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The article discusses how British military thinkers analyzed the impact of the U.S. Civil War between 1880 and 1940, focusing on how the results of the war shaped the U.S. into a global power. Other topics include how the different meanings of the Civil War shaped British understanding of it, the relationship between Great Britain and the Confederacy during the War, and the role of war in initiating social, political, and military change.

This essay explores the impact of late Victorian cultural assumptions on the conduct of the South African War of 1899-1902, both at home and on the battlefield. It contends that three cultural values, intrinsic to late Victorian culture--cosmopolitanism, political egalitarianism, and race--shaped British soldiers' sense of justice at the outset of the war and, as a result, influenced their actions on and off the battlefield. This article emphasizes that the numerous "small wars" fought by British armies in the late nineteenth century, of which the South African War was the largest, were each unique and worthy of study not just as political history but as cultural military history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American military theorists between the Civil War and World War II have garnered limited attention in military history, but they developed many ideas about the nature and practice of war. These theorists did not fixate on the writings of Carl von Clausewitz, but they were familiar with his work. But independent of Clausewitz, American military theory emphasized the Clausewitzian concept of the relationships among politics and society in preparing for and fighting wars. This article explores Clausewitz and American military theory, explains how Americans became naturally Clausewitzian, and discusses what their thinking has to do with the conduct of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "The U.S. Army's Transition to Peace, 1865-66" Clayton R. Newell and Charles R. Shrader examine the actions taken by the Union Army in the year following the Civil War to demobilize the victorious army of more than one million volunteers; reduce the number of personnel, scale back the operations, and dispose of surplus equipment, supplies, and facilities of the various staff departments; and recruit the units of the Regular Army up to authorized strength. They then proceed to discuss the new missions assigned to the Army's administrative and supply departments, including management of the Freedmen's Bureau; caring for the disabled veterans and the fallen; and assembling the official records of the War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses support for the Confederacy among southern California settlers prior to and during the U.S. Civil War. According to the article, several settlers in southern California were originally from Missouri and expressed public support for the secessionist movement of the U.S. southern states. The article describes the significant tension between southern Californians who supported the Confederates and the U.S. Army and Union sympathizers following the start of the Civil War.

Sir Michael Howard has made an enormous contribution to writing about war since 1950. This essay offers a considered assessment of his work and devotes due attention to the context in which he wrote and the influences that shaped his outlook. Three essential themes have permeated his work: the German problem (and thus the British problem that complicated its resolution), the Soviet problem, and the relationship between war and society. The essay charts his efforts to impart a framework to the study of war and the degree to which it has been shaped by societal, but especially organizational and moral forces. The essay offers a slice of British historiography and intellectual life in the postwar years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents discussion of the discipline and methodology of Early Modern historical scholarship and research as of 2009 and reflects on possible changes which could occur within the field in the following 40 years. Particular attention is given to the potential for a new historiographical focus on the socio-cultural history of wartime. Details are given noting the large-scale presence of war within the civilizations of Early Modern Europe and the lack of cultural, rather than direct military or political, investigation of war documents is criticized. It is suggested that such a field could be very successful in the future.

The exceptional weather conditions and associated harvest failures of 1315–17 marked the beginning of the worst subsistence crisis in European history. Until now, historians have mainly viewed the Great Famine, and medieval famines in general, through theoretical models of the larger fourteenth‐century crisis. However, this article suggests that this approach is flawed and instead applies recent theories on contemporary famines to the crisis of 1315–17 in the county of Flanders. This new perspective not only leads to a re‐examination of existing explanations, such as the role of warfare, but also reveals the importance of property rights in entitlement to food: the power of elites, the relative number of large‐scale landowners, and the structure of household income all influenced peasants' degree of vulnerability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the strategies and institutions that were mobilized in order to collect information during the Taiping Civil War (1851-1864). Through a close reading of the Zei qing huizuan 賊情彙纂 (Compendium of Rebel Intelligence), the article reveals that the Qing and its allies understood the Taiping as a political entity constituted on a familiar (dynastic) model and also in ethnographic terms (linguistic, sartorial, religious, regional). The article also demonstrates how individuals made use of their access to information to obtain patronage and employment within the pro-Qing camp. Finally, by spotlighting the political and moral language used by the authors of the Zei qing huizuan , the article makes obvious the deep relationship between intelligence and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article question the alleged historical characterization of the 1701-1714 war of Spanish succession as "inevitable". Political and economic factors of the war are identified including the death of Bavarian crown prince Wilhelm III, French king Louis XIV's proposed compromise treaty, and diplomatic negotiations by the barons of Auersperg. Social and nation-building aspects of the war are described.

