constitutive. These co-constitutive relationships are with the United Kingdom (via the republic debate, the process of reconciliation between settlers and Indigenous peoples and civics and citizenship education), New Zealand (via ‘Anzac’ war commemoration) and the United States of America (via defence and security). The Anglosphere idea remains important to debates about national identity and public policy in Australia and provides context for decisions about how Australia positions itself in the world at a time of significant transnational challenges and threats.

From disenchantment to glory: Fluctuations in the memory of World War II in Japanese Cinema (1980–2020)

In recent decades, the field of memory studies has shown increasing interest in the reconstruction of the past through the lens of cinema. The ongoing “war for memory” or “history problem,” as it is otherwise known, in East Asia vis-à-vis the memory of World War II provides plentiful opportunities for exploration of the role films play in shaping collective remembering. This study was designed to answer the question of how World War II has been remembered in Japanese cinema by detecting patterns and fluctuations of memory in a sample of 59 movies released between 1980 and 2020. The results suggest that World War II has most frequently been depicted as a natural disaster (beginning in 1942) that evolved into a conflict between Japan and the United States alone—other Asian countries having been cast as mere spectators. Finally, after a heroic fight to the death in which only the Japanese suffered, the disaster ended in 1945 as mysteriously as it began.

Understanding the Immortal Regiment: Memory Dualism in a Social Movement

The Immortal Regiment is the most popular phenomenon and yet the most understudied institution to have emerged in Russia in the last decade, having been described variously as state propaganda, a popular movement hijacked by the state, a cult of the dead, a religious procession and a manifestation of genuine patriotism. The article suggests seeing the Immortal Regiment as a memory-based social movement distinct from the NGOs and GONGOs that struggle to represent it, thus challenging dominant visions of the institution. The organisational structure of the Immortal Regiment reflects the inherent dualism of Russian war memory, combining and counterposing statist militarism and popular anti-war sentiments. This view provides a basis for understanding the most significant popular movement in contemporary Russia while revealing its political implications.

ПРАВОВАЯ ОСНОВА ДЛЯ СОХРАНЕНИЯ ИСТОРИЧЕСКОЙ ПАМЯТИ О СОБЫТИЯХ ВЕЛИКОЙ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ ВОЙНЫ

The reasons for the actualization of the problem of preserving the historical memory of the Great Patriotic War in the conditions of information warfare based on legislation are considered

The Phenomenon of Leningrad Military Museum in the first decades of the Soviet era

After 1917, historical everyday life museums became widespread, but there were also projects of military everyday life museums, which are the subject of this article. In 1919–1927 in Petrograd (Leningrad) there was the Military museums Section of the People's Commissariat of Education. Its activities were aimed at conservation the military museum property and developing projects for the creation of a unified military museum, which involved the creation of an everyday life department. However, the proposed ideas were not timely, and the Section was dissolved. But already in 1930, the Military-historical-everyday life museum was organized in the Military department, which existed for 7 years, and then became part of the Artillery Museum. For the first time, the composition and activities of the Leningrad Military museums section are considered, whose employees were officers of the Imperial Russian Army, founders of regimental museums, military historians, archivists, writers, collectors who tried to save the memory of the First World War and contribute to the preservation of pre-revolutionary military history. The continuation of the development of these ideas falls on the 1930s due to the new generation of the military, who realized the importance of museumification of the historical and cultural heritage, and the creation of the Military-historical-everyday life museum. Based on the analysis of some exhibits introduced into scientific circulation for the first time, conclusions can be drawn about the features of the collections. Based on archival sources, the article analyzes how the history of museum work reflects sociocultural changes in the country.

Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus

Reviewed by: Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town by Jill Ogline Titus Barbara A. Gannon Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town. By Jill Ogline Titus. Civil War America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xvi, 244. $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6534-4.) The Civil War ended in 1865; the battle for its memory continues. The struggle persists both in popular memory and in scholarly monographs engaged in pitched historiographical debates over the legacy of America’s deadliest conflict. Jill Ogline Titus, the associate director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College, examines the Civil War’s centennial at the site of its most famous battle. Scholars including David W. Blight and Robert J. Cook have assessed this commemoration at the macro level. In contrast, Titus’s microstudy assesses the Civil War’s contested memory in “America’s most famous small town.” As her title suggests, there were several agendas at play in 1963 that had little to do with the events of 1863. Many white Americans wanted to use the centennial to encourage national unity. Titus notes that “Gettysburg’s 100th anniversary enlisted both the battle and Lincoln’s famous Gettysburg Address in the service of the anticommunist crusade” (p. 1). But despite this eager embrace of unity by white Americans, African Americans did not stand idly by. Instead, they struggled to recruit Civil War memory as “[v]ibrant campaigns for equal rights, north and south, shone an unstinting spotlight on the hollowness of ‘freedom’ and the unfinished work of the Civil War” (p. 1). While earlier studies at the national level support Titus’s findings, her contribution to this vital subfield demonstrates the value of microhistory. Previous examinations of this milestone assessed how state and national organizations, including the U.S. Civil War Centennial Commission, shaped this anniversary. In contrast, Titus examines how grassroots organizations shaped a local commemoration. While National Park Service personnel and their interpretation of the battlefield reflected national discourse, local citizens, Black and white, also shaped this commemoration mostly through civic organizations. Notably, these groups ranged from the NAACP, one of the oldest and best-known civil rights groups, to one of the newest and least-known organizations, the Congress of Racial Equality. Like all studies of Civil War memory, this study tells readers more about the era it examines than it does about the Civil War itself, documenting how these civil rights organizations operated at the grassroots level in northern states. Most studies examine these organizations’ actions in the de jure Jim Crow South, and not in the de facto Jim Crow North. In this book’s greatest irony, in the place where Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a “new birth of freedom,” African Americans struggled to realize emancipation’s promise. While Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America’s Most Famous Small Town is a tremendously important local study, it might be valuable to examine other small towns and larger cities and their commemorations. The most obvious factors in the Gettysburg commemorations, tourism and commercialization, shaped residents’ memory. What about the centennial at Sharpsburg/Antietam? Did the people remember the Emancipation Proclamation issued in its aftermath? The Civil War’s [End Page 387] bloodiest day occurred far from the type of road system that made the Gettysburg battlefield accessible to tourists. Did that matter? What happened in cities like Philadelphia, which was central to both the Black and the white Civil War experience? How did other northern cities with populations of native-born Black Americans and foreign-born immigrants commemorate? In Civil War memory, forgetting matters. Did western communities, such as those in Colorado or California, even observe the centennial? This call for more research in no way diminishes the value of this outstanding study. No one town, regardless of its iconic landscape, represents the final word on memory studies, particularly since Americans seem willing to continue to fight and even kill at places like Charlottesville, Virginia, sixty-four years after Gettysburg remembered the centennial of its three bloody days. Barbara A...

True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction By Clayton J. Butler

Reviewed by: True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction By Clayton J. Butler Wendy Hamand Venet True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction. By Clayton J. Butler. Conflicting Worlds: New Dimensions of the American Civil War. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2022. Pp. x, 228. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-7662-7.) In True Blue: White Unionists in the Deep South During the Civil War and Reconstruction, Clayton J. Butler makes an important contribution to our understanding of Unionists in the Deep South during and after the Civil War. Butler asks several key questions. Who were these white men? Why did they remain loyal to the Union? How were they viewed in the North and the South? What roles did they play during and after the war? He seeks answers to these questions by focusing individual chapters on three Unionist military units: the First Louisiana Cavalry, the First Alabama Cavalry, and the Thirteenth Tennessee Union Cavalry. While acknowledging that his approach undervalues the important role played by Unionist women during the war, Butler notes that “donning a blue Federal uniform represented the most unambiguous expression of national allegiance one could make” (p. 2). Butler finds that white Unionists came from many backgrounds and professed a variety of motivations for their unconditional loyalty. Some were slave owners, while others were laborers motivated by class resentment. In New Orleans, many Unionists were German or Irish immigrants. Although some were former Whigs, many Unionists were Democrats who had voted for Stephen A. Douglas in the presidential contest of 1860. While some Unionists disliked slavery, most did not express sympathy for slaves as a motivation to enlist. Instead, they professed a strong dedication to the United States as a nation. For these men, secession represented a violation of the Constitution and the legacy of the Founders. Butler does not make a case that Unionist soldiers influenced the outcome of the war, but he does argue that these units had a respectable military record, fighting at Port Hudson, Louisiana, in the Red River campaign, and during William T. Sherman’s March to the Sea. Sherman, Butler shows, understood the public relations value of having Unionists serve in his ranks. Of greater [End Page 368] interest to Butler is the role of newspapers’ support of the Union or the Confederacy through the dissemination of information about soldiers’ allegedly heroic or traitorous efforts. Butler’s impressive newspaper research encompasses big city dailies and small-town papers, and it helps broaden the relatively narrow focus of his book. Another strength of this book is Butler’s discussion of the 1864 Fort Pillow massacre, in which Confederate soldiers under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest killed close to half the garrison of 585 U.S. soldiers rather than allowing them to surrender. While not taking attention away from the massacre’s Black victims, Butler notes that Forrest’s men also killed nearly one hundred white Unionists, as well as the commander of the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry, Major William F. Bradford. Bradford initially escaped the bloodshed but was executed by Forrest’s men several days after the massacre. Butler argues convincingly that the episode should be understood both as an expression of Confederates’ racial hatred and as their reaction to the presence of white and Black defenders of Union. In a volume of fewer than two hundred pages of text, the book’s coverage of Reconstruction is understandably brief and largely focused on Louisiana and Alabama. Although many white Unionists ultimately endorsed emancipation during the war, in the postwar period their diverse political views reemerged. Unionists played roles during both Presidential and Radical Reconstruction, but Butler joins other scholars in emphasizing that their failure to form a long-term alliance with African Americans contributed to Reconstruction’s broader failure. In his conclusion, Butler discusses the “relatively small place” unconditional Unionists occupy in both national Civil War memory and current historiography. Small in number but consequential nonetheless, these Deep South Unionists found “their voices drowned out by the chorus of returning Confederates and their descendants” (p. 166). Clayton Butler’s book reminds us of...

