War Work Research Articles

Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark A. Lause

Reviewed by: Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class by Mark A. Lause Frank Towers (bio) Free Labor: The Civil War and the Making of an American Working Class. By Mark A. Lause. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Pp. 275. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $28.00.) Writing a history of American labor in the Civil War era is a daunting task given the momentous changes wrought by war and emancipation and the division of the workforce by race, gender, skill, and ethnicity. Taking [End Page 454] up the challenge, Mark Lause interprets the Civil War as a defeat for the promise of a genuinely egalitarian and inclusive labor movement. Civil War workers fought against not only slavery but also wage-paying employers and their government allies. Although workers shared a commitment to free labor, the “elasticity” of the term meant that no single agenda or organizing strategy guided their efforts (xiii). Lause views the question of how to fight for free labor as equally important as debates over its meaning. Confronted with systematic discrimination, unskilled, non-white, and female workers opted for radical measures like the strike, which relied on worker solidarity, whereas skilled white men who worried more about retaining existing privileges pursued a politics of respectability that emphasized moral suasion and alliances with politicians and bosses. The triumph of respectability at war’s end did lasting damage to the promise of free labor for all. Northern workers “took up arms because they understood the importance of the conflict in shaping the future value of ‘free labor,’” and a “rolling strike of the slaves” in the South became “the great incontrovertible and irreversible fact of the war” (41, 57). While many slave-state trade union leaders left the Confederacy, northern unskilled workers—often recent immigrants—led strikes and draft protests. Compared to prewar militancy, these actions were larger, more violent, and exhibited greater “bitterness” (70). Although fighting slavery, the United States government opposed the militant strategies pursued by slaves and unskilled immigrants. It “used ethnicity to conjure a difference between the respectable conduct and the riotous, violent and subversive means unworthy of how Americans did things” (80). Describing U.S. general William Rosecrans’s antilabor stance during his command of St. Louis, Lause argues that he “sounded no different than his Confederate counterparts at Richmond,” who summarily broke strikes and conscripted labor organizers (124). Despite hostile treatment from the Lincoln administration, northern labor supported Republicans over the Democrats, who “did not speak the language of labor” (152). This alliance drew white workers toward political reform at the expense of more radical methods and broader solidarity. Partnering with Republican proponents of respectability “created a situation in which the leaders of the most successful and secure unions could become as invested as the employers in avoiding conflicts that might lead to strikes” (169–70). Tracing a line from the wartime victory of respectability over militancy to Samuel Gompers’s American Federation of Labor, which concentrated on narrow questions of wages and hours and limited organizing to skilled [End Page 455] white men, Lause concludes that “American institutions shaped the kind of labor organizations that could behave in such a way as to cooperate in their own marginalization in the lives of the nation and its workers” (182). Lause’s attempt to integrate the history of labor in the Union and the Confederacy has great potential, as does his big argument about strategy and the postwar trajectory of American labor. Unfortunately, the book leaves these as suggestive ideas rather than rigorously argued proofs. The analysis needs more primary source documentation and more engagement with recent secondary literature. Despite the book’s claim to be a breakthrough in inclusive history, it focuses primarily on the elite of skilled white men active in trades unions, especially typographers. Printers had influence as communicators, but their numbers were smaller than those of the iron molders, shoemakers, miners, and other industrial craft workers who organized during the Civil War. A strike by the former irritated partisan newspaper editors, but collective action by the latter could cripple the war effort. Meanwhile, despite the book’s argument about political engagement, it says...

The Tyranny of Doctrine and Modern Strategy: Small (and Large) States in a Double Bind

ABSTRACTThe formation of doctrine and strategy is usually regarded as the exclusive province of the major powers. Small states and their militaries have little choice but to conform. This article, however, argues that small, developed states possess an unprecedented opportunity independently to form doctrine and pursue strategy. The reasons are a worldwide trend of devolution in political power and a concomitant democratisation of violence and reduction in the scale of military means and conflict. However, seizing this opportunity is powerfully constrained by the tyranny of outmoded ideas of how war and strategy work.

