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  Finding a Place for World War I in American History 1914-1918

  Jennifer D. Keene

  "World War I has occupied an uneasy place in the American public and political consciousness.1 In the 1920s and 1930s, controversies over the war permeated the nation’s cultural and political life, influencing memorial culture and governmental policy. Interest in the war, however, waned considerably after World War II, a much larger and longer war for the United States. Despite a plethora of scholarly works examining nearly every aspect of the war, interest in the war remains limited even among academic historians. In many respects, World War I became the 'forgotten war' because Americans never developed a unifying collective memory about its meaning or the political lessons it offered. Americans remembered the Civil War as the war that ended slavery and saved the union, World War II as 'the good war' that eliminated fascist threats in Europe and the Pacific, the Cold War as a struggle for survival against a communist foe, and Vietnam as an unpopular war. By comparison, World War I failed to find a stable place in the national narrative."

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  Italian Society during World War II

  Shira Klein

  "This chapter showcases what life was like for ordinary Italians during the Second World War. Up to the 1980s, a typical textbook on Italian history told a narrative of victimhood and heroism, promoting the idea that most Italians had never wanted to join the war in the first place, and resisted both the Fascists and the Germans. It was Mussolini and his henchmen, according to this narrative, who led unwilling Italians into war. The Italian rank-and-file were anti-Fascist heroes and victims of the leadership’s repressive tactics, whereas the Fascist leaders were villainous perpetrators.[i] Since the 1990s, historians have shown that Italians suffered from the conflict but also inflicted suffering on others, and that anti-Fascism remained on the sidelines until relatively late in the war. Further, some scholars have asked a broader set of questions about Italians’ life under battle, probing how their experiences of war developed over time. How, then, did war affect Italians’ daily reality, and how did it shape their opinion of Fascism? To what extent did Italians join the anti-Fascist resistance, and conversely, what role did they play in persecuting minorities and committing atrocities? What was their relationship with Nazi occupiers in the north, and Allied occupiers in the south?"

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  Life Is Beautiful, or Not: The Myth of the Good Italian

  Shira Klein

  "Life is Beautiful illustrates a popular misconception about Italy's role in the Holocaust. The film features the good Italian and the warped view that Italy treated Jews kindly in the late 1930s and during World War II. Historians have proven this claim to be grossly exaggerated, arguing that Italians persecuted Jews vigorously. Yet popular representations of the past-films, novels, museum exhibits, and websites-continue to give credence to the notion that Italians were overwhelmingly good to Jews. Although France and Germany cultivated similar self-acquitting myths in the decades immediately after the war, they eventually moved on to accept the more difficult truths about the past. Italy, however, has not moved on; the narrative of the good Italian is still very much alive. Life is Beautiful, the most famous Italian production about the Holocaust to date, both reflects and bolsters this warped view of the past. This essay surveys, first, what actually happened to Jews between 1938 and 1945 in the Italian peninsula, summarizing the broad scholarly consensus that Italy pursued a brutal and relentless persecution of its Jews. The essay then lays out the myth of Italian benevolence and its origins, using Life is Beautiful as an example of how the past has been misremembered."

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  A la sombra de la Revolución Sandinista: Nicaragua, 1979-2019

  Mateo Jarquín Chamorro

  "Como suele suceder en cualquier sociedad conmovida por la pérdida abrupta del statu quo, el análisis de la historia vuelve a la moda en Nicaragua. La sociedad civil y la clase política buscan en el pasado las respuestas a las mismas preguntas planteadas por este libro: ¿cómo hemos llegado hasta aquí? ¿Qué perspectivas se abren para el futuro?

  A primera vista, lucen imperantes las continuidades en la historia de Nicaragua. La consolidación de una nueva dictadura con pretensiones dinásticas invita a comparaciones evidentes con el proyecto somocista y hace eco de una larga tradición caudillista. Asimismo, lucen intactos los hábitos recurrentes de una élite económica “resignada” desde la independencia a perpetuar la realidad nacional del subdesarrollo (Pérez-Baltodano, 2003), así como otros vicios providencialistas de nuestra cultura política que han servido como caldo de cultivo para las dictaduras."

