Wartime Correspondence Research Articles

Faith, Valor, and Devotion: The Civil War Letters of William Porcher DuBose (review)

Reviewed by: Faith, Valor, and Devotion: The Civil War Letters of William Porcher DuBose April E. Holm Faith, Valor, and Devotion: The Civil War Letters of William Porcher DuBose. Eds. W. Eric Emerson and Karen Stokes. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2010. ISBN 978-1-57003-912-6, xxix, 360 pp., cloth, $49.95. This attractively presented volume of correspondence will interest scholars of both southern theology and the Civil War soldier's daily life. William Porcher DuBose (1836-1918), a late-nineteenth-century Episcopalian theologian whose writings reflected the religious tradition of the postwar white southern elite, came of age along with the secession crisis. The Civil War interrupted DuBose's path to the priesthood, and he spent three and a half years in the Confederate army. Later in life, he developed a theology that valued ecumenism, emphasized human experience as a route to salvation, and defended a divinely ordained social hierarchy. DuBose's exceptional scholarly career followed a respectable, but in many ways ordinary, experience as a minor Confederate officer and then as a chaplain. W. Eric Emerson and Karen Stokes have carefully compiled and edited previously unpublished correspondence from DuBose's war years. These letters are of particular interest as DuBose's theology emphasized the importance of human experience. (He later described the Confederate defeat as a profoundly important "turning point" in his life [xxxvi].) This volume provides an interesting contrast to DuBose's mature reflections. The letters reveal young DuBose's intelligence and thoughtful piety but also show him to be understandably distracted by daily concerns. This book will therefore also appeal to readers interested in the soldier's private life. DuBose's correspondence furnishes an intimate glimpse into the lived experience of the Civil War. As with all correspondence of the period, much of the content is taken up by details of health and daily activities that, when read together, underscore the protracted waiting, uncertainty, and tedium that characterized army life. Most of the letters are addressed to Annie Barnwell Peronneau, to whom DuBose was engaged in 1861 and married in 1863. They make for an engrossing narrative as DuBose's private drama of love, engagement, and marriage unfolds alongside the familiar events of the Civil War. The letters are preceded by a short biographical essay and supported by footnotes and an index that primarily references people, places, and events. It is unfortunate that the notes and index are limited for the most part to proper names, as this reduces the book's usefulness for readers seeking information [End Page 292] by topic. "Slavery," for instance, does not appear in the index, and the footnotes do not elaborate on DuBose's references to "servants," runaway slaves joining the Union army, and his own "devoted set of negroes" (249). The editors might have also provided more historical and biographical context. As the introduction acknowledges, this collection is by no means a complete set of DuBose's wartime correspondence. The reader encounters gaps in the narrative (particularly when DuBose is on furlough) that more extensive notes might have filled. This volume gives readers a window into a formative experience for one of the most notable American theologians and provides ample material on both religion and daily life in the Confederate army. While the collection makes for an engaging read, the limited index and footnotes reduce its usefulness as a general source. April E. Holm University of Mississippi Copyright © 2011 The Kent State University Press

Airgraphs and an Airman: The Role of Airgraphs in World War II Family Correspondence

This article discusses Australia’s participation in a Second World War postal system, the airgraph service, which used microfilm and air transport to provide a speedy and lightweight ‘photo-letter’ for correspondence throughout the British Empire during wartime. Through analysing the correspondence of one Australian serviceman and his family, consisting of letters, cables and airgraphs, we consider the specific role of the airgraph in wartime correspondence and its contribution to maintaining morale and a sense of connection to home and family for those separated by war.This article has been peer-reviewed.