Some Thoughts on Mary Elizabeth Massey

Some Thoughts on Mary Elizabeth Massey Joan E. Cashin (bio) How do we assess the paradox of Mary Elizabeth Massey? Her academic career combined original research, high productivity, perseverance, and some deeply conventional social and political attitudes. Born in 1915 in Morrillton, Arkansas, she obtained her doctorate in 1947 at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill under the guidance of Fletcher Green. For most of her career, she taught at Winthrop College in South Carolina. Despite a heavy teaching load, she published three monographs when many historians went their entire careers without publishing one, and she published quickly, with three books emerging between 1952 and 1966: Ersatz in the Confederacy, Refugee Life in the Confederacy, and Bonnet Brigades. Moreover, she was a woman in a profession dominated by men, and before her death in 1974, she never quite received the recognition she was due. Since her death, all of her books have been reissued, and most scholars now acknowledge that she was a pioneer of American social history.20 Massey was a dedicated researcher and a very talented writer. She examined an enormous array of primary sources, and she created richly detailed narratives written in clear, readable prose. She was also daring in her choice of [End Page 409] topics. In Bonnet Brigades, she focused on women’s lives when few historians did so; she addressed subjects that most historians shied away from until the 1980s—such as sexuality, adultery, and prostitution—and she discussed female soldiers in both armies, a topic largely ignored by scholars until the 1990s. Ersatz in the Confederacy anticipated the current interest in material culture and the physical environment, the chapter titles reading like today’s research agenda: “Food and Drink,” “Clothing,” and “Housing and Household Goods.” Refugee Life, published in 1964, is probably her best monograph. She covered not just refugees but civilians in general—urban life, medicine, crime, journalism, and other subjects. She presented well-crafted capsule biographies of individual women, such as Kate Stone of Louisiana, and how they experienced their peregrinations. Massey’s war was a saga of adventure, misadventure, and suffering. When it ended, she observed, refugees, like soldiers, had been “away ‘at war.’”21 Yet Massey repeated one of the war’s hoariest myths: that of the white southern people united behind the Confederate cause. Her native state, Arkansas, and the state where she earned her doctorate, North Carolina, contained many unionists, but in her books she did not discuss the war’s causes or why anyone would oppose the conflict. In Ersatz in the Confederacy, she conflated the words “southern” and “Confederate,” giving scant attention to white southern unionists; although she stated that she deliberately excluded them from Refugee Life, they pop up sporadically in the narrative, anyway. (What would Freud say?) In Bonnet Brigades, she argued that most white southern women supported secession, and that after 1861 all of them wanted to support the C.S.A. Pro-Union spies, such as Pauline Cushman, rate a few pages, but Massey did not treat unionists as a distinct group with their own history. Nor did she follow through on her own findings that a substantial number of whites in both regions opposed the war effort.22 Her work on gender is filled with similar tensions and contradictions. In Bonnet Brigades, which included northern and southern women, she seemed fascinated by unorthodox, resilient figures such as Anna Dickinson and Elizabeth Meriwether. When she declared that southerners and northerners had a great deal in common, she obviously meant white women. She [End Page 410] devoted one chapter to black women, including Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman, whom she praised for their war work, yet she wrote that slave women were “indifferent” to their children and “welcomed” emancipation until they realized it carried “greater responsibilities” than those they knew as slaves. (Truth’s “Arn’t I a Woman” speech, which Massey did not cite, fully expressed her grief for the children she lost while enslaved in New York.) The black southern woman “gained relatively more” from the war than her northern counterpart, Massey finally conceded. The generalizations about slave women, coupled with her grudging acknowledgment of the great achievement of...

Wartime Ideology in “The Thimble”: A Comparative Study of Popular Wartime Romance and the Anti-romance of D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence detested war enthusiasm and did not wish to participate in any war work during the First World War. He did not therefore contribute to the promulgation of the nation’s cause, unlike famous British writers such as Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, who willingly met at Wellington House, the British War Propaganda Bureau. Lawrence particularly hated persons who strove to arouse jingoistic feelings in the public, such as David Lloyd George and Horatio B...