As war challenges survival and social relations, how do actors alter and adapt dispositions and practices? To explore this question, I investigate women's perceptions of normal relations, practices, status, and gendered self in an intense situation of wartime survival, the Blockade of Leningrad (1941-1944), an 872-day ordeal that demographically feminized the city. Using Blockade diaries for data on everyday life, perceptions, and practices, I show how women's gendered skills and habits of breadseeking and caregiving (finding scarce resources and providing aid) were key to survival and helped elevate their sense of status. Yet this did not entice rethinking 'gender.' To explore status elevation and gender entrenchment, I build on Bourdieu's theory of habitus and fields to develop anchors: field entities with valence around which actors orient identities and practices. Anchors provide support for preexisting habitus and practices, and filter perceptions from new positions vis-à-vis fields and concrete relations. Essentialist identities and practices were reinforced through two processes involving anchors. New status was linked to 'women's work' that aided survival of anchors (close others, but also factories and the city), reinforcing acceptance of gender positions. Women perceived that challenging gender relations and statuses could risk well-being of anchors, reconstructing gender essentialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the involvement of the military and paramilitary in the government and society of the newly created Czechoslovakia between 1918 and 1922 and compares the military violence against the experiences of Austria, which was defeated in World War I. Topics include the Czechoslovak Social Democratic Party, political violence, military relations with the civilian government, competing cultures of victory and defeat in the two countries, and the brutalization thesis of historian George Mosse.

In both World Wars, the state retained men with essential skills on the home front. Despite needing to mobilise industry and labour in order to supply the military and to maintain key services such as healthcare and food provision, those men who remained in civilian roles were susceptible to accusations of cowardice and being derided as shirkers evading their patriotic duty. While the manliness of the 'soldier hero' was secure, the civilian man was susceptible to having his masculinity called into question. This article utilises a range of sources including parliamentary debates, cartoons, Mass Observation records, written testimony and oral histories to examine the policies that were implemented affecting civilian male workers deployed in essential jobs in both wars and the perceptions of men to their reserved status. While there were haphazard attempts to raise an 'industrial army' in the First World War, by 1939, a more systematic approach had been implemented with a Schedule of Reserved Occupations drawn up retaining key men in their work. While men on the Second World War home front were potentially diminished by the 'soldier hero' and the female war worker, they defined and defended their contributions to the national war effort in written and oral sources in gendered terms, making reference to job security, valued skills, significant earning power, the auxiliary position of female dilutees, positive cultural representations and the added dangers from aerial bombing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of the First World War sparked widespread voluntary efforts to raise funds or knit comforts in support of the war overseas. The proliferation of disparate patriotic initiatives, particularly those soliciting funds from the public, raised concerns about the sustainability of these parallel appeals. State governments passed legislation to regulate patriotic appeals and encourage the centralisation of these efforts under a handful of established voluntary societies such as the Red Cross, the South Australian Soldiers Fund, or the Victoria League. This article examines the tension between the states’ effort to centralise voluntary patriotic work and the emotional factors that motivated volunteers. This article has been peer reviewed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates why royalist popular culture in the immediate aftermath of the Napoleonic wars often depicted young mothers anxious for peace. Such representations reflected the brutality of the wars, women's relative prominence in anti-conscription resistance and a cultural shift from revolutionary injunctions to wives and mothers to sacrifice their menfolk for the good of the nation to Napoleonic images of women as tremulous counterparts to virile soldiers. But the image of peace-loving mothers in 1814 and 1815 was not simply a response to the devastation of war or a continuation of Napoleonic gender roles. Instead, it served distinctive purposes in a period of peace-making and political transition, which entailed not only disentangling masculinity from martial valour but also strategically invoking feminine anguish or joy. The focus on Louis XVIII's role in rescuing mothers helped legitimise an unpopular monarch, who had gained power only with the help of foreign armies, and was returning to a country that had executed its last king. The image of grateful women and happy families also deflected attention away from