The Wartime Correspondence of Monroe Sweetland and Lillie Megrath Sweetland

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 1 Oregon-born Monroe Sweetland spent most of his first thirty-five years living elsewhere — growing up in Constantine, Michigan, attending Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio,enrollinginlawschoolatCornell and Syracuse in New York State, and finally working as a student organizer for the socialist League for Industrial Democracy from 1932 through 1935. He met Lillie (Lil) Megrath at Syracuse in the fall of 1931 and the two married in 1933, marking the beginning of a remarkable union of affection and engagement in politics that would last until Lil’s death in 1985.1 Lil was in every respect Monroe’s equal as a progressive, working for the League for Industrial Democracy (both of them as avowed socialists), partnering with her husband in supporting the Oregon Commonwealth Federation when the couple moved to Oregon early in 1936, and then working for the National Labor Relations Board and War Labor Board in Washington ,D.C.,during the SecondWorld War. Monroe held federal and laborrelations appointments between 1940 and 1943 and then joined the American Red Cross, serving in the Pacific theater of operations for two years. That two-year period of separation resulted in an extensive and fascinating exchange of correspondence between them. The letters are also replete with references to Oregon politics: support for University of Oregon Law School dean Wayne Morse, Monroe’s interest in purchasing a small-town newspaper in the state,and the political prospects of Oregon’s liberal Democrats. When Monroe mustered out of the Red Cross in the fall of 1945, the Sweetlands moved to Oregon with their nine-year-old daughter Barbara and set up shop in the newspaper business. Beginning in 1946, they produced weekly newspapers, first in Mollala, then Newport, and finally in The Wartime Correspondence of Monroe Sweetland and Lillie Megrath Sweetland© 2010 Oregon Historical Society oregon voices by William G. Robbins  Robbins, Sweetland Wartime Correspondence Milwaukie, where they published the Milwaukie Review for more than a decade. While Monroe worked hard to energize and modernize Oregon’s moribund Democratic Party, Lil did much of the day-to-day work in getting out the weekly newspapers. Archival material in the Oregon Historical Society also reveals that those were financially difficult years for the Sweetlands. Beginning with the 1948 election, Monroe was elected to two successive four-year terms as one of Oregon’s two Democratic National Committeemen. Reflecting the successes of the Democratic Party, voters elected Sweetland to the Oregon House in 1952 and then elevated him to the Oregon Senate in 1954andagainin1958.AsaDemocratic National Committeeman, Monroe was an important figure in national liberal politics, representing Oregon’s interests with powerful Democrats, including Presidents Harry S.Truman and later John F.Kennedy.He declared his support for Kennedy’s candidacy in June 1959 and served as his campaign manager in the state. After Monroe’s second failed attempt to win the Secretary of State’s office in 1960, he and Lil traveled abroad, eventually spending a year at Universitas Padjadjaran in Bandung , Indonesia, where Monroe was a visiting lecturer in journalism. After returning stateside, he took a job with the National Education Association Lil and Monroe Sweetland are standing in front of their Molalla home. After returning to Oregon, the Sweetlands published the Molalla Pioneer from February 1946 to late 1947, when they purchased a newspaper in Newport. OHS digital no. bb006715  OHQ vol. 111, no. 1 (NEA), working out of Burlingame, California,as legislative consultant for theWestern states.Lil returned to salaried work with the U.S.Department of Labor, Manpower Administration. In histenyearswithNEA,Monroegained national prominence for being the primary architect of the Bilingual Education Act of 1968 and for his tireless efforts in pushing for the age-eighteen vote, achieved in 1971.2 The three extensive Sweetland collections in the Oregon Historical Society’s archives provide a relatively comprehensive portrait of the donor’s long and productive life (one collection was donated posthumously).The most significant exchanges of spousal correspondence reflect Monroe’s nearly two years of service with the American Red Cross between February 1944, when he left for San Francisco , Hawaii, and then the Marshall Islands, and his return stateside in the late fall...

Becoming a Franco-American: Jean Renoir, the Second World War, and A Salute to France

ABSTRACTCommissioned by the American Office of War Information in both English- and French-language versions, A Salute to France/Salut à la France (1944) are traditionally considered minor works of tangential importance to Renoir's career. Yet a close reading of the films' form and ideological content in relation to the director's wartime correspondence suggests that they deserve to be remembered for their clever blend of acted sequences with newsreel clips, as a turning point in the cross-cultural identity crisis that Renoir worked through while in Hollywood, and as a quintessential expression of his politically engaged, international humanism.

