Search

After the French defeat in May-June 1940, Japan invaded Indochina, a French colony. Then, many women and men decided to create some circuits to resist this occupation. Their mission dealt with the Japanese soldiers in the peninsula, with whom Admiral Decoux's General Government wanted to maintain a modus vivendi in the name of Vichy. The time constraints were different for these groups than for their metropolitan counterparts: they kept on fighting until their destruction on 9 March 1945 and the Japanese overthrow of the peninsula. Although Vichy's implication in Indochina is well known, the anti-Japanese resistance groups from this region and their participation in the Allied victory in and out of mainland France have not been studied recently. This paper intends to focus on the dynamics of these circuits' interventions during their fight in Indochina. How did they maintain contact with Free French Forces despite their geographical isolation? What was their implication in the final victory against the Japanese forces? As with the war itself, Resistance was an international phenomenon which was not limited to European borders but spread throughout the world through contacts with the Allied secret services. This paper will study the construction and materiality of these contacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The myth that the women's movement in Britain went into decline in the decade following the Second World War has now been debunked. Yet despite this more accurate re-telling of the fate of female activism in the 1950s, the view that the majority of women at this time aspired only to marriage and motherhood persists. The iconic image of the ‘ideal 1950s housewife’ has proved hard to excise from the historical record and the public imagination. The aim of this paper is to discover what women really wanted in the 1950s. This will be done through a study of popular housewives' associations who represented the interests of over a million British women throughout the decade. The paper will evaluate how successful these groups were in supporting their members and campaigning to improve the lives of women. In exploring these themes it is argued that a new understanding of domesticity emerged in the 1950s better reflecting what women really wanted in the decades following the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper considers the negotiations for the repatriation of the Japanese residents of New Caledonia who were transferred to Australia for internment after the outbreak of the Asia-Pacific theatre of World War II. It shows that whilst the Japanese residents’ place of origin was New Caledonia, it was deemed instead to be Japan, and they were repatriated to Japan either as part of the Anglo–Japanese civilian exchange of September 1942 or after the cessation of hostilities. The paper also shows that the Australian government had security concerns regarding the Japanese before and during the war but was willing to repatriate the Japanese to New Caledonia after the war should the New Caledonian authorities have been willing to accept them back. The New Caledonian authorities’ decision not to accept the Japanese back in New Caledonia resulted in their repatriation to Japan even though some expressed the wish to return to New Caledonia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we analyse the Second World War (WW2) and the Holocaust as genocide during WW2 as sensitive topics in history teaching as perceived by 719 teachers from Austria, Belarus, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Serbia and the Netherlands. Using the thematic content analysis of open answers to an online questionnaire we explore the reasons for the sensitivity of these topics. The reasons for sensitivity were found to lie in cognitive and emotional barriers to treating the atrocities, violence and discrepancies between different perspectives on WW2 of social memory groups. A relatively new dimension, confirmed by the research, is the problem of the aestheticisation of the violent past. This can lead to banalisation and even legitimisation of the violence and aspects of the violence that pupils perceive to be fascinating. The results are discussed in the framework of multi-layered collective memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the historical formation of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in the United States and argues that programme emergence depended on the ability of policy entrepreneurs to link the economic concerns of agricultural production with the ideational concern of national security. Using a historical institutionalist framework this paper stresses the critical juncture of the Second World War and the positive feedback loop created between agricultural industries and schools to understand the emergence of the NSLP. In addition, it stresses the role of frames in policy-making and focuses on the use by policy entrepreneurs of a security frame whereby child malnutrition was cast as a national security issue. The policy window of war gave policy entrepreneurs the chance to use the politically and culturally resonant frame of security, in the contexts of agricultural subsidies, to push for the creation of this programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the strategic initiatives that Sir Philip Mitchell, governor of Kenya, brought to Great Britain’s Indian Ocean imperial and diplomatic policy in the years following the Second World War. Seeking to give strategic shape to his own coastal Islamic sympathies, Mitchell encroached on high-level policy debates with a proposal to reorganise Britain’s Western Indian Ocean around a political directorate to administer the coastal zones from Aden to Tanganyika. Such a cadre, Mitchell argued, would provide a valuable defensive bulwark against nationalist agitation and a ‘civilised’ foundation for local government initiatives. This paper brings together biography, strategic policy and area studies to demonstrate how Africa’s decolonisation shaped and limited the strategic options for Britain’s post-war Indian Ocean policy. Mitchell’s proposal broached a fascinating debate concerning the Indian Ocean as a realm of historical experience and future political construction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The indigenous rights movement emerged in the last quarter of the twentieth century, establishing a newly conceptualized identity claimed not on the grounds of shared culture, language or ancestry but on shared