Reading as war effort: the National Home Reading Union during the First World War

Soon after the outbreak of the First World War, the National Home Reading Union (NHRU), a British educational organisation concerned with guiding working-class and middle-class readers in their reading practices and choices, issued a pamphlet with advice on reading in wartime. An enthusiastic appeal to readers in Britain and to members of the Union to keep up their reading and study as they had done before the outbreak of the War, the address also stressed that the right kind of reading was now, in times of conflict, more important than ever before. This article considers the ways in which the NHRU redefined the everyday practice of reading as a crucial part of the war effort during the First World War. By drawing on the Union's magazines and other publicity material, this article explores the changing meanings of reading during the First World War, paying attention to the larger discourse about reading, what constituted the right kind of reading, both in terms of practices and content, and how reading could be constructed as a productive activity that constituted active expressions of patriotism and citizenship. The cultural responses to the First World War and the importance of the printed word in times of conflict have received sustained scholarly attention, and current reappraisals of the cultural history of the First World War in light of its centenary have already contributed to a renewed interest in the war's intellectual history. Much of that scholarly attention has focussed on the ways in which the War acted as a prompt to writing and print considering the literary responses to the First World War, the production of texts during and after the conflict, and the role of writing for expressions of patriotism or dissent. Some scholars have begun to interrogate the reception of print and the reading practices of civilians and soldiers, highlighting that the War made reading more urgent and brought into sharper focus the need for reading for a variety of purposes. Readers read for relief, distraction and escape, and they also read for information, education, and to gain a sense of understanding of the world around them. Reading constituted an important mechanism for coming to terms with and living through a world at war, and readers in Britain and elsewhere in the British world participated in the War by knowing about it. This article extends current understandings of wartime reading and argues that through organisations such as the NHRU, the reading practices of civilians formed part of the war effort. Much of the NHRU's message during its 40-year existence concerned the effect of reading as steadying minds, increasing mental capacities and thus exercising a general, civilising influence. This rhetoric about the broader societal value of reading – everyday, general reading of fiction and non-fiction, though of the right kind – was emphasised during the War as especially important and urgent. Crucially, the NHRU framed reading as an act of duty and service. Placing the work of the NHRU within the broader scholarship on patriotic organisations and the war work of civilians, this article argues that the NHRU extended the concept of good citizenship to the practices of reading.

Facilitating workplace learning and change

Purpose– This study aims to describe the lectores (readers) who read the world news and works of literature to workers in pre-World War II cigar factories in Tampa, Florida, and in New York City. The paper addresses the need for more examination of some neglected aspects of workplace learning by presenting a more critical approach to workplace learning as a form of social change. It also focuses on the importance of the lectores’ role as facilitators of workplace learning and leaders of change.Design/methodology/approach– The paper is based on a qualitative analysis of archival data from libraries and research centers located in New York City and in Miami, Florida.Findings– Through the lectores, cigar factories were a place where workplace learning, organizational and social change occurred daily. As leaders, the lectores were radical agents of change and created affordances that shaped the factory workers’ workplace and personal learning. The discussion explores the dynamics between the lectores and the cigar workers.Practical implications– Findings from this study demonstrate that developing employees is not limited to elevating their knowledge and skills needed to increase productivity and organizational performance. As self-actualized employees are better contributors to organizations, they, along with facilitators of learning, must care about what workers intrinsically need and explicitly demand. The findings speak to the multifaceted nature of workplace learning, one that encompasses skill acquisition and one that transforms workers. In essence, learning facilitators elicit change.Originality/value– The research literature on workplace learning in the early part of the twentieth century in the USA is rare. This historical data-driven examination of the lectores and their role in factories presents a unique opportunity to focus on issues of social justice that are largely absent from human resource development discourse.