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  Finding a Place for World War I in American History: 1914-2018

  Jennifer D. Keene

  "World War I has occupied an uneasy place in the American public and political consciousness.1 In the 1920s and 1930s, controversies over the war permeated the nation’s cultural and political life, influencing memorial culture and governmental policy. Interest in the war, however, waned considerably after World War II, a much larger and longer war for the United States. Despite a plethora of scholarly works examining nearly every aspect of the war, interest in the war remains limited even among academic historians. In many respects, World War I became the “forgotten war” because Americans never developed a unifying collective memory about its meaning or the political lessons it offered. Americans remembered the Civil War as the war that ended slavery and saved the union, World War II as “the good war” that eliminated fascist threats in Europe and the Pacific, the Cold War as a struggle for survival against a communist foe, and Vietnam as an unpopular war. By comparison, World War I failed to find a stable place in the national narrative."

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  Mobilizing for the Great War

  Jennifer D. Keene, Ross A. Kennedy, and Michael S. Neiberg

  The First World War required an unprecedented mobilization of resources, opinion, and people in 1917 and 1918. Across remarks on the debates over conscription, the shaping of policy, trade with Europe, race and ethnicity, regional antimilitarism, and life in the training camps, Jennifer Keene, Ross Kennedy, and Michael Neiberg collectively posited a modestly distinctive southern experience but with important qualifications and limits. Audience members asked the panelists for further discussion of definitions--of "the South" and "the Great War"--and for their thoughts on regional animosities, sectional reconciliation, the preparedness debate, and the role of southern churches in the war mobilization.

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  Translation of "Three Jewish Men Are Accused of Sodomy (Rome, 1624)"

  Shira Klein

  A translation of "Three Jewish Men Are Accused of Sodomy (Rome, 1624)", testimony of captain Jacobus Spellatus. Dr. Klein is responsible for the translation, but did not author the editor's note at the top of the first page.

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  Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years in Vietnam

  Gregory A. Daddis

  Withdrawal is a groundbreaking reassessment that tells a far different story of the Vietnam War. Daddis convincingly argues that the entire US effort in South Vietnam was incapable of reversing the downward trends of a complicated Vietnamese conflict that by 1968 had turned into a political-military stalemate. Despite a new articulation of strategy, Abrams's approach could not materially alter a war no longer vital to US national security or global dominance. Once the Nixon White House made the political decision to withdraw from Southeast Asia, Abrams's military strategy was unable to change either the course or outcome of a decades' long Vietnamese civil war.

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  Italy’s Jews from Emancipation to Fascism

  Shira Klein

  How did Italy treat Jews during World War II? Historians have shown beyond doubt that many Italians were complicit in the Holocaust, yet Italy is still known as the Axis state that helped Jews. Shira Klein uncovers how Italian Jews, though victims of Italian persecution, promoted the view that Fascist Italy was categorically good to them. She shows how the Jews' experience in the decades before World War II - during which they became fervent Italian patriots while maintaining their distinctive Jewish culture - led them later to bolster the myth of Italy's wartime innocence in the Fascist racial campaign. Italy's Jews experienced a century of dramatic changes, from emancipation in 1848, to the 1938 Racial Laws, wartime refuge in America and Palestine, and the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors. This cultural and social history draws on a wealth of unexplored sources, including original interviews and unpublished memoirs.

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  Choosing Progress: Evaluating the "Salesmanship" of the Vietnam War in 1967

  Gregory A. Daddis

  "As the president and his war managers increasingly saw Vietnam as a 'race between accomplishment and patience,' publicizing progress became an integral part of the war. Yet far from a unique case of bureaucratic dishonesty, the 1967 salesmanship campaign demonstrates the reality, even necessity, of conversation gaps when one is assessing progress in wars where the military struggle abroad matters less than the political one at home."