experience as native peoples marginalized by colonial expansion. This article examines how the Second World War created conditions favouring the emergence of indigenous identity as a global concept. Using a comparative perspective, this paper considers two ways in which war conditions affected indigenous peoples: by highlighting issues of citizenship, loyalty and military service; and by altering how combatant powers evaluated indigenous cultures. While the experiences of particular groups varied widely, the wartime era focused attention on both policies of assimilation and assertions of distinctiveness, creating a fluid context for change. A global, comparative perspective offers insight into the role of the war era in understanding the relationship between indigenous activism and the international order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1941 Australian tabloid journalist Dorothy Gordon Jenner was caught up in the Japanese siege of Hong Kong and was incarcerated in the Stanley Internment Camp. During her internment Jenner kept a clandestine record of daily life written in pencil on Bronco brand toilet paper and kept hidden in the heels of her shoes. To date her fragmented diary and notes have defied analysis. This paper provides a reading of Jenner's personal wartime testimonio through the frame of tabloid journalism to expose how the tabloid genre-Jenner's stock-in-trade as a journalist before the war-became the framework for her personal testimony during World War II. By interpreting Jenner's private diary and notes as testimonio journalism this paper exposes the flow of the tabloid vernacular style of journalism between private and public discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is possible that Donald Trump’s success in the US presidential election of November 2016 will touch off the greatest transformation in world politics since World War Two. This is because, for the first time, the presidency of the United States—a country that since World War Two has consistently upheld the liberal world order—has been won by a man who asserts that the US national interests will take precedence over international cooperation. If so, Japan could be one of the most profoundly affected countries. Japan has thus far accepted its status as a junior partner within the US security framework and—without any significant military power of its own—has devoted itself to economic development. Although it is difficult to predict what Mr. Trump’s policies will be, there is a possibility, based on the statements he has made to date, that he will be calling for Japan to become more self-reliant. Although his comprehension of the Japan-US security arrangements is fraught with misconceptions, there is ample possibility that he will ultimately opt to maintain the current Japan-US security framework. However, given that the average defense expenditure of NATO countries is 2% of their GDPs, and that the average expenditure of OECD countries on official development assistance (ODA) is 0.7% of their GDPs, it is highly questionable whether Mr. Trump will approve of Japan’s level of defense spending (less than 1% of its GDP) or of its level of spending on ODA (approximately 0.2% of its GDP). It would not be such a bad thing for Japan to become more self-reliant in terms of security. It is almost unnatural for Japan to maintain this relationship as it is, in the form that it has taken since before Japan’s postwar reconstruction. However, in the context of international relations in East Asia, it has long been taken for granted that this is Japan’s basic stance. Changing this will be no easy task—either domestically or in terms of Japan’s relations with neighboring countries. In these respects, the authors of this paper decided to consider the question of how Japan should develop its foreign and security policy, and to offer some proposals in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since 2006, four maritime archaeology field schools, desktop and field surveys have been carried out in Guam. In 2012 a site associated with the United States Navy's Construction Battalion (US Seabees) was investigated. This paper summarizes the historical background of Guam and the known sites of maritime archaeological interest, particularly those dating to World War II. The problems of public interpretation of the cultural material of colonial powers are considered, and, using the Seabee site as an example, ways in which Guam's indigenous Chamorro people can be included in this history are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I survey the histories of Europe's Christian Democratic parties and suggest that inasmuch as they show that religiously framed party politics can have significant and positive effects on both institutions and supporters, it is difficult to see how those lessons translate straightforwardly to the American social and political order. Even if they did, making a success, both electorally and substantively, of a Christian Democratic movement in the United States would require a degree of statesmanship that certainly seems in short supply these days. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores two stories of the author's own family, one of post-Second World War Displaced Persons, and one of Nazi collaboration. Juxtaposed, these two stories attached to one familial identity throw into relief the expectations of victimhood and responsibility encoded in stereotypical refugee narratives. The paper tracks such expectations in contemporary Australian refugee debate, showing that essentialised equations between refugees and victimhood can be used to obscure, rather than expose, relations of power and violence. The uncomfortable revelations about my own family that I canvass here can thus be understood as a synecdoche for uncomfortable truths about Australia's history in relation to refugees, both past and present. Attending to these truths requires being prepared to disrupt ‘familiar’ narratives of victimhood and perpetration, and remember our own potential affiliations with violence, whether personal or national. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates whether the memories of women's movements that grew out of the Italian Resistance to the Nazi-Fascist Regime during the Second World War have left any legacy to women teachers in early childhood education. The article focuses on the case of internationally renowned and high-quality schools for young children, the municipal schools of a northern Italian town called Reggio Emilia. In contrast to much of the literature on gender and early childhood education, this paper reveals that many women teachers in these schools think of themselves as agents of social change, and that this is tied to their memories of the Italian Resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a collection of original papers and research project reports considering the history of the BBC foreign-language services prior to, and during, the Second World War. The communication between the British government and foreign publics by way of mass media constituted a fundamental, if often ignored, aspect of Britain's international relations. From the 1930s onwards, transnational broadcasting, that is, broadcasting across national borders, became a major element in the conduct of Britain's diplomacy, and the BBC was employed by the government to further its diplomatic, strategic and economic interests in times of rising international tension and conflict. A review of the literature on the BBC's foreign-language broadcasts sets the stage for the presentation of the articles that compose this special issue of Media History. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many Japanese people, the 49th parallel was only a line on a map, yet there were differences for the Japanese residents in the United States and Canada. The two nations had different concepts of citizenship and constitutions but, in what has been called “hemispheric orientalism,” prejudice knew no border. Both countries severely restricted immigration from Japan. In the United States, immigrants, the Issei, were aliens ineligible for citizenship. Thus, states could deny their access to commercial fishing and the right to own or lease land. Because the American constitution bestows full citizenship on the native-born, their American-born children, the Nisei, could vote and acquire land, but experienced discrimination especially in employment. On paper, the Canadian Issei had more civil rights since they could become naturalized but this provided few advantages apart from the rights to own land and to fish commercially. The Canadian Nisei had no more rights than their parents. In British Columbia, where 95 percent of the Japanese lived, they could not vote and provincial laws and customs denied their access to many occupations. During the Second World War, both nations required all the Nikkei to leave the Pacific Coast, incarcerated some, severely restricted the mobility of others, and proposed to “repatriate” many of them to Japan. Drawing mainly on the previous scholarship which has examined specific themes, time periods, or comparisons, this article offers an overview of how between the 1890s and the 1940s the effects of prejudice varied more in detail and timing than in principle even though formal consultation between the two nations was sporadic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using data from fieldwork conducted in late 2009, this paper examines the Russian educational sphere and initiatives by the political elite to control and manipulate textbook content, testing objectives, and the structuring of curricula in order to maximize exposure to, and absorption of, its preferred narratives. Using a more detailed critical analysis of textbook content, I show that methods of discursive manipulation are used to highlight positive aspects of the Stalinist period - especially victory in World War II - while downplaying its political repression. This manipulation allows the state to both legitimize its version of Stalinist history and to perpetuate the underlying legitimizing function that version serves. In this way, the discourse implicitly justifies Putin's centralized state as the type of system that has historically produced great achievements for Russia. This article adds to the literature on the manipulation of educational content for political purposes generally, and in the case of Russia specifically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Second World War there was an increasingly developed system for controlling the code-names used for operations where different Allied forces were involved. This paper follows the development of this system – based on the British Inter-Services Security Board – that spread to overseas theatres on the British side and to American forces world-wide. The selection of code-names was not without controversy; with Winston Churchill getting personally involved and his intervention is highlighted. A critique of the system is attempted, although the final judge is ultimately the success of the security of the activities disguised by the code-names. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Labour shortages in New Zealand during World War II prompted the ‘importation’ of domestic labour from its colonial dependency of the Cook Islands, and over 100 young women were employed as ‘house girls’ in private homes. These expedient arrangements were viewed less favourably when the young women moved toward more independent lifestyles, and issues over rights of citizenship arose when they opted to remain in self-chosen employment in New Zealand. Official concerns were clouded by allegations of moral misconduct, and ‘problems’ were further complicated by the adverse social and economic conditions that eventuated in the Cook Islands through the loss of so many marriageable young women. By examining the passage of these young migrants into New Zealand's wartime society, this paper shows how efforts to repatriate perceived troublemakers generated unexpected political tensions, developments that challenged colonial power relationships and highlighted inconsistencies in the Dominion's policies in relation to its Pacific Islands territories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the extent, causes and nature of juvenile delinquency in Metropolitan London during and immediately after World War II. In response to a rising number of children and young persons being sentenced in the Metropolitan Juvenile Courts, magistrates and experts at the London Country Council favoured the continuation of a welfarist approach to delinquency that had operated before the war. War conditions reinforced the view that delinquency was the result of familial and social deprivation that eschewed retributive punishment. An increasing number of children and teenagers, mainly girls and often in need of care and protection, appeared before the Metropolitan Juvenile Courts. These delinquents were increasingly regarded in terms of