“We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas by William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford

Reviewed by: “We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas by William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford Andrew Fialka “We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas. By William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford. (Springfield: Ozarks Studies Institute of Missouri State University, 2021. Pp. xiv, 343. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-7346290-1-9; cloth, $39.95, ISBN 978-1-7321222-3-9.) “We Gave Them Thunder”: Marmaduke’s Raid and the Civil War in Missouri and Arkansas is a refreshing take on traditional military history. Grounded in up-to-date secondary literature and straightforward about slavery’s role in causing the Civil War, this monograph brings modern scholarship to its intended audience—“descendants” in Missouri and Arkansas to whom Marmaduke’s Raid still matters (p. 2). William Garrett Piston and John C. Rutherford note how simultaneous events in the western theater, such as the battle of Stones River, overshadowed the raid’s importance and how the larger and better-preserved site of the battle of Wilson’s Creek still dominates Civil War memory in southwest Missouri. The raid has not fared much better in academia—no other monograph-length treatment exists, and the raid receives scant coverage in applicable syntheses, including James M. McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (New York, 1988), Herman Hattaway and Archer Jones’s How the North Won: A Military History of the Civil War (Urbana, 1983), and Jay Monaghan’s Civil War on the Western Border, 1854–1865 (Boston, 1955). In addition to bringing the raid’s larger story to light, Piston and Rutherford illustrate the logistical chess game played by Union and Confederate commanders attempting to control the St. Louis–Fort Smith corridor—a possible “back door” for Confederates to capture St. Louis and turn the tide in the trans-Mississippi theater—while constantly having their troops siphoned off to larger battlefields in the East (p. 22). Military matters take up the bulk of the book. Piston and Rutherford expertly summarize Missouri’s unique, and often confusing, position both on the American frontier and as a border state. Chapters 1–2 explain Missouri’s multiple governors—the ousted secessionist Claiborne Fox Jackson and provisional Unionist Hamilton Rowan Gamble. They also detail the state’s many fighting forces, including volunteer regiments, which focused on opening the Missouri River to the Union navy and controlling the aforementioned St. Louis–Fort Smith corridor; the Missouri State Militia, a homegrown state security and counterguerrilla force; and the Enrolled Missouri Militia, which called all able-bodied and loyal men into emergency service (without making a particularly good distinction between those who were loyal and disloyal). The narrative peaks in chapters 6 and 8, which offer blow-by-blow accounts of the battles of Springfield and Hartville, complete with corresponding battle maps. Union forces held off fierce attacks in Springfield thanks to hastily constructed fort defenses and a clever use of cavalry units to buy additional time for preparation. In Hartville, outnumbered Union forces again held off Confederate raiders, this time thanks to securing the high ground northwest of the town and utilizing brush to hide their lack of strength. The attention to detail in this book’s presentation makes it particularly enjoyable to read. The maps, created by Jim Coombs, a maps and GIS librarian at Missouri State University, are very helpful. The numerous color images [End Page 367] are vivid and will be appreciated by anyone enthusiastic about material culture. The lack of academic jargon in the prose makes even lengthy tactical passages easy to follow. This is accessible scholarship. “We Gave Them Thunder” has few shortcomings. I took issue with how Piston and Rutherford justify not including more stories of women and children, white or Black. The authors assert that “very few sources detail their experiences” (p. 2). Yet there are nearly three thousand records from Missouri’s Union Provost Marshal Papers for Greene, Webster, and Wright Counties alone (an area that includes Springfield, Hartville, and their connecting road). Civil War historians focused on Missouri have utilized the Provost Marshal Papers to uncover the histories...