Christine E. Hallett. Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War

One hundred years on from the outbreak of the First World War, Christine E. Hallett is the leading authority on the many and varied nursing services who worked with the Allies from 1914 onward. This is a position she has earned gradually through the publication of a number of books and articles that draw on a broad professional knowledge, meticulous and detailed scholarly research, and many fascinating case studies, held together by a rich and lively prose style that keeps readers engaged throughout. Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War is her third book on the subject and is the most comprehensive to date. Until the publication of Hallett's first monograph, Containing Trauma: Nursing Work in the First World War (2009), readers wishing to find a good book on the history of military nursing were still directed to Anne Summers's comprehensive study, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses, 1854–1914 (1988). Although this is a valuable resource, it remains significantly limited in two major ways: the focus is on British women only, and the study ends in 1914 on the very brink of war. The First World War, perhaps the most important arena for the development of battlefield nursing, is, rather frustratingly, excluded. Containing Trauma began to address this as Hallett, whose considerable professional experience combines the roles of both nurse and historian, examined the work undertaken by women in this most devastating and liberating of conflicts. Hallett followed this in 2013 with a new collection (co-edited with Alison S. Fell), First World War Nursing: New Perspectives, which brought together both historians and literary scholars to examine the wealth of primary-source materials that give insight into this most challenging of experiences.

FRI-07 HOW A RECORDING COMPANY, A BAND AND A NOBEL LAUREATE DEVELOPED COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY

You have accessJournal of UrologyHistory of Urology Forum I1 Apr 2015FRI-07 HOW A RECORDING COMPANY, A BAND AND A NOBEL LAUREATE DEVELOPED COMPUTED TOMOGRAPHY Sutchin R. Patel, Nicholas A. Rotker, and Anthony A. Caldamone Sutchin R. PatelSutchin R. Patel More articles by this author , Nicholas A. RotkerNicholas A. Rotker More articles by this author , and Anthony A. CaldamoneAnthony A. Caldamone More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1016/j.juro.2015.02.485AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVES A Nobel laureate, one of the most important recording companies of the 20th century and one of the most influential musical groups of all time come together to develop computed tomography (CT). METHODS We reviewed the medical literature regarding the life of Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, the history of Electrical Musical Industries, Ltd (EMI) and The Beatles in reference to the development of CT. RESULTS During World War II EMI played a crucial role in the war effort working on radar systems for the allies. After the war, EMI would translate its electronic prowess into the recorded music business. In 1955 it would purchase Capitol Records and with the growth of the music industry in the 1950s, EMI would sign The Beatles. With the meteoric rise of The Beatles, EMI's profits rose 80% in their first year after signing The Beatles. Sir Godfrey Hounsfield, an English electrical engineer, served in the Royal Air Force during World War II as an instructor in radar mechanics. After the war he began his scientific career in 1951 working for EMI. He helped design and construct the first solid-state (transistor) computer in England in 1959. In 1967 Hounsfield began developing what would become the first CT-scanner. By directing x-ray beams through the body at 1 degree angles, with a detector rotating in tandem on the other side, he could measure the attenuation of the x-rays. These values were then analyzed via a mathematical algorithm to produce a 2-dimensional image of the slice of the body. Hounsfield worked with Jamie Ambrose, a radiologist, to conduct the first clinical CT-scan at Atkinson Morley Hospital in 1971 in a patient with a brain tumor. In 1971, EMI entered the medical equipment business marketing the CT-scanner using its previous sales from the recording industry (much of it due to The Beatles) to help finance its new venture. By 1976, the CT industry was booming and EMI could not produce enough CT-scanners to fill demand. In the end, as others would enter the CT market, EMI would have a hard day's night maintaining its monopoly and would eventually get back to the music industry. Allan MacLeod, a South African physicist, working independently of Hounsfield developed the same theory on how x-rays could be utilized to image the body. Both Hounsfield and MacLeod, neither of whom had a medical background, would win the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology for inventing the CT-scanner. CONCLUSIONS Let it be known that it was only yesterday when a recording company, a band and a radar scientist revolutionized medical imaging with the development of CT. [Bonus: Can you find the names of 7 Beatles songs hidden in this abstract?] © 2015 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 193Issue 4SApril 2015Page: e583-e584 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2015 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Sutchin R. Patel More articles by this author Nicholas A. Rotker More articles by this author Anthony A. Caldamone More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement Advertisement PDF DownloadLoading ...

