Wartime Context Research Articles

A Quantitative Description of the Henan Famine of 1942

AbstractThe Henan famine of 1942 occurred during the middle of the Sino-Japanese war, in a province that was divided between Japanese, Nationalist and Communist political control. Partly due to this wartime context, existing accounts of the famine rely almost exclusively on eyewitness reports. This paper presents a range of statistical sources on the famine, including weather records, contemporary economic surveys and population censuses. These statistical sources allow similarities to be drawn between the Henan famine and other famines that occurred during the Second World War, such as in Bengal, when the combination of bad weather, war-induced disruptions to food markets, and the relegation of famine relief to the war effort, brought great hardship to civilians living near the war front.

Armed Forces, Alcohol Abuse and Responsibility for War-Time Violence: Applying the Attention-Allocation Model

Several historical and contemporary examples involving the relationship between alcohol use and the commission of atrocities can be identified. During the Second World War, for instance, alcohol was supplied to men of Reserve Police Battalion 101 (RPB 101) in order to make their participation in mass murder at Jozefow easier. Similarly, in the context of the ethnic wars of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, ordinary Serb soldiers were reported to have been plied with alcohol as a measure of official policy. Moreover, alcohol use has been linked to the Rwandan Genocide. And more recently, alcohol and drug-related charges were reported to have been involved in more than a third of all Army criminal prosecutions of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and to have been used by guards at Abu Ghraib. Yet, the relationship between substance abuse and war-time atrocities is unclear. Drawing on accepted social psychological phenomena such as conformity, obedience to authority and the construction of social norms, it is contended that alcohol does not cause aggression directly through its pharmacological effects alone and an argument is raised against the general use of dispositional causal explanations of alcohol-related violence in the war-time context. I propose that intoxicated aggression in the context of war is primarily the product of contextual variables interacting with the pharmacodynamics of alcohol. I develop an integrated theoretical framework showing the pathways through which alcohol affects aggressive tendencies in the context of war and suggest preventive measures. The proposed integrated theoretical framework is made up of three main propositions: combat stressors; drinking as a coping strategy; and situational risk factors. It offers a socio psychological description and explanation of the dynamics of alcohol intoxication and aggression in the context of war.

The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada by Mark Osborne Humphries

Reviewed by: The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada by Mark Osborne Humphries Sarah Glassford Humphries, Mark Osborne — The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013. Pp. 323. If, like me, you tried to write an undergraduate essay in the early 2000s on “Spanish Flu” in Canada, you probably found few sources, wrote your 10 or 20 pages, and moved on with your life thinking you knew what there was to be known. Mark Osborne Humphries’ The Last Plague: Spanish Influenza and the Politics of Public Health in Canada now joins Esyllt Jones’s Influenza 1918: Disease, Death, and Struggle in Winnipeg (UTP 2007) in showing us how little we actually understood. Humphries’ important and insightful book significantly alters the place of Spanish Flu in the landscape of Canadian social and medical history. Some 50,000 Canadians died in this epidemic, and in The Last Plague Humphries demonstrates that their deaths ultimately brought Canada into a new, modern era of public health work and knowledge. Even if they have never spared a thought for cholera, smallpox, or any other historical epidemic, most students and scholars of modern history are at least familiar with the existence of the global 1918–19 influenza pandemic, hot on the heels of the First World War. Humphries gives the wartime context of the epidemic its due, but his crucial contribution to the historiography is to reframe the story completely, moving it from the footnotes of wartime social and military history to a central position in the long history of Canadian public health. In Humphries’ assessment, the Spanish Flu epidemic served as a vital turning point in the evolution of Canadians’ collective understanding of the proper role of government in fostering a healthy population, as well as the country’s understanding of disease more broadly (from something outsiders brought in, to something Canadians themselves spread). In public health, as in so many other respects, the wartime crisis prompted dramatic re-imaginings of how state and citizens should interact. The book therefore has important things to say to those interested not only in health history, but also in wartime society and state formation. Above all, this is a book about context, and this long view proves not only innovative but also highly instructive. After the introduction, the book begins nearly a century before the Spanish Flu epidemic, outlining in chapters two to four how Canada dealt with various 19th century epidemics, how public health and sanitation reform movements influenced Canada before 1914, and how the country dealt with an influenza epidemic in 1889–91. Chapters five through seven examine the 1918–19 influenza pandemic, assessing the impact of the disease’s first (milder) and second (deadlier) waves, as well as municipal, provincial, and federal government responses. Chapter eight covers the related-but-separate issue of the epidemic’s wartime context. The remaining two chapters and conclusion demonstrate the role of the epidemic in fundamentally changing the course of Canadian public health policy from 1919 onward. Sixty-nine pages of endnotes, a wide-ranging 39-page bibliography, and a 17-page index round out this useful resource for both scholars and students. [End Page 559] The bibliography stands as a testament to Humphries’ exhaustive primary and secondary source research, which encompasses bureaucratic, military, women’s, labour, and Western social history, as well as the history of medicine and health which is its primary focus. Overall, Humphries’ sources serve him well: his detailed tracking of the multiple vectors of influenza in chapters five and six, for example, convincingly overturn the previously-held assumption that the epidemic came to Canada from Europe with returning soldiers. Similarly, in chapter seven he makes excellent use of primary sources and existing provincial and local studies of the epidemic, to tell the on-the-ground story of how Canadians dealt with the deadly flu. The discussion of medical and popular remedies in circulation (pp. 121–22), and the descriptions of poverty and sickness in flu-stricken working-class districts (pp. 124–26) are particularly evocative and moving. However, Humphries’ love affair with his sources occasionally gets...