The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives

Reviewed by: The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives Steve Breyman (bio) The Atomic Bomb and American Society: New Perspectives. Edited by Rosemary B. Mariner and G. Kurt Piehler. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Pp. xxx+447. $42. It is encouraging that as the nuclear age nears its seventh decade, social scientists and humanists continue to analyze and interpret what it means for American society. The eighteen essays in this volume look at the effects of the bomb on U.S. foreign policy, on the scientists and technologists who brought the bomb into being, on the workers and communities that designed and manufactured it, and on American culture. Coeditor Rosemary Mariner is a former professor of military studies at the National War College; coeditor Kurt Piehler is a historian and former director of the Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. The volume begins with a sweeping review of the nuclear age by historian Paul Boyer, who makes two straightforward arguments: the bomb is central to postwar American culture, and the cultural impact of the bomb flowed and ebbed with the levels of anxiety and organized domestic resistance it has produced. Boyer detects three "cycles" in the atomic age marked by bursts of antinuclear activism and cultural expression. In part 2, the focus is on the creation of the bomb and public reactions [End Page 1036] in the immediate aftermath of its use on Japan. We get a fine account from Peter K. Parides of how Vannevar Bush and James B. Conant marshaled scientific and technological expertise on behalf of war preparedness and ultimately bomb construction in the face of bureaucratic pettiness and turf consciousness. George K. Webb provides a fascinating look at the post-Hiroshima discussion of the bomb in local papers across the United States. Mary Anne Schofield adds new insight to the gendered accounts of "war talk" in her examination of the roles played by a selection of women at Los Alamos. Judy Barrett Litoff performs a similarly salutary service in her looks at the wartime correspondence of women and their families deeply troubled by the implications of the bomb and its destruction of tens of thousands of Japanese. In part 3 there are five chapters about failed attempts to control and manage the risks of the genie once released. Megan Barnhart examines the Deweyesque Federation of American Scientists campaign to educate the public about the bomb—"no secret, no defense, international control"—in uneasy league with the professional opinion-manipulators of the Advertising Council. Shane J. Maddock provides a fascinating analysis of the role of American exceptionalist ideology in U.S. nonproliferation policy. Tracey C. Davis looks at the confused and contradictory federal policies and exercises to maintain "continuity of government" following a nuclear attack before and after the Cuban missile crisis. Jenny Barker Devine provides fresh insight into fearful civil-defense rhetoric through her focus on its circulation and application in rural America. Robert E. Hunter adds a new layer to our understanding of Hollywood and the bomb through his critical review of three nuclear-terrorism movies from the 1950s. Part 4 includes interesting takes on culture and the bomb. William David Freeman adds a new chapter to the history of the nuclear navy through oral interviews with the "elite techno-sailors" known as Nukes. Todd A. Hanson explodes the "Dr. Strangelove myth" regarding atomic scientists—and fights against anti-rationalist critiques of science—in his biography of William Ogle, "a brilliant scientist and team leader, yet somewhat ordinary American family man" (p. 263). David M. Walker revisits the nuclearization of the U.S. military from strategic ballistic missiles to tactical shells for shore bombardment and "future war" as envisioned by military strategists and comic-book writers. Michael A. Day turns to an examination of the atomic scientists as postwar public intellectuals, with a focus on J. Robert Oppenheimer and Isidor I. Rabi. Christopher John Bright returns us to the late 1950s, when nuclear antiaircraft missiles were distributed across the country. These devices showed up in films, on television programs (including an episode of Lassie), in children's plastic model kits, and in hairstyles. The book...

Stalin—Roosevelt—Churchill: the Big Three through the wartime correspondence

Stalin—Roosevelt—Churchill: the Big Three through the wartime correspondence

"Fear Was Not in Him": The Civil War Letters of Major General Francis C. Barlow, U.S.A., and: The Boy General: The Life and Careers of Francis Channing Barlow (review)

Reviewed by: “Fear Was Not in Him”: The Civil War Letters of Major General Francis C. Barlow, U.S.A., and: The Boy General: The Life and Careers of Francis Channing Barlow D. Scott Hartwig “Fear Was Not in Him”: The Civil War Letters of Major General Francis C. Barlow, U.S.A. Edited by Christian G. Samito. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004). Pp. 247. Cloth, $55.00.) The Boy General: The Life and Careers of Francis Channing Barlow. By Richard F. Welch. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003. Pp. 301. Paper, $24.95.) At first glance, Francis Channing Barlow was an easy man to underestimate. Clean-shaven in an era where most men wore facial hair and looking like a lad barely out of his teens, Barlow offered no outward appearance of the fiber within. Except for his eyes, which were penetrating and strong and suggested that he was a man of enormous self-confidence and one who did not suffer fools kindly. Few volunteer soldiers of the Civil War achieved the success that Barlow did, rising from a private in 1861 to major general in 1865. His upbringing was hardly that of a future warrior. Raised by his mother, Barlow spent his formative years among the educated and cultured of society. He graduated as class valedictorian in 1855 from Harvard University and embarked on a career in law in New York City. Those who knew him were struck by his keen mind and frank and often painfully blunt personality. He also possessed a fearlessness that prompted one young man who knew him [End Page 308] to write, "I think I never knew anyone so perfectly without fear of personal injury" (Welch, 27). When the war broke out, Barlow immediately left his successful law practice and enlisted as a private in the 12th New York Volunteers, a three-month regiment. Within a short time he was a lieutenant, although by his own admission, he wrote, "I confess I understand but little of an officer in battle" (Welch, 36). But Barlow was a quick learner. When the 12th New York mustered out, he reenlisted immediately, this time as lieutenant colonel of the 61st New York. The men of the regiment soon learned that Barlow was their true commander, and an exacting one. At Seven Pines, in the Seven Days battles, and at Antietam, where he was severely wounded, Barlow proved himself as a soldier and earned his general's star. He led the Eleventh Corps division at Gettysburg, where he was again severely wounded. After recovering from his Gettysburg wound, he returned to command a division of the Second Corps throughout the 1864 Virginia campaign. By the end of the war, he was a major general and perhaps the most distinguished volunteer soldier in the Army of the Potomac. Barlow returned to New York and civilian life after the war, resuming his law practice and entering the political arena, first as U.S. marshal of southern district New York and then as attorney general of New York state. While his uncompromising principle and blunt manner rendered him unsuited for the diplomacy of politics, he proved the nemesis of greed and corruption, taking on William Marcy Tweed and his powerful and corrupt Tammany Hall organization with the same fearlessness with which he led his regiment's assault at Antietam. It is remarkable for a man of Barlow's accomplishments that aside from the New York Monuments Commission, In Memoriam: Francis Channing Barlow, 1834-1896 (Albany: J. B. Lyons Company, 1923), he has had no biographer. The two books reviewed here have at last given him the attention he deserves. The first, Christian Samito's "Fear Was Not in Him," consists of Barlow's wartime correspondence from May 2, 1861, to July 19, 1864, the latter date only ten days before his wife, Arabella, died of typhoid fever. This devastating event shook the seemingly imperturbable Barlow and contributed largely to a decline in his health that forced him to take a leave of absence from the army, which lasted until March 1865. Samito has done a marvelous job of editing the letters and has further complemented them with a fine...

Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments

Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front: Wartime Experiences, Postwar Adjustments explores the North's Civil War in ways that brings fresh perspectives to our knowledge of the way soldiers and civilians interacted in the Civil War North. Northerners rarely confronted the hardships their southern counterparts faced, but they still found the war a challenging event that to varying degrees would re-shape and transform their old comfortable assumptions about their lives. Having given up their sons to save the Union, they craved information and followed the progress of the companies and regiments that they had sent off to fight. At the same time, their soldier boys never fully severed their ties with home, even as the rigors of war made them rougher versions of their old selves. The home front and the front lines remained intimately connected. This book expands our understanding of those connections.The authors of the essays in this volume bring new and different approaches to some familiar topics while offering answers to some questions that other scholars have ignored for too long. They explore such varied experiences as recruitment, soldiers' motivation, civilian access to the combat experience, wartime correspondence, benevolence and organized relief, race relations, definitions of freedom and citizenship, and ways civilians interacted with soldiers who sojourned in their communities. It is important that they do not stop with the end of the fighting, but also explore such postwar problems as the reintegration of soldiers into northern life and the claims to public memory, including those made by African Americans. Taken as a whole, the essays in Union Soldiers and the Northern Home Front provide a better understanding of the larger scope and depth of wartime events experienced by both civilians and soldiers and of the ways those events nurtured the enduring connections between those who fought and those who remained at home. In that regard, the essays go to the very heart of the Civil War experience.

Within their sphere? Women Correspondents to Aberdeen Daily Newspapers 1900-1914

This research provides an insight into the motivations and agenda of women correspondents to Aberdeen local newspapers during the period 1900-18. This was achieved by undertaking a content analysis of all printed letters to the editor identified as being by women correspondents to the Aberdeen Daily Journal and Aberdeen Free Press. Women correspondents were identified by their signatures, feminine noms de plume or the content of their letters. Whilst it is accepted that this method must of necessity have excluded some women correspondents who did not wish to reveal their gender, this research focused exclusively on correspondents who were willing to be identified as female in their correspondence to the newspapers. In this way, it was hoped to identify the issues which impelled women out of their domestic and private sphere and into the more public sphere of newspaper debate. The two Aberdeen newspapers were also well suited for this research because of their lack of editorial gatekeeping, with little censorship of letters discerned, even in wartime. However, a lack of editorial censorship did not mean that women correspondents faced no barriers to the publication of their opinions in the newspapers. Women correspondents had to overcome social conventions, including possibly the disapproval of friends and family, in order to enter the world of public debate. The research identified particular issues about which it was acceptable for women to correspond to the newspapers and particular women who were allowed to debate these issues. Middle-class women engaged in philanthropic and charitable work, especially that related to women and children or, during the First World War, the war effort, felt justified in writing to the newspapers in order to publicise such activities. Women also justified correspondence to the newspapers on certain matters by claiming that they came under woman's jurisdiction in the domestic sphere. Many women further justified their correspondence on such matters by using pen names which emphasised their domestic and maternal role, such as `Mother' or `Wife'. Such correspondence tended to be proactive rather than reactive to other material in the newspapers, which is in direct contrast to the findings of previous researchers into the motivation of newspaper correspondents. Interestingly, the research discovered that women correspondents' use of noms de plume increased from 1900 until the outbreak of the First World War. While some women used pen names to emphasise their familial role, others used them in a much more straightforward way - in order to protect their identity while writing on contentious subjects. Such subjects included controversial issues such as woman suffrage and the sexual double standards of early 2e century Britain. However, even the most militant suffragette justified her demand for a vote by emphasising woman's difference from man. Such correspondents preferred to enlarge the woman's sphere to include social commentary and electoral privilege rather than step outside it altogether. The research also investigated differences between the two newspapers and between pre-war and wartime correspondence. It is suggested that the Daily Journal attracted more letters from `domestic' women on issues related to a more narrowly defined `woman's sphere' while the Free Press's correspondents included more New Women. In addition, the Journal received more letters from women based in England or further afield, for example the colonies, while the Free Press tended to receive letters from women within Scotland. Women's wartime correspondence was dominated by the war effort, which swept most other topics of correspondence off the letters pages, although the later years of the war saw an increase in letters of complaint, usually aimed at increasing bureaucracy and again making use of familial pen names. Such findings contribute to the broader history of the media and women's studies in the northeast of Scotland, and indicate a broadening and nationalising of interest throughout the early 20th century, and the beginning of an accompanying weakening of local, regional links.