Making War Work for Industry: The United Alkali Company's Central Laboratory During World War One

The creation of the Central Laboratory immediately after the United Alkali Company (UAC) was formed in 1890, by amalgamating the Leblanc alkali works in Britain, brought high expectations of repositioning the company by replacing its obsolete Leblanc process plant and expanding its range of chemical products. By 1914, UAC had struggled with few exceptions to adopt new technologies and processes and was still reliant on the Leblanc process. From 1914, the Government would rely heavily on its contribution to the war effort. As a major heavy-chemical manufacturer, UAC produced chemicals for explosives and warfare gases, while also trying to maintain production of many essential chemicals including fertilisers for homeland consumption. UAC's wartime effort was led by the Central Laboratory, working closely with the recently established Engineer's Department to develop new process pathways, build new plant, adapt existing plant, and produce the contracted quantities, all as quickly as possible to meet the changing battlefield demands. This article explores how wartime conditions and demands provided the stimulus for the Central Laboratory's crucial R&D work during World War One.

David Rees. 29 May 1918 — 16 August 2013

David Rees completed his Cambridge undergraduate studies in mathematics in summer 1939; in his first three months of postgraduate work in autumn 1939 he produced a characterization of completely 0-simple semigroups. War then intervened: he worked until the end of the war at Bletchley Park, the British codebreaking centre in Buckinghamshire, where he was part of a team that broke the Enigma code regularly for some critical months during 1940. After the war he first worked at Manchester University, but moved to Cambridge University in 1948. In the immediate postwar period, he continued with research into semigroups and non-commutative algebra. His first paper was very influential, and he is considered by semigroup theorists to be one of the founding fathers of their subject.

Rodney Hill. 11 June 1921 — 2 February 2011

Rodney Hill was born on 11 June 1921 in Leeds, and educated at Leeds Grammar School. He went up to Cambridge University in October 1939, with a Major Scholarship at Pembroke College. He graduated BA with first-class honours in 1942 in the Mathematical Tripos. Volunteering for war work immediately, he worked in full-time government service on ballistics in the Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory, and on the plasticity of metals in the Cavendish Laboratory. In 1943 he moved to the Armament Research Department at Fort Halstead in Kent, for three years. Here he was involved in, for example, the modelling of armour penetration by projectiles. This established his expertise in the Mathematical Theory of Plasticity, in which he became a world-recognized leader via the writing of a renowned book with that title (still in print after 60 years) and 170 research articles with eventually 26 collaborators. He had more than 10 research students. In 1963 he wrote a textbook, Principles of dynamics , based on his lectures to undergraduates. Subsequent appointments were at the British Iron and Steel Research Association in Sheffield, at Bristol University, and then as Professor of Applied Mathematics at Nottingham University (1953–62), and at Cambridge University. He retired in 1979 but continued with active research for more than another 20 years. Hill was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1961, whose Royal Medal he received in 1993. He received the Honorary Degree of DSc from the Universities of Manchester (1976) and Bath (1978). He was awarded the von Karman Medal of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1978, and the Panetti Medal of the Turin Academy in 1988. In 1982 The Rodney Hill 60th Anniversary Volume called Mechanics of solids was published, edited by H. G. Hopkins and M. J. Sewell. It contains 19 articles by 23 contributors in 693 pages. The Rodney Hill Prize in Solid Mechanics (US $25 000, at four-yearly intervals) has been established by Elsevier Ltd. It was awarded first in 2008 (Ortiz) and then in 2012 (Gao). A principal relaxation of Hill for 50 years was in extended botanical expeditions with his wife, Jeanne, in many parts of the English countryside, searching for, and identifying and recording, many species of wild flowers and fungi; and in the cultivation of a garden at home. Rodney Hill married Jeanne Wickens in 1945. She died in 2003. They had one daughter, Caroline, who survives them. Rodney died in Cambridge on 2 February 2011.