Facial Cues to Perceived Height Influence Leadership Choices in Simulated War and Peace Contexts

Body size and other signs of physical prowess are associated with leadership hierarchies in many social species. Here we (1) assess whether facial cues associated with perceived height and masculinity have different effects on leadership judgments in simulated wartime and peacetime contexts and (2) test how facial cues associated with perceived height and masculinity influence dominance perceptions. Results indicate that cues associated with perceived height and masculinity in potential leaders‟ faces are valued more in a wartime (vs. peacetime) context. Furthermore, increasing cues of apparent height and masculinity in faces increased perceived dominance. Together, these findings suggest that facial cues of physical stature contribute to establishing leadership hierarchies in humans.

Sounding the Limits of Resistance Memory: Robert Desnos, Comics, and Nursery Rhymes

Chantefables, a collection of nursery rhymes written by Robert Desnos and originally published in the German-authorized press at the time of the Occupation, figures prominently in present-day French schools, where it is used to introduce young learners to the poetic possibilities of the French language as they are expressed through Desnos’s playful use of rhyme and image. Despite its popularity, however, little attempt has been made to read Chantefables as a non-clandestine product of Occupation culture. This study examines the collection’s relationship to the wartime context and discerns in Chantefables an evocative power left unexplored in decontextualized celebrations of the work.

Minority Language Development and Literacy among Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), Refugees, and Wartime Communities

Abstract: This article describes how minority language development and literacy activities were facilitated in a wartime context for Southern Sudanese language groups, particularly through the use of workshops. It also presents the voices of the language speakers themselves as they reflect on this process. A background discussion considers the importance of minority languages, education in times of war, and resources for minority language development and literacy. The activities of assessment, orthography formation, and writers’ training are then described as they were implemented in a workshop context. The concluding section of the article provides an update on multilingual education developments in Southern Sudan and notes some strengths and weaknesses of a workshop approach in stressed contexts.

Introduction: Campaign 2004: Looking to the Past for Ideological Certainty in a Period of National Anxiety