American Women in a World at War

Early in 1943, Max Lerner, the well-known author and journalist, writing for the New York newspaper PM, pre dicted that when the classic work on the history of women comes to be written, the biggest force for change in their lives will turned out to have been With the renewed interest in American women's history that has occurred over the last quarter century, most historians interested in women and World War II have addressed the implication of Lerner's statement by asking the question Did World War II serve as a major force for change in the lives of American Our reading of approximately thirty thousand letters written by more than fifteen hundred women representing a broad cross-section ofthe wartime population has led us to conclude that the events of World War II did indeed have a dramatic and far-reaching effect on the lives of American women. For more than a decade, we have been engaged in a nationwide effort to locate, collect, and publish the wartime correspondence of American women. Our search began in the late 1980s as we were making the final revisions for a book, Miss You: The World War II Letters of Barbara Wooddall Taylor and Charles E. Taylor (1990), which was based on thousands of pages of correspondence between a young war bride and her soldier husband. We found the Taylors' letters to be extremely powerful documents, chronicling a grand story of romance, making do, and growing up during wartime. We were convinced that Taylor's story was similar to those of other women during the war. But how could we be sure? While conducting the research for Miss You, we learned that the letters written by men in combat had often been carefully preserved by loved ones, donated to military and university archives, and made into many books. But what had happened to the billions of letters written by American women? No one seemed to have an adequate answer to this question. During the early stages of our search for the missing letters, many of our colleagues and friends discouraged us from taking on this challenge because of the perceived wisdom that few, if any, letters written by American women had survived the vicissitudes ofthe war and the postwar years. After all, it was well known that men in combat were under orders not to keep personal materials such as diaries and letters. Moreover, we were repeatedly warned that should we locate letters written by women, they would include little, if any, significant commentary because of strict wartime censorship regulations. Others discounted our effort, arguing that women's letters would contain only trivial bits of information about the war years. Yet the historical detective in each of us was not persuaded by these arguments. In the spring of 1988, we intensified our search for women's wartime correspondence by devising a brief author's query re questing information from anyone who had knowledge about letters written by American women during the Second World War. We sent the query to every daily newspaper in the United States?about fifteen hundred newspapers in all?and requested that the query be printed on the letters-to-the-editor page. Much to our delight, newspapers throughout the United States com plied. Very shortly thereafter, wartime letters from across the United States began to pour into our offices. We soon realized that we had struck a gold mine of information. We supplemented our author's query to the nation's newspa pers with more than five hundred letters of inquiry to magazines and newsletters specializing in issues of concern to women, World War II veterans, and minorities. We wrote letters about our search to every state historical society and to dozens of research and university libraries. In an effort to locate the correspondence of African American women, we solicited the advice of prominent black historians, surveyed archives specializing in African Ameri can history, and sent out a special appeal to five hundred predomi nately black churches around the nation. In total, we have written more than twenty five hundred letters of inquiry. We often

"Never Leave Me": The Wartime Correspondence of Peg and George Edwards, 1944 to 1945

"Never Leave Me": The Wartime Correspondence of Peg and George Edwards, 1944 to 1945

The complete wartime correspondence of Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra: April 1914-March 1917

Introduction The Nicky - Sunny Correspondence Appendix I: Name and Term Identifier Appendix II: Table of Ranks as of 1914 Bibliography Biographical Index

Dear Miye: Letters Home from Japan, 1939-1946 (review)