“My Poetry Has Two Lives, Like Any Exile”: A Conversation with Dunya Mikhail

10 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 photo : cary loren D unya Mikhail is a native Iraqi, forced to leave her home in 1996 to be able to write her poetry without censorship. Her sense of loss for her homeland permeates her writing. Published both in Arabic and English, her recent book, The Iraqi Nights (2014), reimagines what it means to be an exile. The cadence and subject of her poetry builds on her previous work in Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (2009) and The War Works Hard (2006). Mikhail began publishing poetry as a student at the University of Baghdad, where writers that resisted the governing regime through their work lived in a constant state of fear and retaliation. She started to rely heavily on the power of the metaphor to convey her politically charged thoughts to the reader. Mikhail’s poetry chips away at political and social Iraqi constructs to reveal the truth, and within it all she harbors a sense of hope—a prayer for Iraq. Sobia Khan: Dunya, your poetry centers on your experiences of the wars in Iraq and as an Iraqi exile. Can you speak a little more about your life experiences that you capture in your writing? Dunya Mikhail: I can tell you my life story briefly: I was born, I write poetry, I will die. But each of those three actions carries millions of details. The fact that I was born in Iraq, for example, means waking up every day to the sounds of sirens and explosions, the Tigris River and the cafés with masgouf fish and the tea with cardamom , the coffee shops for men only, playing soccer in the streets with the neighborhood kids, the University of Baghdad and skipping classes to continue discussions about art and poetry with other artists and writers , using metaphors to hide the true meanings from censors, the death of my father due to lack of medical treatment, exchanging our house for one-way tickets . . . Q&A My Poetry Has Two Lives, Like Any Exile” A Conversation with Dunya Mikhail by Sobia Khan “ WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 11 SK: As an exile living in the United States, your work continues to reflect your anxieties as an Iraqi. How do you use the medium of poetry to think through those anxieties, and has your writing changed in the nineteen years you have lived in the United States? DM: I think that the metaphors somehow returned to being their real things here. Did that ruin my poetry? Well, I think that my style of writing didn’t change, but I just don’t feel the need for extra layers of meaning for other purposes than the text itself as art. But my usage of the English language made me more sensitive toward my usage of Arabic. Trying to translate my own poem gives me a chance to distance myself somehow from the poem and try to understand it from the outside. The problem with this, however, is that I am free to change the original as much as I want to since it’s mine, and I often do. Some words and phrases come in English first due to their cultural connotation. My poetry has two lives, like any exile. SK: I am intrigued by how you equate your poetry as having two lives. Is there never the possibility of having a single life for an exile, and for your poetry? DM: The exile can’t resist taking a look back, like Orpheus. Trying to have one life for the exile is like a word in dictionary: it occupies one space but has other meanings and connotations. The here is an occasion that reminds us of there. SK: Your most recent book, The Iraqi Nights, uses historical literary archetypes and reinvents them. Can you say more about what you are trying to accomplish in The Iraqi Nights? DM: The Iraqi Nights has poems on multiple themes. For example, the title poem is comprised of seven sections that are supposedly written on seven walls. In Babylonian mythology, Inanna had to pass seven gates to find Tammuz so that he could play the magical flute. Inanna is the goddess of love and war...

Три интервью из собрания Фонда визуальной истории Шоа

The archival publication includes three detailed interviews with Holocaust survivors. Aleksandr Kasha, Marian Balaban, and Tewel Pruzanski were born in Poland. After the Soviet occupation of Eastern Poland in 1939, they were deported to the inner territories of the USSR: one as a political prisoner, one as an exile, and one as a labor migrant. The tragic circumstances of their exile allowed them to escape the Holocaust. Aleksandr Kasha spent the war working in Central Russia; after the war, he remained in the USSR. Marian Balaban joined the Polish army formed by General Władysław Anders against the vehement antisemitic pressure of Polish officers. He fought in Italy, was there on Victory Day, and eventually settled in the United States. Tewel Pruzanski fought in the Soviet Army against the Nazis. Dismayed by Polish guerrilla anti-Jewish terror after the war, he made his way to Germany posing as a German refugee, and eventually emigrated to Australia. Despite the differences in their individual biographies, their life experiences were quite representative of Polish Jews who voluntarily or forcibly were resettled to the Soviet Union, where, although they had to survive horrible living conditions and repressions, they escaped the fate of their neighbors and families who were left behind in Poland.