Introduction:Campaign 2004: Looking to the Past for Ideological Certainty in a Period of National Anxiety Shawn J. Parry-Giles (bio) and Trevor Parry-Giles (bio) Some moments in the cultural life of a nation are pivotal—they resonate with an everlasting impact that shocks and changes forever. One such moment for the United States was September 11, 2001. We now shorthand September 11 by reference to its date; it is simply 9/11 and it joins December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963, and April 19, 1995, as among those moments that we teach our children and our students, that we remember permanently, that we relive in anniversaries and memorials year after year. Unlike other national traumas—like the assassination of President Kennedy or the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City—the brutality of September 11 is without end for many as U.S. troops continue to pursue a worldwide campaign against "global terrorism" and Americans live in almost perpetual fear of yet another terrorist attack. Indeed, as we write, the United States relentlessly conducts its "war on terrorism" with sustained action in Afghanistan and Iraq, and equivocates over its policies relating to potential nuclear threats in Iran and North Korea. Acts of political violence continue unabated, moreover, with commuter trains exploding in Madrid and London while nightclubs are incinerated in Bali. And the occurrence of car and suicide bombings in the Middle East, from Gaza to Tel Aviv to Baghdad to Beirut, has become an almost daily event. As the symbolic and physical violence of September 11 continues, so does the uncertainty over the cultural and ideological meaning of those events. [End Page 543] Indeed, September 11 is unparalleled as a cultural trauma that demanded a response. The trauma of September 11 has had significant consequences, from longer lines at airports to the denial of freedom and civil liberties for thousands living in the United States and around the world. It means a perpetual uncertainty and a threatening, endless feeling of danger from future attacks and "weapons of mass destruction." It means, as do all significant cultural traumas, that our sense of collective life will be forever altered and our identity as a community subject to ongoing anxiety and fluctuation. Such cultural anxiety functioned as the backdrop for Campaign 2004—the first general election in the aftermath of that nation-altering catastrophe. Bill Clinton always says that campaigns are about the country's future and not its past. But Campaign 2004, we contend, functioned instead as a window into the nation's collective past, revealing the ideological comforts that citizens long for in a wartime context as well as those ideologically contested moments that citizens toil to forget. As cultural critics Jean Pickering and Suzanne Kehde note, "In times of change or crisis, nations look to the past and infer a narrative that erases all confusion and contradiction."1 To that end, campaign rituals, particularly the rhetoric that infuses campaigns, can provide psychological comfort, relying on a certainty of the past that is more cathartic than an uncertain future in a war on terrorism where the enemy is ambiguous and the end of the global war is unimaginable. Such a psychological return to the past, of course, necessitates that ideological contested moments of history are either forgotten or resolved simplistically in favor of unity. And, such a return favors more traditional ideological commitments related to gender, race, and militarism. Explaining the complexity of such psychological processes associated with national identity, Victor Burgin contends that "forward movement in life is achieved through a backward movement in memory, but one that is more than a simple temporal regression."2 In reflecting upon such a national psychological regression, we turn to the political topics and leaders that are addressed by the authors of the essays and forum pieces included in this special issue on Campaign 2004. Rather than review the authors' arguments, though, we instead demonstrate how the rhetoric they interrogate reflects a rhetorical regression, which either provides a sense of ideological certainty or reflects a cultural amnesia when such certainty is too painful or contentious. In reviewing the campaign discourse of President George W. Bush and Senator John F...

Sisterhood's ordeals: shared interests and divided loyalties in Finnish wartime nursing.

The aim of this article is to highlight early Finnish nursing in a special wartime context. Occupational development of nursing is envisioned by addressing at a more general level women's mutual relationships and the opportunities and obstacles of the process of occupational development. The article debates two main issues. Establishing occupational domains was a process of selecting suitable labour force and training women morally, as well. The hierarchical order of nursing is manifested especially in the questions of auxiliary labour and the so-called amateur scare. War was still a time of romanticism with visible military and religious models, but women also struggled for their right to have rights.

Engineering Behavior: Project Pigeon, World War II, and the Conditioning of B. F. Skinner

Engineering Behavior: Project Pigeon, World War II, and the Conditioning of B. F. Skinner JAMES H. CAPSHEW During the Second World War the scientific outlook and profes­ sional goals of American psychologist B. F. Skinner underwent a remarkable metamorphosis. Wartime contingencies reshaped his re­ search agenda and converted him to the cause ofbehavioral engineer­ ing. Before the war, Skinner was reluctant to venture very far outside the academic laboratory. He was a scientific purist who resisted extrapolating the results of his animal experimentation to the realm of human behavior. After the war, he attempted to make such connections boldly explicit, arguing that the scientific principles of behaviorism had widespread applicability to human affairs. By the 1950s Skinner had emerged as an advocate of the use of operant conditioning techniques for the control of individual and group behavior in a variety of settings and promoted applications ranging from teaching machines to the design of entire societies. Skinner’s transition from inventive scientist to social inventor can be traced to the circumstances of World War II, which provided him with opportunities to explore the technological ramifications of operant psychology. Years later he noted that three wartime projects had dramatically broadened his intellectual horizons by offering the first evidence that his system of behavioral science could engender a system of behavioral engineering.1 The first was known as Project Dr. Capshew teaches in the Department of History and Philosophy of Science and serves as assistant director of the Program on Scientific Dimensions of Society at Indiana University. He gratefully acknowledges the editorial suggestions of Lau­ rence D. Smith, William R. Woodward, Alejandra C. Laszlo, Eliot Hearst, and B. F. Skinner and the encouragement received from audiences that heard earlier versions of this article at Indiana University and at annual meetings of the Air Force Historical Foundation, the Society for the History of Technology (where he was awarded the 1986 Joan Cahalin Robinson Prize), and the Association for Behavior Analysis. lB. F. Skinner, “My Years at Indiana” (paper prepared March 31, 1988, for Indiana University Department of Psychology Centennial Celebration, Bloomington, April 1988), p. 5; a copy is in the personal collection of the author.© 1993 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/93/3404-0001$01.00 835 836 James H. Capshew Pigeon—an attempt to construct a missile guidance system utilizing the conditioned pecking behavior of pigeons. Project Pigeon con­ sumed much of Skinner’s energy during the war, and, even though it was never brought to fruition, it played a pivotal role in reorienting his thinking toward the possibilities of behavioral engineering.2 The second project was closer to home. Faced with the challenges of raising a second baby daughter, Skinner drew on his manual skills and invented the “baby-tender,” a futuristic climate-controlled crib de­ signed to promote the physical and psychological health of infants.3 Featured in the Ladies’ Home Journal shortly following the war, the device was later marketed commercially with little success as the “Aircrib.”4 Skinner’s third novel project was precisely that—a novel. During the summer of 1945 he drafted the manuscript that would be published three years later as Walden Two.' The book was Skinner’s attempt to conceive a utopian human society based on the principles of reinforcement that he had gleaned from his laboratory research on animal behavior. Taken together, these efforts represent Skinner’s initial forays into the realm of behavioral engineering, and they clearly demonstrate how the technocratic ideals embedded in his research practices found expression in the wartime context. Although Skinner’s work was undeniably idiosyncratic, it reflected broader trends in American psychology that reached their fullest expression during the Second World War, with its overriding emphasis on military utility and the virtues of order, control, and effectiveness.1’ Of the three projects, Walden Two became the most famous. It was the first step in Skinner’s public transformation from experimental psychologist to social philosopher, and its description of an entire culture molded along behaviorist lines suggested the scope of Skin­ ner’s ambitions. As important as the novel was, it was only the most visible manifestation of a more fundamental...