welfare rather than as juridical subjects. However, this penal-welfarist practice, which embraced the rehabilitation of delinquents, was periodically challenged, as psychological treatment was regarded with suspicion, and the corporal punishment of boys gained in popularity in wartime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Remittances of Chinese overseas during the decades before and just after the Second World War formed an important part of China's economy and were a significant feature of Southeast Asia's economic history. Familial and ethnic sentiments drove this impulse to send money back to China. In reviewing evidence for Malaya and Singapore, this paper is a new study on the nature, the role and the mechanisms of transmission of these remittances. In charting the ebb and flow of remittances during the period, this study examines several factors responsible for the subsequent decline of these flows. These are political changes, both in China and Southeast Asia, the policies and regulations of the British colonial administration, and generational change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why is tipping for service customary in the United States, but not Australia? With origins in sixteenth-century England, then moving onto Continental Europe, tipping was introduced to both Australia and the US in the late-nineteenth century. Yet it became the norm only in the US, whilst simultaneously marginalised in Australia. This paper proposes that the structure of US society in the late-nineteenth century was one that was conducive to tipping, while the structure of Australian society was not. Furthermore, quiet anti-American sentiment in Australia during the Second World War defined tipping as “un-Australian”. These two factors have ensured that tipping has been seldom practiced in Australia's history. However, this seems to be changing in recent years. The extent to which Australians adopt the custom may depend on the direction of labour-relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on the formation of place-based war memories in contemporary Japan by examining the Japanese grassroots movements to preserve war-related sites within the local and national politics of “cultural property,” and the developments in which the Ichigayadai Building No. 1 in Tokyo and the Matsushiro Underground Imperial General Headquarters Complex in Nagano are conserved to recall the memories of the Asia-Pacific War in Japan. Both places embody the war of aggression carried out by Imperial Japan in the twentieth century. The Ichigaya site was home to the Imperial General Headquarters during the war. The Matsushiro site refers to gigantic underground shelters and tunnels built at the end of the war to relocate the Imperial General Headquarters of the Ichigaya site. Both sites gained social and national attention in the 1990s by raising questions of how to convey memories of suffering caused as well as suffering experienced to the next generation. By introducing the struggles to conserve war-related sites, I argue that contemporary Japan's public memory-making and -remaking processes are shaped by contestants to reclaim places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper describes a B-Dienst success in solving signals using a British code used by merchant ships (the Merchant Ships' Code (Mersigs II)) in late 1943, despite only having a depth of two; it also relates the history of the Mersigs II system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the realm of alternate worlds. Although the emphasis of such creations relies on historical alteration (resulting in an alternate time stream), settings can impressively support the historical alternative: most alternate history plots come with shifted or even newly drawn political borders and are set in transformed urban and rural spaces. Not surprisingly, actual maps or at least remarkably detailed layouts of the geographical framework play a significant role. In other words, counterfactual spaces can be mapped with words or cartographic symbols; they can be both told and visualized. By including both concepts from the field of theory of the narrative and from a cartographer's point of view, focus is laid on various strategies in order to map and/or remap cities, countries, as well as entire geopolitical situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the course of gathering oral histories from women who served in the Navy and Coast Guard during World War II, an unusual conversational pattern has emerged. The women almost invariably diminish the importance of their wartime contributions; a common refrain is "I didn't do anything important." Their individual experiences, as revealed during the interviews, belie that assertion. In this paper, I will use the women's words to parse what is meant by this rhetorical move. Do the women really believe they did not do anything important? If so, why do they find it necessary to participate in the very public process of oral history, placing their names and life stories within the historical record? Considering both the content and the context of the women's words from a feminist pragmatist philosophical base will help explain this seemingly incongruent act. This article demonstrates that the women do not really mean to belittle their life experiences (and military service), but instead are using the phrase as a way to acknowledge society's expectations. The oral history interview, meanwhile, is used by the women to not only place their experience into the historical record but also to affirm the importance of their wartime work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper lists Enigma-related Kriegsmarine documents captured by the British during the Second World War and describes the formation and functions of Naval Section VI, which dealt with captured documents in the British Government Code and Cypher School. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the surge of scientific revelations concerning chaos, cybernetics and systems theory since the Second World War, architecture has been drawn into several encounters with dynamic complexity. Architects have often danced with this complexity, hut there has never been a full embrace - the encounters only amounting to skirmishes between two radically different perspectives. Increasingly however, these two histories of design and science are convergent, drawn together by forces of post-industrial knowledge, society, globalization, economic interdependence and ecological sustenance. Through past literature, that convergence can be framed by four modes of architectural complexity - wicked, messy, ordered and natural - but the history of these encounters has seldom been couched in terms of their teleological and dynamic influences, nor have their separate operations been characterized or connected in a way that adds coherence. This paper addresses this missing history by making explicit distinctions between each of the four modes of architectural complexity, tracing their early proponents and characterizing their operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In arguing for the twin projects of globalizing history and historicizing globalization, this paper locates the development of historical scholarship in its own historical context. For the most part, professional historical scholarship has focused on the experiences of national communities and has taken European modernity as the principal guide to the understanding of the world's various societies. In the interests of enhancing understanding of the world and its development through time, there is a clear need to globalize history and historicize globalization. From ancient to contemporary times, several distinct interests--notably those of empire, business and mission--have driven or at least informed efforts to understand the larger world. Since World War II, the production of knowledge about the larger world has come largely through area studies scholarship, which itself has clearly reflected the interests of contemporary states. While area studies projects have experienced remarkable success in developing reliable information and constructing meaningful knowledge about the larger world, it has become clear that scholarship focusing exclusively on individual states or local communities is inadequate for purposes of understanding large-scale globalizing processes that have touched many peoples and influenced the development of individual societies, as well as the world as a whole. Following up on this recognition, recent scholarship in world history suggests that globalization has a very long history indeed. In combination, the projects to globalize history and historicize globalization promise to yield an enriched understanding of the world and its development through time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1947 the Oseredok Ukrainian Cultural and Education Centre in Winnipeg held a memoir contest. Sixty-four memoirs were submitted, and most of them are still preserved in Oseredok's archives. All extant submissions were examined in order to determine what they had to say about the Holocaust. Altogether twenty-five memoirs concerned World War II, and of these fourteen made at least some mention of the Holocaust. This body of memoirs is the earliest collection of Ukrainian memoirs of World War II that I am aware of, the closest in time to the events of the Holocaust. Already then, however, Ukrainians had become quite defensive about their behaviour towards the Jews; this perhaps explains why close to half the memoirs about the war omitted the fate of the Jews altogether and why the memoirs that do mention the Holocaust say almost nothing about Ukrainian involvement. The memoirists did, however, reproduce the image of Jews as agents of communism, particularly active in the organs of repression. The majority of the 1947 memoirs nonetheless indicated horror at and disapproval of the murder of the Jews by the Germans. Perhaps characteristically, the account expressing the strongest such feelings was written by an older man from outside Western Ukraine. Conversely, the most outright expression of lack of sympathy with the Jews came from a man twelve years younger and from Galicia. Although the latter felt pity for some individual Jews he knew and gave them alms, he expressly stated that he had no sympathy with them as a group, as "a nation that had done so much evil to my nation." Perhaps this is a case that corresponds to the phenomenon noted by Jan Gross in Fear, that individuals hate whom they have injured: this memoirist served in the civil administration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the core propositions articulated by several public actors in the so-called Bandera debate, i.e., discussions about the usable past and legacy of the wartime Ukrainian nationalist insurgency and its central symbolic figure, Stepan Bandera. In Western Ukraine, popular historical imagery as well as intellectual polemics about the "Ukrainization" of World War II challenged both the Soviet myth of the Great Patriotic War and the European model of politics of regret. Correspondingly, one of the main ideas conveyed during the Bandera debate in Western Ukraine was the necessity of liberalization of the national politics of memory, i.e., the process of opening the political discourses and public debate to the circulation of diverse voices and narratives concerning the national past, a circulation unrestrained by political pressure. Generally, however, wartime events and figures continue to be presented in line with dichotomous national discourses. As the example of a chain of restaurants exploiting the theme of World War II demonstrates, one-dimensional interpretations of the contentious past suggested to the public by the actors involved in the commercialization of historical knowledge may have far-reaching, unpredictable implications. This is especially true in post-Orange Western Ukraine where politics--including the politics of memory--is increasingly determined by ultra-right forces such as VO Svoboda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the following questions: how and with the aid of which resources was the memory of forced labour during World War II constructed and recreated in the public space of Soviet and post-Soviet Ukraine? How has the perception of the place of forced labourers in the general pantheon of war participants changed? And what kinds of transformations took place in the meaningful emphases and symbolic accretion of images associated with this group of people? The initial focus is on the Soviet version of this memory because some correction must be made to the theory that was formulated in the early 1990s and which gradually acquired normative significance in post-Soviet (including Ukrainian) journalism and scholarly literature: namely, that the history, creativity, and memory of this population group were "forgotten" in the official Soviet version of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]