Reviewed by: Dear Miye: Letters From Japan, 1939–1946 Thomas Y. Fujita Rony Dear Miye: Letters From Japan, 1939–1946. By Mary Kimoto Tomita. Edited, with an introduction and notes, by Robert G. Lee. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Dear Miye: Letters Home From Japan, 1939–1946 was of such exceptional merit that it won an outstanding book award from the Association for Asian American Studies in 1996. It was well deserved. Editor Robert Lee’s introduction provides a concise and informative background for the remainder of the text, the “innermost thoughts and feelings” of a young Mary Kimoto. (p. vii) Kimoto’s correspondence to her friend Miye Yamasaki, and later with another United States-born nisei, Kay Oka, provide a fascinating, and often passionate firsthand description of Japanese, American, and Japanese American society from “over there.” 1 Kimoto, an United States citizen and raised in rural California, went to the country of her parents after graduating from junior college. She wanted to see the sights, meet the family she knew only from letters and secondhand stories, and learn something of Japanese culture. She also went to escape temporarily the grim economic realities faced by even college-educated nisei under segregation, a point emphasized by her having to work as a domestic to raise the money to go abroad. After a two-year stay, she was returning to the United States when war broke out; her ship turned back to Yokohama, trapping her in Japan for the duration. Kimoto went back to college, and kept on writing down her thoughts, although she could no longer send them to her friend Miye due to the war. It was during this period that her correspondence with another nisei trapped in [End Page 112] Japan, Kay Oka, blossomed. When the war ended, Kimoto was able to work for the American Red Cross and the occupation forces, and was also able to resume her correspondence with her family in the United States and with Miye. After two years, Mary Kimoto succeeded in claiming the United States citizenship that was her birthright, despite the official assumptions to the contrary, and went home, eventually marrying and taking the name Mary Kimoto Tomita. The book is divided into four sections and a brief epilogue that brings the reader up to the present. The first section consists of the author’s preface and that of the editor, the latter of which spells out the logic used in editing the voluminous and highly personal correspondence. It also informs the reader that the wartime section is largely based on an essay written by Kimoto in 1947, because the wartime correspondence to Kay Oka was burned in an air raid, along with journals and the accumulated letters Kimoto was unable to send Miye. The prefaces are followed by an introductory essay that locates the experience of the author in terms of the social and cultural history of the time, the place of Dear Miye within extant scholarship, and addresses some of the intellectual issues the work raises. This is followed by “The Prewar Letters, 1939–1941” (pp. 23–139), “The ‘Dear Kay’ Letters, 1941–1945” (pp. 141–156), and the largest portion of the work, “The Postwar Letters, 1945–1946” (pp. 157–387). Dear Miye, as the introduction notes, is a “countermemory, which is to say, a trace of the resistant strain that ruptures the continuity of official history.” (p. 4) What Kimoto’s letters show best is that people make the world they live in, and that the rules, codes, and laws they live by are neither “natural” nor necessarily logical. Like Transforming the Past (1985) by Yanagisako, Dear Miye exposes these often assumed “truths” to analysis. 2 Structures of domination and ligitimation contain contradictions that lie uneasily, always able to erupt into the smooth flow of hegemonic processes. Individuals like Mary Kimoto take those contradictions for starting points in their resistance to being “realistic” or following the common sense of the time. Growing up in rural California, and in Japan, Kimoto withstood the intense pressures faced by a minority person with few resources and many handicaps of gender, race, nativity, class, and economics. Although a self-described “unworldly young...

‘So I married again’: Letters from British Widows of the First and Second World Wars

This paper is based on an archive of almost eight thousand letters, based at Staffordshire University and known as the War Widows Archive: The Iris Strange Collection. The overwhelming majority of the letters are from widows of the Second World War but there are also over three hundred from First-World-War widows. In addition, there are hundreds of press cuttings charting the nineteen-year campaign which British war widows fought to obtain better pension provision; official correspondence; various service organization journals; war widows' journals from other countries; verse written by war widows; photographs; and a wartime diary kept by a British prisoner of the Japanese during his captivity. The archive has been arranged by subject for example, letters can be found under the heading 'pensions', and press cuttings are arranged chronologically. More detailed cataloguing will be undertaken at a future date. The letters may only be cited anonymously as some of the correspondents are still living and the various war widows' organizations are still functioning. Some of the older material is fragile, therefore access is limited to those actively engaged in research. (Application to consult the archive should be made in writing to Debbie Roberts, Tutor Librarian in the School of Arts, Staffordshire University Library, College Road, Stoke-on-Trent, ST4 2XW.) The widows' letters were all written in the years between 1971 and 1992 to one person, a woman called Iris Strange. She was a war widow whose husband, Bob, was taken prisoner after the fall of Singapore in 1942 and died in captivity. The archive also contains their wartime correspondence as well as Iris Strange's unfinished autobiography. After her husband's death Iris Strange, and many other war widows who felt resentment at the harsh treatment meted out to them by successive governments, tried to get their voices heard by writing to individual MPs, newspapers, service organizations, even the Queen. It was to no avail. When Iris approached her MP during the 1950s, he told her there were thousands worse off than her and to stop complaining. As successive post-war governments refused to release the names of war widows it was difficult, without publicity, for them to find each other. This left them isolated and powerless. By contrast, the Australian government released the names of Australian war widows in 1945 enabling the War Widows Guild of Australia to be formed immediately after the war; consequently they became a powerful lobby group and soon secured excellent pension provision for their members. As the country began to recover from the devastating effects of the Second World War during the 1950s and 60s very little improved for British war widows. The average age of a Second-World-War widow was twenty-three years and the pension