Clamor of Innocence: Central American Short Stories

Appearing at about the same time as Rosario Santos's anthology And Sold the Rain (see above), Clamor of Innocence, a collection of Central American short stories, shows similarities and differences with the former. Among the similarities are the presence of many shared authors (Carmen Naranjo, Samuel Rovinski, Julio Escoto, and at least ten others) as well as several individual stories. This is not necessarily a negative feature, as it actually serves to reinforce the idea that there is a group of Central American writers whose works abundance and quality form a contemporary literary identity for the region. There are brief biobibliographic notes on each author at the beginning of Clamor of Innocence, but no introductory comments to clarify the selection process of the thirty-one texts. However, it is clear that the compilers have followed a wider historical perspective than the Santos anthology by including Miguel Angel Asturias's Johnthe, Carmen Lyra's Estafania, and Salarrue's We Bad. Also included are already classical stories such as The Swede by Ernesto Cardenal and The Center Fielder by Sergio Ramirez, both reflective of Somozan political repression in Nicaragua without being specific as to the target. In addition to these, we find the well-known Rogelio Sinan (Panama) and Carmen Naranjo (Costa Rica). Several of the selections were included in the Antologia del cuento centroamericana edited by Sergio Ramirez (1973). There are six women writers, as opposed to four in And Sold the Rain, but the differences in the number of selections included curiously result in an equal representation in both: about 20 percent of the authors. Two of these names and one story, The Guayacan Tree by Bertalicia Peralta, are shared by the anthologies. One feels that, within the not-so-familiar field of Central American literature, women writers are even less frequent or familiar. Fortunately, this status is not reflected in the quality or prolific nature of those women who do write. Naranjo's Walls and Rima de Vallbona's Penelope on Her Silver Wedding Anniversary are invitations to read more of their work. An interesting feature of Clamor of Innocence is the fairly large proportion of stories concerned with human sexuality, both within a wartime context and outside it. Morales's Dead Weight, Castellanos Moya's Setback, and Castillo's Anita, the Insect Eater, moreover, are as concerned with the sexual experience of the female protagonist as is Peralta in The Guayacan Tree. As a counterbalance, the Panamanians Enrique Jaramillo Levi (While He Lay Sleeping) and Sinan (Heaven's Surgeon) link sexuality with male mortality and morality. Sinan's story is more nearly a fantasy or allegory than a psychological study. Importantly, indigenous culture is represented in Delfina Collado's Katok and Francisco Gavidia's She-Wolf. Collado f cuses m re on historical aspects of the Conquest and prese ts less a modern short story than an artistic recreation of the clash between Spaniards and Indians during that period. Gavidia treats mythical/magical phenomena pertaining solely to a native American group, not situated in a specific time but rather atemporal, as if to underscore the persistence of the other, non-Hispanic groups in Central America.

"Our New Gold Goes Adventuring": The American International Corporation in China

Research Article| May 01 1974 "Our New Gold Goes Adventuring": The American International Corporation in China George T. Mazuzan George T. Mazuzan Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1974) 43 (2): 212–232. https://doi.org/10.2307/3637550 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation George T. Mazuzan; "Our New Gold Goes Adventuring": The American International Corporation in China. Pacific Historical Review 1 May 1974; 43 (2): 212–232. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3637550 Download citation file: Ris (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 ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1974 The Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.