contemporary problems - including the difficult return of veterans to a defeated country and the lasting grief of those who had lost loved ones in war - by focusing on the joy of mothers whose sons would remain safely home. This article draws on two different bodies of scholarship, rarely considered together - the growing literature on the history of emotion in the era of the French Revolution and studies of gender and war in the twentieth century, especially the First World War - and uses a variety of sources, from recruitment propaganda to songs, to show the specific ways gendered and emotional images could be deployed at transitional moments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information is provided on the conference titled "Visions of War: Experience, Imagination and Predictions of War in the Past and Present" at the Estonian War Museum – General Laidoner Museum from April 19-20, 2016. Topics, including attitudes towards war in medieval Scotland, predictions future of war, British and German military history writing, the British Royal Navy's war planning and Sweden's neutrality during World War I, are discussed.

Uniquely in the history of British wartime support for Belgian refugees, a subcommittee of Glasgow Corporation assumed complete responsibility for close to 20,000 refugees housed in Scotland. The councillors who formed Glasgow Corporation’s Belgian Refugee Committee became the administrators for Belgian refugee relief for the whole of Scotland. The Glasgow committee raised money to support Belgian refugees via public, church and trade union donations from across Scotland to offset the £1000 weekly running costs. This article considers the reasons behind the Corporation’s assumption of this national role and assesses its success in supporting Scotland’s Belgian refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Located in Birtley, County Durham, the gated community of Elisabethville housed several thousand Belgians from 1916 until the aftermath of the Great War. Most residents were conscripted Belgian soldiers who constituted the workforce at the nearby National Projectile Factory. This article focuses on the complex relationship between the ‘Birtley Belgians’ and their host population. It thus covers issues such as wartime charity, Anglo-Belgian leisure-time interactions as well as debates about the exiles’ moral and socio-economic impact. Moreover, the case of Elisabethville sheds light on several wider issues, from war-related displacement to the intersections between home front and battle front. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Summary Using critical discourse analysis, this twelve-country study addresses a key lacuna by examining civil society perspectives on the implementation of the Participative Democratic Model (PDM) of gender mainstreaming in post-conflict states. The findings reveal specific data, transitional justice, and governance challenges in war-affected states as policy actors press for heightened attention to issues such as the effects on women of war-induced poverty, human rights violations, and women’s empowerment in state reconstruction and peace-building. The analysis shows the aftermath of war accentuates frame misalignment between civil society and governing elites. In order to address this a Transformative Model (TM) of Participative Mainstreaming in Post-conflict States is proposed. Building on conflict theory it argues for the engendering of “transitional justice” in order to secure equality in public policy and law-making. In particular, it details how future attempts to apply the PDM need to be adapted across four Transformational Domains: actors, issues, rules, and structures. Each is populated by “post-conflict issues/actions”. When CSOs successfully advance claims for modifying policy and practice “frame-alignment” occurs and the implementation of PDM may be adapted to the specificities of war-affected states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article extends recent reconsideration of British First World War patriotism by considering the ways in which domestic propaganda campaigns used repetitive organizational structures as rituals to provide a sense of familiarity among civilians. Using examples, involving multiple propaganda bodies and in varied parts of the nation, of street meetings, film screenings, fundraising weeks and the religious response to the fourth anniversary of Britain's entry into the war, it argues that historians should consider repetitive elements in First World War propaganda as a possible virtue rather than a drawback. Instead of repetition showing a lack of imagination or initiative, it apparently served a purpose in making propaganda events comfortable and accessible instead of alien or challenging. The form, organization and structure of propaganda, as well as its content, should be carefully studied to ensure fuller understanding of its purposes and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay investigates scientific exchanges between Britain and France from 1806 to 1814, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. It argues for a picture of scientific communication that sees letters and printed texts not as separate media worlds, but as interconnected bearers of time-critical information within a single system of intelligence gathering and experimental practice. During this