“My Poetry Has Two Lives, Like Any Exile”: A Conversation with Dunya Mikhail

10 WLT SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2015 photo : cary loren D unya Mikhail is a native Iraqi, forced to leave her home in 1996 to be able to write her poetry without censorship. Her sense of loss for her homeland permeates her writing. Published both in Arabic and English, her recent book, The Iraqi Nights (2014), reimagines what it means to be an exile. The cadence and subject of her poetry builds on her previous work in Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (2009) and The War Works Hard (2006). Mikhail began publishing poetry as a student at the University of Baghdad, where writers that resisted the governing regime through their work lived in a constant state of fear and retaliation. She started to rely heavily on the power of the metaphor to convey her politically charged thoughts to the reader. Mikhail’s poetry chips away at political and social Iraqi constructs to reveal the truth, and within it all she harbors a sense of hope—a prayer for Iraq. Sobia Khan: Dunya, your poetry centers on your experiences of the wars in Iraq and as an Iraqi exile. Can you speak a little more about your life experiences that you capture in your writing? Dunya Mikhail: I can tell you my life story briefly: I was born, I write poetry, I will die. But each of those three actions carries millions of details. The fact that I was born in Iraq, for example, means waking up every day to the sounds of sirens and explosions, the Tigris River and the cafés with masgouf fish and the tea with cardamom , the coffee shops for men only, playing soccer in the streets with the neighborhood kids, the University of Baghdad and skipping classes to continue discussions about art and poetry with other artists and writers , using metaphors to hide the true meanings from censors, the death of my father due to lack of medical treatment, exchanging our house for one-way tickets . . . Q&A My Poetry Has Two Lives, Like Any Exile” A Conversation with Dunya Mikhail by Sobia Khan “ WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 11 SK: As an exile living in the United States, your work continues to reflect your anxieties as an Iraqi. How do you use the medium of poetry to think through those anxieties, and has your writing changed in the nineteen years you have lived in the United States? DM: I think that the metaphors somehow returned to being their real things here. Did that ruin my poetry? Well, I think that my style of writing didn’t change, but I just don’t feel the need for extra layers of meaning for other purposes than the text itself as art. But my usage of the English language made me more sensitive toward my usage of Arabic. Trying to translate my own poem gives me a chance to distance myself somehow from the poem and try to understand it from the outside. The problem with this, however, is that I am free to change the original as much as I want to since it’s mine, and I often do. Some words and phrases come in English first due to their cultural connotation. My poetry has two lives, like any exile. SK: I am intrigued by how you equate your poetry as having two lives. Is there never the possibility of having a single life for an exile, and for your poetry? DM: The exile can’t resist taking a look back, like Orpheus. Trying to have one life for the exile is like a word in dictionary: it occupies one space but has other meanings and connotations. The here is an occasion that reminds us of there. SK: Your most recent book, The Iraqi Nights, uses historical literary archetypes and reinvents them. Can you say more about what you are trying to accomplish in The Iraqi Nights? DM: The Iraqi Nights has poems on multiple themes. For example, the title poem is comprised of seven sections that are supposedly written on seven walls. In Babylonian mythology, Inanna had to pass seven gates to find Tammuz so that he could play the magical flute. Inanna is the goddess of love and war...

The Mass-Clock and the Spy: The Catholicization of World War II

The religious history of World War II in the U.S. has long been dominated by the theme of pluralism. The trials of mobilization and battle fostered inter-religious cooperation. Against a backdrop of Nazi intolerance and godless communism, these collaborative experiences would, in the postwar years, help mute religious conflict and amplify a “Judeo-Christian” consensus. This framing, while compelling, has deflected attention from the distinctive modes with which religious Americans interpreted the war. The work of the National Catholic Community Service (the Catholic arm of the United Service Organizations) illustrates the ways Catholics framed the war as a religious matter. In seeking to build Catholic bridges across the separations of wartime, Catholics amplified the unique moral and spiritual means of their tradition. Two themes—sacramental presence and moral exceptionalism—dominated Catholics' efforts to Catholicize the war. Exploring these efforts reveals the religious arenas within which Catholic soldiers, war workers, and their families were invited to work out their sense of the war and their responsibilities as Catholics and Americans. The stories—often strikingly indifferent or even hostile to the pluralist “consensus”—shed new light on the war and on the history of religious difference in the U.S.