John A. Quitman: Old South Crusader (review)

86CIVIL war history dreamed ofmartial glory, and he sought to make the dream reality through a Military Academy education. Long in advance of his June 1860 graduation , he came to view the secession crisis as a morality play. Southerners were defenders of the faith, upholders ofthose principles upon which the nation had been founded. Yankees were infidels or heretics, and abolitionists agents of Satan. Eager for the Apocalypse, he did not wait for the shelling ofFort Sumter before resigning his U.S. Army commission. In brief order he rose from lieutenant of Confederate artillery to colonel of the Forty-ninth North Carolina Infantry. His aptitude as administrator, drillmaster, and tactician brought him brigade command late in 1862 and a division under Early in May 1864. On virtually every field diat drew die Army of Northern Virginia—especially Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania—he won plaudits for his gallant bearing and adroit leadership , while his desire to seek the forefront of action brought him three wounds. His few less-than-satisfactory performances could be attributed to the flawed strategy ofhis superiors or to his inexperience in a new grade or position. As a warrior, Ramseur cuts an impressive path through this book, but rarely does he come to life as a human being. To a large extent the author attempts to characterize him through his prewar and wartime correspondence with relatives and friends and with Ellen Richmond Ramseur, whom he wed in October 1863 and who gave birth to dieir only child short days before his mortal wounding at Cedar Creek. But Ramseur's prose—replete as it is with the most fulsome embattled-Soudierner clichés—does not portray a man so much as a personification ofa region, a society, and an era. By his unswerving adherence to the secessionist ethos, his fervid defense of slavery, his unquestioning condemnation of Northern society and national politicians, and his determination to equate Confederate military success with the Tightness of die Soudiern cause, Ramseur leaves die reader wondering ifhe ever entertained an original thought. Even in his letters to his bride he hides behind jingoistic rhetoric. Despite the authors extensive research and pleasing style, his subject lacks fullness, depth, and dimension. Take away the gilt-spangled uniform, the trappings of Rebel royalty, and Dod Ramseur vanishes. Edward G. Longacre Headquarters Strategic Air Command fohnA. Quitman: Old South Crusader. By Robert E. May. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Pp. xviii, 465. Paperback $19.95; hardback $40.00.) John A. Quitman, governor and state legislator of Mississippi, congressman , judical and military leader, has long deserved a first-rate biography. Robert E. May at Purdue University has written the most complete and book reviews87 thorough account of Quitman's life based upon extensive Quitman papers and odier manuscripts, printed primary sources and newspapers, and secondary sources confined primarly to broader topics of Southern history. Actually, few authors have attempted to grapple with Quitman, the man and his career and its implications. May's primary concerns are to explain Quitman's radicalization and to describe his contribution to Southern secessionism, because it is in this particular area that the author believes Quitman deserves fundamental attention. Although Quitman was a transplanted Yankee who came to Natchez at age twenty-two, he very quickly became an insider among Mississippi's elite society. Three years after his arrival, his marriage to Eliza Turner, who was from a wealthy Mississippi family, made him a member of the plantation gentry. In less than a decade, Quitman was elected to the state legislature. Politically, he identified widi the John Quincy Adams wing of the Republican party and did not endorse states rights until the early 1830s, first as a states rights Whig and later as a Democrat. May, therefore, strongly disagrees with William L. Barney who tends to think diat Quitman's political radicalism resulted from a need to prove himself to his fellow Mississippians because ofhis Northern roots. From the time diat Quitman became John C. Calhoun's protégé during the nullification crisis in South Carolina until his deadi less dian three years before the Civil War, Quitman, according to May, was both an American nationalist and a Southern...

Stephen Dodson Ramseur, Lee's Gallant General (review)