period, Napoleon Bonaparte's Continental System blockade severed most links between Britain and continental Europe, yet scientific communications continued--particularly on electrochemistry, a subject of fierce rivalry between Britain and France. The essay traces these exchanges using the archive of a key go-between, the English man of science Sir Charles Blagden. The first two sections look at Blagden's letter-writing operation, reconstructing how he harnessed connections with neutral American diplomats, merchants, and the State to get scientific intelligence between London and Paris. The third section, following Blagden's words from Britain to France to America, looks at how information in letters cross-fertilized with information in print. The final section considers how letters and print were used together to solve the difficult practical problem of replicating experiments across the blockade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the persistence of the shock caused by the American Civil War on the relative city size distribution of the USA. Two features make the study of this conflict interesting. First, it took place at an earlier stage of the industrialisation and urbanisation processes than those previously analysed in the related literature. Second, the battles were fought in the open field, not in urban areas. In line with previous results for the Second World War in Japanese and German cities, our findings suggest that the effects of the shock were transitory. Furthermore, some evidence regarding the possible presence of a ‘safe harbour effect’ is reported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the history of the foundation and the activities of the All-Russian Memorial Society for the Soldiers of the Russian army, fallen during the war with Germany, Austria and Turkey. This public organization was founded for the implementation of commemorative projects and the improvement of military burials during the First World War. Recent historiography has for the most part neglected the All-Russian Memorial Society. The author uses new archival sources, such as official correspondence (incoming and outgoing letters), protocols and registers of the executive agency of the All-Russian Memorial Society, parish registers, lists of members, as well as published sources such as the organization's charter, directives of the Holy Synod and articles from the journal Arkhitekturno-khudozhestvennyi ezhenedel'nik. The article concludes that by the beginning of 1917 the All-Russian Memorial Society had received support from the Emperor, had opened local departments all across the Empire and had prepared for the implementation of its projects. Activities of the All- Russian Memorial Society stopped after the Bolshevik's seizure of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the First World War, heroes and soldiers who “sacrificed their lives for the Fatherland" were seen ambiguously in various segments of Russian society. The article analyzes the representation of those fallen at the two poles of Russian culture: in the official discourse generated by the high and middle class urban ‘educated society' and in the ‘common' discourse of villagers and urban dwellers who were culturally close to them. The study draws on official accounts, periodicals, popular literature, folklore (songs, poems, laments), peasant's letters, and recorded conversations. The official patriotic discourse sacralized and romanticized the images of the fallen heroes. In the traditional rural culture, attitudes towards the death on the battlefield and the posthumous fate of those fallen were articulated within different discourses, to which the binary opposition “hero" vs. “not hero" was not central. Here, the war victims were often regarded as needless sacrifices. Not only were they believed to be lost forever for their loved ones and for the communities they had belonged to, but also as disadvantaged and facing trouble in their afterlife. However, at both poles the ideas were changing in the course of the war. In the official ‘romantic-heroic' discourse, the emphasis initially was on heroic deeds of brave individuals and gradually shifted towards the image of anonymous, sublime and tragic mass sacrifice, producing a cult of fallen soldiers. The warfare techniques changed, and the widespread use of weapons of mass destruction and of longrange artillery restricted the individuals' opportunities for showing courage and led to depersonalization of heroes. This depersonalization crisis was resolved in the official discourse by way of a gradual equalization of “heroes" and “the fallen". The ‘popular' front-line discourse took a rapid way from peasant fatalism and religiously motivated self-sacrificing victimhood, which was involuntary and not reflected upon, toward cynical and cold-blooded desacralization and depreciation of this sacrifice. These two discourses had little in common besides the religious motivation and the rhetoric of heroism. They were inherendy different in terms of contents and articulation intensity. In a revised form, both discourses were later to be used by the Bolsheviks to compromise patriotism in Tsarist Russia and to develop Soviet rituals for honoring the “soldiers of the revolution". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the liberation of the Second World War, the governing parties in both Belgium and The Netherlands agreed that it was necessary to punish the collaborators. But the notion that the large majority had to be ‘re-educated’ for social reintegration also very soon prevailed in both countries. Collaborators had to be ‘cured’ to become full democratic national citizens again, and their punishment was designed to achieve this. Although in the last few decades the research scope of transitional justice has developed greatly and has contributed to an ever more nuanced picture of the punishment of collaboration in the post-war period, the question of to what extent prisons were used as places to ‘improve’ enemies of the state during a regime change has largely been overlooked. But precisely by studying the execution of the punishment, underlying ideologies and interests are exposed, and we can see how well defined citizenship was. This paper, with the aid of the Dutch–Belgian comparison, considers how post-war re-education was approached in those countries and what this says about the meaning of imprisonment during regime changes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Commercial itinerants like peddlers and hucksters formed the connective tissue of eighteenth-century mid-Atlantic retail economies, mediating consumers' access to a profusion of goods and provisions. Male and female itinerants leveraged geographic mobility to earn a modicum of economic independence. In doing so, they encountered a legal culture that viewed unrestrained movement as disruptive to social order. Struggling to differentiate licit forms of mobility from illicit ones, such as runaway slaves and servants, local and colonial officials enacted licensing, vagrancy, and market statutes to categorize and contain itinerancy. Revolutionary upheaval, including food shortages and fears of espionage, only exacerbated concerns about commercial travelers. In the war's aftermath, women hucksters became particular targets for popular derision, underscoring the more informal mechanisms by which commercial intermediaries were policed. Even as peddlers and hucksters became more indispensable to the mid-Atlantic economy, their place in the legal and social order grew increasingly tenuous at the end of the century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the history of Russia during the Great War and prelude to the Bolshevik Revolution. Emphasis is given to topics such as scholastic focus on social mobilization, public support for war and the cultivation of patriotism, and social stability under tsarist rule. Other topics include population displacement, the conscription of minorities, and military occupation.

Present in many European countries, the institution of the ‘gendarmerie’ is a powerful and regal tool for controlling territories and populations as well as for strengthening the central authority. The twentieth century's two world wars represent decisive moments for understanding the modes of regulation implemented by the gendarmeries. The ambition of this article is to question the impact of the two world wars on the modes of control over territories and persons for the Belgian and French gendarmeries and the DutchKoninklijke Marechaussee. In this way, the author analyses the relationships between the State and the police institutions. The article thus sheds light on evolutions in ‘gendarmic systems’ from a regional, national and transnational perspective during the first half of a twentieth century marked by two major crises. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The purpose of this work is to suggest new ways of identifying those communities in which opposition to Britain's involvement in the First World War was most marked. The principal indicators used here are conscientious objectors (COs). It will be argued that existing calculations of their numbers are unreliable and that conclusions based on those calculations are, therefore, unsafe. A new approach using the newly compiled Pearce Register of British Conscientious Objectors will be outlined and, by means of a sample of area studies of Essex and Northumberland, its potential for mapping patterns of dissent demonstrated. We further argue that this process may then inform different routes to a better understanding of popular attitudes to the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on images reproduced in both professional and popular publications, this article charts the changing representation of the war-damaged man in Soviet visual culture from the outbreak of war in 1941 until the reinstatement of Victory Day as a public holiday in 1965. Through such images it is shown that art followed a very different trajectory than literature or film when it came to dealing with such problematic aspects of the war experience, a disjunction that is attributed to the inherent nature of the various cultural genres. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the most dramatic shift in the depiction of the damaged man came — not in the Thaw as we might expect — but in the mid 1960s as part of a wider reassessment of the War and its legacy in Soviet visual culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After the Gallipoli landing on 25 April 1915, the word Anzac began to appear with increasing frequency to brand a range of Australian consumer products, and many traders applied to change the name of their businesses to Anzac. On 25 May 1916, the federal government issued War Precautions Regulations prohibiting the unauthorised use of the word Anzac ‘in any trade, business, calling or profession’. This article explores applications to use the word Anzac for commercial purposes between 1915 and 1921 to argue that consumer culture became a battleground where individuals and groups competed to assert ownership over the word and the social currency it represented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the historical conditions for, and implications of, the attitudes and conduct of a number of prominent or influential public intellectuals in the United States during the Great War. It argues that many intellectuals, particularly those who supported American entry to the war, shared a general lack of concern with the realities of full-scale warfare. Their response to the war had little to do with the war itself – its political and economic causes, brutal and industrial character, and human and material costs. Rather, their positions were often based on their views of culture and philosophy, or on their visions of the post-war world. As a result, relatively few of these intellectuals fully considered the political, social, and economic context in which the catastrophe occurred. The war, to many of them, was primarily a clash of civilizations, a battle of good versus evil, civilized democracy versus barbaric savagery, progress versus backwardness, culture versus kultur. The article describes several manifestations of American intellectual approaches to the war, discusses the correlation between intellectual and general public attitudes, and concludes with some implications for thinking about the relationship between intellectuals and war in more recent American history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines how white commercial farmers in Zimbabwe responded to the liberation war in the 1970s and the violence of Gukurahundi in the 1980s. It claims that the farmers adapted strategies using silencing and selective remembering as major components during the period. Also cited are the reconciliatory strategy of Zimbabwean Prime Minister Robert Mugabe, the stories about the plight of the farmers in the journal "The Farmer," and the role of the Commercial Farmers' Union (CFU).

An introduction to this special issue is presented which addresses the post-war impact of World War I, based on the 1968 special issue of "Journal of Contemporary History" dealing with the transition from war to peace, as well as the 1990 book "Fallen Soldiers" by George Mosse and his post-war theories of "brutalization" arising from the war.

This article reconsiders important aspects of African participation in the First World War, both in Europe and in Africa itself, as part of the British and French empires. More specifically, it explores demobilization at the end of the war in comparison with that process in Europe, paying close attention to the particularities of the colonial context. The article argues that, although French and British Africa were integrated significantly into their metropole’s war efforts between 1914 and 1918, the experience of demobilization in these colonies does not conform to George Mosse’s ‘brutalization’ thesis, which has been so influential in understanding postwar events in parts of Europe. Africans who participated in the British and French war efforts did not emerge from their experiences to roil the political landscape with discontent and violence, even if the effects of the war were still important in many areas of the continent. Further, the story of demobilization in Africa demonstrates the importance of attending to the specific context of the colonial ‘peripheries’, even as we recognize the important links that connect them to the metropolitan ‘centres’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although an independent Polish state did not exist after the end of the eighteenth century, Poles repeatedly tried to regain their lost independence. The existing territorial and political status quo could not be challenged without the use of force. The growing antagonism between the powers which had partitioned Poland at the end of the 18th century was met with satisfaction by many Poles. Both main Polish political parties, namely the National Democrats and the Socialists, accepted war as a method of solving international disputes. In Galicia after 1908, active paramilitary organizations prepared the Polish youth for a future military conflict between Russia and Austro-Hungary. Poles, especially in autonomous Galicia, celebrated the anniversaries of various battles and wars fought, after 1795, for the liberation of Poland. On the other hand, with the exception of a small group of radicals, the greater part of Polish public opinion did not intentionally strive for war. Nevertheless, most Poles accepted the prospect of war as a means of bettering their political situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the history of Hawaii during the U.S. Civil War, focusing on the diplomatic, political, economic, and military impacts the war had on civilians in Hawaii. Other topics include a discussion of how Hawaiians received information on the war through letters and newspapers, information on public opinion of the war in Hawaii, and how people in Hawaii supported the war effort through fund raising and sending supplies.