Introduction: War and Culture Studies–Blurred Boundaries and Complex Identities

A shorter introduction than is usual for a varia issue that incorporates five examples of the variety of articles which the JWACS has attracted in the course of this seventh volume. These varia issues, of which two have been included in this particular volume, aim to provide an opportunity for war and culture scholars to consider the broad range of research areas currently covered by the discipline. Those areas may often seem rather disparate, bound together only by an interest in, and a focus on, the effects of war on cultural production in various forms and in varied ways. However, as is always the case, on closer analysis there are intriguing hidden links and themes which flow from article to article, and which offer unexpected and rewarding insights into the broader scope of the work of war and culture studies. This time the recurrent themes are those of the blurred boundaries and complex identities which the experience of war and of its aftermath, of very different types of war and in very different places, produce for those experiencing them and for the ways in which those experiences are expressed. This issue moves forward chronologically, encompassing diverse geographical spaces, fulfilling the journal’s remit: from nineteenth-century South Africa with John McAleer on ‘“The eye of the artist”: Thomas Baines, the Eighth Cape Frontier War and the representation of warfare’; to Second World War London with Charlotte Charteris’s ‘Inside Julian Maclaren-Ross’s Closet: clothing as communication in wartime Britain’; and then to Second World War Germany in Roger Wood’s ‘The Referential and the Relational: Victor Klemperer’s Diaries in the Nazi Years’; and ending with two different aspects of a contemporary period which still turns its gaze back in time, returning once again to Britain and Germany with Peter Lowe’s ‘The Urge to Tell it Backwards: the Contemporary Poet and the Great War’ and finally Ian Roberts’s ‘The Return of the Hero? Contemporary German war films’. And what of these blurred boundaries and complex identities? Represented here in art, the novel, the diary, poetry, and film, they are those of the war artist’s complex witnessing of and relationship to people engaged in battle; the social outsider caught up in

Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897–1959

Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897–1959

“Roast Seagull and other Quaint Bird Dishes”

The accepted narrative of British press conduct during the First World War is highly negative. Commentators overwhelmingly agree that newspapers downplayed the horror of life in the trenches and afterwards were found to have published fabricated atrocity stories to encourage hatred of “the Hun” on a grand scale. Scholarly assessment of news coverage of women's involvement in war work is also predominantly negative, highlighting patronising and unrealistic portrayals of munitions workers and others. These narratives, however compelling, ignore sections of newspapers and other current affairs journals devoted to helping readers trying to feed families on restricted budgets with scant food, who were grieving for or caring for sons and husbands, and who were adjusting to bewildering disruptions to family life. The dominant historical narratives ignore the development of a previously unexamined form of “lifestyle” journalism and a genre of vivid features journalism focusing on lives on the “Home Front” and which helped undermine traditional boundaries between the domestic and public realms. This article asks whether “soft” genres of journalism actually better reflected the realities of wartime readers' lives, and better satisfied their need for information than propaganda-driven news pages. Assessing readers' responses to these different genres of journalism helps explain why readers can simultaneously mistrust and also enjoy their news media.

As you were in first world war nursing.

Nursing students dressed up in uniforms from 100 years ago to commemorate the contribution of healthcare workers in the first world war.

The Devotion of French Prisoners of War and Requisitioned Workers to Thérèse of Lisieux: Transcending the ‘Diocese behind Barbed Wire’

This article discusses the devotion of French prisoners of war and requisitioned workers to St Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897) in the period 1940–1945. Soon after her death Thérèse, who was canonized in 1925, attracted millions of devotees internationally. The material under review reveals that the example of Thérèse was both inspirational and consoling. Individuals and groups constructed a spiritual world, emotionally, through the connections they made and maintained with Catholics in the camps and at home, and physically, through the altars and chapels they erected, the letters they wrote and received, and the images and reading materials that were sent to them. The usual dichotomies applied to histories of the period, notably the resistance/collaboration binary, do not provide an adequate framework for interpreting non-combatant responses to the crisis of defeat and captivity. The example of devotion to Thérèse demonstrates that for those who regularly practised their faith, or were moved to do so for the period of their ‘exile’, religious belief and observance offered a viable and ethical alternative to the masculine ideal of military heroism.