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  American Military Strategy in the Vietnam War, 1965– 1973

  Gregory A. Daddis

  For nearly a decade, American combat soldiers fought in South Vietnam to help sustain an independent, noncommunist nation in Southeast Asia. After U.S. troops departed in 1973, the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975 prompted a lasting search to explain the United States’ first lost war. Historians of the conflict and participants alike have since critiqued the ways in which civilian policymakers and uniformed leaders applied—some argued misapplied—military power that led to such an undesirable political outcome. While some claimed U.S. politicians failed to commit their nation’s full military might to a limited war, others contended that most officers fundamentally misunderstood the nature of the war they were fighting. Still others argued “winning” was essentially impossible given the true nature of a struggle over Vietnamese national identity in the postcolonial era. On their own, none of these arguments fully satisfy. Contemporary policymakers clearly understood the difficulties of waging a war in Southeast Asia against an enemy committed to national liberation. Yet the faith of these Americans in their power to resolve deep-seated local and regional sociopolitical problems eclipsed the possibility there might be limits to that power. By asking military strategists to simultaneously fight a war and build a nation, senior U.S. policymakers had asked too much of those crafting military strategy to deliver on overly ambitious political objectives. In the end, the Vietnam War exposed the limits of what American military power could achieve in the Cold War era.

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  Westmoreland’s War: Reassessing American Strategy in Vietnam

  Gregory A. Daddis

  An original and major reinterpretation of American strategy during the Vietnam War which totally reconsiders the generalship of William Westmoreland and offers a more balanced picture of the US Army in Vietnam. The book's thesis that US strategy was more than just 'attrition' confronts decades' worth of historical narratives which argue we lost in Vietnam due to bad leadership and an incorrect strategy

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  Hemingway: A Typical Doughboy

  Jennifer D. Keene

  Ernest Hemingways early adulthood (19171929) was marked by his work as a journalist, wartime service, marriage, conflicts with parents, expatriation, artistic struggle, and spectacular success. In War + Ink, veteran and emerging Hemingway scholars, alongside experts in related fields, present pathbreaking research that provides important insights into this period of Hemingways life. Comprised of sixteen elegantly written essays, War + Ink revisits Hemingways formative experiences as a cub reporter in Kansas City. It establishes a fresh set of contexts for his Italian adventure in 1918 and his novels and short stories of the 1920s, offers some provocative reflections on his fiction and the issue of truth-telling in war literature, and reexamines his later career in terms of themes, issues, or places tied to his early life. The essays vary in methodology, theoretical assumptions, and scope; what they share is an eagerness to questionand to look beyondtruisms that have long prevailed in Hemingway scholarship. Highlights include historian Jennifer Keenes persuasive analysis of Hemingway as a typical doughboy, Ellen Andrew Knodts unearthing of Hemingwayesque language spread throughout the correspondence penned by his World War I contemporaries, Susan Beegels account of the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic and its previously unrecognized impact on the young Hemingway, Jennifer Haytocks adroit analysis of destructive spectatorship in The Sun Also Rises , Mark Cirinos groundbreaking discussion of the instantaneous life review experienced by Hemingways dying characters (an intrusion of the speculative and the fantastic into fiction better known for its hard surfaces and harsh truths), and Matthew Nickels detailed interpretation of the significance of Kansas City in Across the River and Into the Trees . A trio of scholarsCelia Kingsbury, William Blazek, and Daryl Palmerfocus on Soldiers Home, offering three very different readings of this quintessential narrative of an American soldiers homecoming. Finally, Dan Clayton and Thomas G. Bowie reexamine Hemingways war stories in light of those told by todays veterans. War + Ink offers a cross section of todays Hemingway scholarship at its bestand reintroduces us to a young Hemingway we only thought we knew.

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  North America

  Jennifer D. Keene

  "These demographic shifts are just one example of how considering North America as an entity during the First World War offers the alluring possibility of breaking away from the strictures of the normal nation-state approach to studying the war, presenting an opportunity to consider the war's regional and global dimensions. Uncovering the full scope of 'North America's War' requires evaluating Britain's dominant position in the global political economy, North America's contribution to the fighting, international relations within North America and how North American-based events and initiatives affected the course of the war and the peace."

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  Wilson and Race Relations

  Jennifer D. Keene

  A Companion to Woodrow Wilson presents a compilation of essays contributed by various scholars in the field that cover all aspects of the life and career of America’s 28th president. This chapter focuses on Wilson's race relations policies.