The view that the US economy and living standards benefited from mobilization for World War II is commonplace. The main source of evidence is aggregate comparisons of standard macroeconomic variables over the Great Depression and war years. In this paper, we use newly collected data on infant health and industrial accidents to document changes in health conditions during World War II. The findings suggest that infant health and work conditions deteriorated in the early 1940s. Opening or expanding a plant for war production is associated with 7 additional infant deaths (per 1,000 live births) in 1942 and incidence of industrial accidents increased by 16 percent. The war years interrupted the long-run trend toward improved health along a number of dimensions, however, recovery to pre-war levels occurred quickly after 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper shows that in order to maintain its position the Swiss government offered Germany concessions on merchandise trade when necessary, but Switzerland was far from being under German control during the Second World War. Germany provided Switzerland with excess imports to exports while paying higher prices for Swiss goods. Although the levels of trade were considerably smaller due to geographic restrictions, Switzerland gave the Allies favourable terms of merchandise trade, in particular after 1943, in exchange for the continued recognition of Swiss independence. This is consistent with, but not necessarily explicit in the current literature. As a result of these findings, this paper concludes, from a merchandise trade perspective, Swiss neutrality was a policy of pragmatic self-preservation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay focuses on a problem confronting most advanced, industrial states as they prepared for and then engaged in fighting a material-intensive, modern war: how to produce armaments and synthetic products in peacetime but also establish capacity to satisfy a future and uncertain level of demand during wartime. In establishing "shadow factories" which were state-owned but built and operated by risk-averse, private-sector firms, Britain and Germany appeared to produce very similar national solutions for internationally-shared, economic problems. Rearmament policies were driven much less by ideological objectives and far more by economic exigencies. However, this essay examines how a combination of economic, political and strategic factors structured the operation of the shadow factory scheme in Britain. In contrast to interpretations that emphasise Britain's readiness for conflict, the evidence offered here suggests that the constraints imposed by democracy on the mobilisation of resources placed Britain at a disadvantage at the outset of the Second World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to fill the gap of the economic aspect of prisoner of war (POW) employment with regards to German and Italian POWs in British hands during and after the Second World War. It quantifies German POW employment in Britain and Canada, its productivity, economic contribution and revenues for the captors. Germans and Italians contributed almost 200 million man days and at peak one per cent to GDP to the British economy, mostly in agriculture and mostly post-war. Canada's rural sector equally appreciated German POW labour and revenues almost exceeded costs. German POWs presented an asset in disguise: The unskilled, unwilling enemy was turned into a compliant and productive fire fighter against raw material bottlenecks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses 20th century Spanish poet, novelist and essayist Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and his stories of political fiction. The author comments on the emotional trauma caused by the Spanish Civil War and how its traumatic experiences are implemented into his writing. Other topics include Spanish military leader and dictator Francisco Franco and the psychological and societal impacts of the civil war.

George Orwell's initial response to wartime internment is characterised by his silence. Uncertainty, desire for government work, wartime necessity, political prejudice and faith in English reasonableness contributed to his toleration of the policy, in the specific context of total war. Orwell worried that criticising internment could undermine public trust in civil liberties, which performatively protected England from the excesses of totalitarianism. Unlike others on the Left, he therefore placed his faith not in the vigilance of parliament, but in an illusion embraced by the English people: that they remained guardians of civil liberties, despite a need in wartime to curtail them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]