book reviews85 saluting, drilling, and spit-and-polish discipline were not exactly the norm in Sherman's army. For instance, there was a hungry member of the Seventeenth Ohio who, in the midst ofan assault preparation, interrupted the colonel's instructions with a request: "Colonel, I want to charge by way ofthat turnip patch." Experience, mutual respect, and indeed, a camaraderie between officers and men contributed to a sense of self-reliance and self-confidence that made Sherman's army one of the very best that the United States has ever put in the field. Glatthaar quotes heavily from his sources, believing that "to strip the ideas from the manner in which an individual presented them would be, in many cases, an injustice to both the soldiers and the reader." The author probes many facets ofthe character of Sherman's troops. Why they fought, whether for the Union, abolition, or adventure; their attitudes toward, and relations with Southerners, black and white; the daily life in camp and on the march, foraging and pillaging—all diese are reflected in the words of numerous soldiers. The reviewer might question whether some generalizations are warranted from the evidence presented. Occasionally die author seems to accept accounts uncritically, particularly comments of soldiers about their experiences with and attitudes toward blacks. There is no new interpretation here of Sherman or his total-war concept. But overall, this book is a good one. It is interesting and makes a contribution to Civil War historiography , especially in bringing out that Sherman's army was different from the Army of the Potomac, and in developing the story of the common soldier in the Western Theater ofthe war through his own words. James Lee McDonough Nashville, Tennessee Stephen Dodson Ramseur, Lee's Gallant General. By Gary W Gallagher. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. Pp. 232. $19.95.) Douglas Southall Freeman, who conferred sainthood on so many of Lee's lieutenants, found few soldiers more worthy of his admiration than Stephen D. Ramseur (1837-64). Fearless and clear-headed in battle, able to fire and inspire his troops, with an eye for terrain and a sure grasp of tactics at the brigade and divisional level, Ramseur displayed the highest qualities of Confederate leadership. With the support of Lee, Stonewall Jackson, A. E Hill, Jubal Early, and other superiors, he advanced steadily in rank and responsibility, becoming the youngest West Pointer to attain a CSA major generalship. From earliest days, "Dod" Ramseur embodied the social and political ideals ofhis homeland. Scion ofan upper middle-class family from Lincolnton , North Carolina, he grew up fair of face, erect in bearing, sure in the saddle, true of aim, sharp of intellect, and devout of faith. As a youth he 86CIVIL war history dreamed ofmartial glory, and he sought to make the dream reality through a Military Academy education. Long in advance of his June 1860 graduation , he came to view the secession crisis as a morality play. Southerners were defenders of the faith, upholders ofthose principles upon which the nation had been founded. Yankees were infidels or heretics, and abolitionists agents of Satan. Eager for the Apocalypse, he did not wait for the shelling ofFort Sumter before resigning his U.S. Army commission. In brief order he rose from lieutenant of Confederate artillery to colonel of the Forty-ninth North Carolina Infantry. His aptitude as administrator, drillmaster, and tactician brought him brigade command late in 1862 and a division under Early in May 1864. On virtually every field tiiat drew die Army of Northern Virginia—especially Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, the Wilderness, Spotsylvania—he won plaudits for his gallant bearing and adroit leadership , while his desire to seek the forefront of action brought him three wounds. His few less-than-satisfactory performances could be attributed to the flawed strategy ofhis superiors or to his inexperience in a new grade or position. As a warrior, Ramseur cuts an impressive path through this book, but rarely does he come to life as a human being. To a large extent the author attempts to characterize him through his prewar and wartime correspondence with relatives and friends and with Ellen Richmond Ramseur, whom he...

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The Hoover-Wilson Wartime Correspondence: September 24, 1914, to November 11, 1918

The Hoover-Wilson Wartime Correspondence: September 24, 1914, to November 11, 1918

Myron C. Taylor's Mission to the Vatican 1940–1950

The mission of Myron C. Taylor, personal representative of Presidents Roosevelt and Truman to Pope Pius XII, remains a strange anomaly in the history of the foreign relations of the United States. Ever since 1867, when an act of Congress terminated diplomatic relations between the republic and the world's oldest diplomatic entity, the United States had been unrepresented at the Vatican City. The short-lived attempt to reconstitute some form of permanent and effective diplomatic presence was born in controversy and lasted only from 1940 to 1950 during the incumbency of the single appointee. When on Taylor's resignation President Truman attempted to appoint a popular second world war general to the post, the outcry in the United States was so heated that the nomination had to be withdrawn and the venture abandoned. What went wrong? Was the storm of protest merely a result of religious bigotry on the part of American Protestantism? Or had Taylor's conduct of his mission been such as to evoke these outraged feelings? Certain episodes of the diplomatic negotiations between the United States and the Vatican have already been published, for example, the polite exchange of courtesies collected and introduced by Taylor himself, Wartime Correspondence between President Roosevelt and Pope Pius XII. Some more controversial matters, such as the question of the advisability of bombing Rome, were outlined from the American point of view in the Foreign Relations of the United States. Not until the Vatican's recent decision to publish some of its papers from the pontificate of Pius XII, or more particularly until the opening of Taylor's own papers in 1973, has it been possible to study in more detail the curious entanglement of theological, diplomatic and political considerations which governed the United States' relations with the Vatican, and encompassed Taylor's mission from beginning to end.

The Hoover-Wilson Wartime Correspondence: September 24, 1914, to November 11, 1918

The Hoover-Wilson Wartime Correspondence: September 24, 1914, to November 11, 1918