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  No Sure Victory: Measuring U.S. Army Effectiveness and Progress in the Vietnam War

  Gregory A. Daddis

  Conventional wisdom holds that the US Army in Vietnam, thrust into an unconventional war where occupying terrain was a meaningless measure of success, depended on body counts as its sole measure of military progress. In No Sure Victory, Army officer and historian Gregory Daddis looks far deeper into the Army's techniques for measuring military success and presents a much more complicated-and disturbing-account of the American misadventure in Indochina.

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  Displaced Persons Act

  Shira Klein

  An encyclopedia entry on the Displaced Persons Act, or Wiley-Rivercomb Bill, signed into law signed by President Harry Truman on June 25, 1948. It provided for the immigration of displaced Europeans into the United States following the Second World War.

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  Sustaining the Will to Fight: The American Army in World War I

  Jennifer D. Keene

  The raising, training and sustaining of armies tells us much about the ways in which armies have done, and do, fill 'the yawning gap between ends and means' in meeting and overcoming the challenges of the battlefield. These essays draw on examples ranging from the American Civil War to the United Nations intervention in East Timor in 1999 to illustrate how armies have met, or failed to meet, these challenges

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  United States in the First World War

  Jennifer D. Keene

  This chapter focusing on the devasting events for American soliders during World War I.

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  Master of the Air: William Tunner and the Success of Military Airlift

  Robert A. Slayton

  In 1948, just as the Cold War was settling into the form it would maintain for nearly half a century, major antagonists the US and the USSR began maneuvering into a series of dangerously hostile encounters. Trouble had broken out in Poland and Czechoslovakia, but it was in Germany, which had been at the heart of World Wars One and Two, that the first potentially explosive confrontation developed. The USSR, which had suffered more at Germany’s hands than the rest of the Allies combined, may have viewed developments there with heightened fear and irritability. When the western Allies moved to consolidate their areas of control in occupied Germany, the USSR responded by cutting off land access to West Berlin, holding over two million residents of that city hostage in an aggressive act of brinkmanship.

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  Images of Racial Pride: African American Propaganda Posters in the First World War

  Jennifer D. Keene

  During World War I governmental agencies in the United States produced thousands of posters that targeted both the entire country and specific segments of the population, including the African American community.

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  The Memory of the Great War in the African American Community

  Jennifer D. Keene

  One day a colonel met a colored captain whom he thought he had seen be- fore. “Haven’t I seen you somewhere?” he asked. “Yes, sir,” replied the man, “I was with you on the [Mexican] border [in 1916]; Captain French is my name, sir.” “Oh, I do remember,” said the colonel, “you are Sergeant French.” “No, sir, I am Captain French.” “Well,” said the colonel as he walked away, “if I forget and call you Sergeant, don’t mind.” This encounter between two officers in France during the First World War encapsulated the essence of black troops’ war experience: trying to serve with honor and distinction while encountering a steady torrent of racial prejudice.

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  Americans at War: Assessing the Significance of American Participation in the Great War

  Jennifer D. Keene

  This chapter focuses on American involvement in the Great War (as compared to New Zealand's) and the significance of their final victory.

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  World War I, American Soldiers Lives Series

  Jennifer D. Keene

  Read the experiences of the men and women who served in a horrific war, across the sea-the Great War. Relying extensively on letters, diaries, and reminiscences of those Americans who fought or served in World War I, Jennifer Keene reports on training and camp requirements for enlistees and recruits; the details of the transport across the ocean of sailors, soldiers, and others being carried Over There; and the experiences of African Americans, women, Native Americans and immigrants in The White Man's Army. She also describes in vivid detail, The Sailor's War, and for those on the ground in France and Belgium, the events of static trench warfare, and movement combat. Chapters describe coping with and treating disease and wounds; the devastating amount of death; and for those who came home, the veterans' difficult entrances back into civilian life. A timeline, extensive bibliography or recommended sources, and illustrations add to the usefulness of the volume.

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  Protest and Disability: A New Look at African American Soldiers During the First World War

  Jennifer D. Keene

  This chapter focuses on the treatment of African American soldiers during World War I.