Search

The Editor and Managing Editor of the August Wilson Journal met with four specialists from the University Library System (ULS) at the University of Pittsburgh and one University of Pittsburgh history professor via Zoom on January 14, 2021 to discuss the ULS’s recent acquisition of August Wilson’s archival materials.

This article presents an annotated listing of 117 previously uncatalogued short stories that Hemingway may have read at Windemere, the family cottage, during the summers of his formative years. It also presents speculation regarding a now obscure literary figure named Brander Matthews, who may have edited or otherwise exerted influence in the selection of works included in these twenty volumes, thus influencing Hemingway indirectly. Matthews’s ideas about the principles and aesthetics of the short story genre, which square in some ways with Hemingway’s own, may have exerted a more direct influence, as Hemingway owned Matthews’s book on the subject.

The Gauertal incident in “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” employs elements of an archetypal hospitality plot involving aid for a pursued man, a plot previously employed by Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Victor Hugo, Homer, and others as well as by Hemingway himself. The essay locates these influences in short story collections recently found in the library of the Hemingway family’s Windemere Cottage. Elucidation of the hospitality plot in Harry’s reminiscences, particularly those of the secretaries in the snow, the attack on the Austrian officers’ leave train, and the death of Williamson, aids in interpretation of the story’s essential conundrums, the frozen leopard carcass and Harry’s death flight to Kilimanjaro’s summit.

This “Interchange” discussion took place online over the course of several months in the fall of 2005. We wanted the “Interchange” to be free flowing; therefore we encouraged participants not only to respond to questions posed by the JAH but also to communicate with each other directly. What follows is an edited version of the very lively online conversation that resulted. We hope JAH readers find it of interest.

PrefaceAbbreviationsIntroduction: The Vietnam War and Its Enduring Historical RelevanceDavid L. AndersonPart I. Chronological Perspectives1. Setting the Stage: Vietnamese Revolutionary Nationalism and the First Vietnam War, by Mark Philip Bradley2. "Dealing with a Government of Madmen": Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Ngo Dinh Diem, by Richard H. Immerman3. South Vietnam Under Siege, 1961-1965: Kennedy, Johnson, and the Question of Escalation or Disengagement, by Gary R. Hess4. Lyndon Johnson and the Bombing of Vietnam: Politics and Military Choices, by Lloyd C. Gardner5. Turning Point: The Vietnam War's Pivotal Year, November 1967-November 1968, by Robert J. McMahon6. Richard M. Nixon and the Vietnam War: The Paradox of Disengagement with Escalation, by Jeffrey P. KimballPart II. Topical Perspectives7. American Strategy in the Vietnam War, by John Prados8. The Village War in Vietnam, 1965-1973, by Eric Bergerud9. Fighting for Family: Vietnamese Women and the American War, by Helen E. Anderson10. Vietnamese Society at War, by Robert K. Brigham11. "Hey, Hey, LBJ!": American Domestic Politics and the Vietnam War, by Melvin Small12. Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam War, by Kenton ClymerPart III. Postwar Perspectives13. The Legacy of the Vietnam War, by Robert D. Schulzinger14. The Vietnam Syndrome, by George C. HerringList of ContributorsIndex

The My Lai massacre of March 16, 1968, and the court martial of Lt. William Calley a year and a half later are among the bleakest episodes in American history and continue to provide a volatile focus for debates about the Vietnam War. Other books have exposed the facts surrounding the incident; ""Facing My Lai"" now examines its haunting legacy through an exchange of contemporary viewpoints. This powerful book presents a stellar gathering of writers, including journalists Seymour Hersh and David Halberstam, novelist Tim O'Brien, historian Stephen E. Ambrose, psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, military prosecutor William Eckhardt, and the two true heroes in the My Lai story - Hugh Thompson and the late Ron Ridenhour. As these authors show, the US is still trying to come to grips with its bitter experience in Vietnam. A grim window into the darker side of American history, ""Facing My Lai"" reminds us of humanity's baffling capacity for atrocity within the crucible of war as well as its urgent need for healing in the face of such violence.

Harry Truman's administration began searching for an American response to the clash in Indochina between French colonialism and Vietminh communism in 1945. 30 years and five administrations later, Gerald Ford and his aides tried unsuccessfully to solicit additional aid for South Vietnam from a reluctant Congress. For Truman, Ford and every American leader in between, the dilemma in Vietnam hung ominously over the presidency. In ""Shadow on the White House"", seven historians examine how the leadership of six presidents and an issue that grew into a difficult and often unpopular war shaped each other. Focusing on the personalities, politics, priorities and actions of the presidents as they confronted Vietnam, the authors consider the expansion of presidential power in foreign-policy formulation since World War II. In their analyses, they chronicle the history of executive leadership as it related to Vietnam, assess the presidential prerogatives and motives on war and peace issues, and clarify the interconnection between the modern presidency and the nation's frustrating and humiliating failure in Southeast Asia. Although other histories have been written about the Vietnam experience, this book is a systematic and comparative survey on presidential leadership as it relates to the war issue. It is organised by presidential administrations, giving a detailed examination of each president's decisions and policies. Based on the most recently opened archival sources, the essays provide a framework on which to hang the events of the war.

Wilhelm M?bus enlisted in Company A, 13th Michigan Infantry at Constantine, Michigan, on September 2, 1864-the day Major General William T. Sherman's Union forces occupied Atlanta. Before the end of the month, Private M?bus and his regiment were on the march with Sherman's army in Georgia. The new recruit served only nine months, and was discharged at Washington, DC, on June 8, 1865, but during his brief enlistment he produced a fascinating chronicle of his service. His letters to his family, written in his native German, provide glimpses of three important aspects of the Civil War: the life of the common soldier, the role of the foreign-born soldier in the Union Army, and the campaigns of Sherman's army in Georgia and the Carolinas. M?bus was born 1 October 1842, in Lemberg in south western Germany. At age nineteen, with his parents (John and Elizabeth Hoffman M?bus), brothers, and sisters, he emigrated to the United States and settled on a farm near Fabius in southern Michigan.1 They followed thousands of other Germans who had fled economic hard times and political tension at home in search of opportunity in America. When the M?bus family arrived shortly after the beginning of the Civil War, there were over 1,300,000 German-born Americans, of whom ninety-four percent resided in the northern states. By the end of the war, over 200,000 of these German Americans had served in the ranks of the Union Army, and comprised the army's largest foreign-born contingent. In Michigan, over 14,000 of the state's almost 91,000 soldiers were foreign-born. A large portion of these were German, although