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  Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania: Rebuilding Jewish Lives and Communities, 1944-1950

  Stefan Cristian Ionescu

  On 23rd August 1944, following the collapse of the pro-Nazi dictatorship of Ion Antonescu, Romania changed sides and abandoned the Axis to join the Allies. Justice and Restitution in Post-Nazi Romania explores the hopes, struggles and disappointments of Jewish communities in Romania seeking to rebuild their lives after the Holocaust. Focusing on the efforts of survivors to recuperate rights and property, Stefan Cristian Ionescu demonstrates how the early transitional government enabled short term restitution. However, from 1948, the consolidated communist regime implemented nationalizations which dispossessed many citizens. Jewish communities were disproportionality affected, and real estate and many businesses were lost once again. Drawing on archival sources from government documentation to diaries and newspaper reports, this study explores both the early success and later reversal of restitution policies. In doing so, it sheds light on the postwar treatment of Romanian Jewish survivors, and the reasons so many survivors emigrated from Romania.

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  Providential Rescuers or Collaborationist Traitors? Depictions of Romania’s Jewish Center (Centrala Evreilor) and Its Leaders in Jewish Diaries, 1942-1944

  Stefan Cristian Ionescu

  "During the Second World War, Nazi authorities appointed 'Jewish Councils' (Judenräte) to help with the administration of the non- ghettoized and ghettoized Jewish communities in regions occupied by Germany or in the German sphere of influence. Ghettoization was envisaged as an intermediary (and convenient) stage before the implementation of a 'final solution' to the so-called Jewish Question. During and especially after the war, many Jews criticized members of the Judenräte, the ghetto police, and prisoner functionaries as Nazi collaborators and traitors. After the defeat of Nazism, some of the surviving “Jewish Council” members were attacked, marginalized, or prosecuted for their wartime conduct in criminal and/or honor courts.1 Busy with the work of reconstruction, postwar societies across Europe and Israel celebrated the heroic models of human behavior under Nazi rule embodied by partisans, ghetto fighters, and other armed resistors. Consequently, little attention was paid to the diversity of the aims and positions of Jewish functionaries during the controversial cooperation-collaboration of 'Jewish Councils' with German occupation authorities."

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  Pathway to the Shoah: The Protocols, "Jewish Bolshevism", Rosenberg, Goebbels, Ford, and Hitler

  David M. Crowe

  In the dark months after the defeat at Stalingrad in 1943, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Party’s strident, virulently anti-Semitic propaganda minister, wrote in his diary that he had “devoted exhaustive study to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” despite the fact that some argued that “they were not suited to present-day propaganda.” After rereading them, he concluded that “we can use them very well,” since The Protocols were “as modern today as they were when published for the first time.” The same day, May 13, 1943, he met with Hitler, who told his propaganda minister that he thought they were “absolutely genuine.” He added that regardless of a Jew’s circumstances, whether it be in a ghetto or Wall Street, “they will always pursue the same aims and . . . use the same methods.” Why, he went on, were “there any Jews in the world order?”

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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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  Introduction to Stalin's Soviet Justice: "Show" Trials, War Crimes Trials, and Nuremberg

  David M. Crowe

  "Once Stalin won his power struggle against his principal rival, Leon Trotsky, he adopted new campaigns to collectivize Russian agriculture and dramatically increase industrial production. He decided in the late 1920s to use "show" trials as one of the ways to respond to growing domestic opposition to both programs. The 'show' trials, extralegal proceedings that bore modest resemblance to more traditional Western-style trials, were carefully orchestrated to convince the public of the dire nature of such threats. Thematically, Stalin used them to highlight his fears about an ongoing threat of domestic and international forces determined to destroy the Soviet state. Wrapped in a façade of legality, the 'show' trials were well-crafted propaganda exercises designed partially to rally a nation to support Stalin's goals."

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  Late Imperial and Soviet "Show" Trials, 1878-1938

  David M. Crowe

  "According to Cassidy, the imperial 'show' trials, which began in the 1870s, were a series of 'highly publicized public spectacles that spread the ideas of Russian radicalism even as they condemned the radicals themselves to imprisonment, exile, hard labor, civil death, or execution.'⁴ They also became a source of 'popular entertainment' that drew large audiences and helped, according Elizabeth A. Wood, create a link in the public imagination between 'revolution and trials.' Georgii Plekhanov, one of Russia's foremost Marxists, saw the 'revolutionary trials in the 1870s and 1880s' as 'the greatest historical drama which is called the trial of the government by the people.'⁵"

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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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  "May Justice Be Done!" The Soviet Union and the London Conference (1945)

  Irina Schulmeister-André and David M. Crowe

  "The London Conference, which ended on August 8, 1945, with the signing of the London Four-Power Agreement¹ with annexed statute, was a crucial step in the planning of the Nuremberg IMT trial of major German war criminals. The joint development of the statute is regarded as an important example historically of the cooperation of the Allied Powers, who, despite their different legal traditions, found ways to reach a consensus acceptable as the legal basis for their common goal: to carry out a trial of the major war criminals. This was particularly remarkable, given that they had to negotiate the substantive, procedural foundations of the future tribunal in just a little over six weeks (June 26 to August 8, 1945).

  Given this, it is important to take into account the existing differences and conflicts between each nation's representatives. The minutes of the London Conference published in the Report of Robert H. Jackson,² the US chief prosecutor in 1945, revealed that each of the four delegations openly viewed the trial from the perspective of their own legal origins, experiences, and agendas, which caused quite a few problems during the negotiations. There were also questions about whether a trial of major German war criminals should even take place. This was further complicated by the fact that no serious political discussions had taken place between the Allies before the end of the war about the nature of the trial. That led to different opinions among the delegates about the binding nature of the decisions made in London. The Soviet delegation, for example, had a very different view of the purpose of the trial and the authority of the tribunal that was to conduct it. These conceptual differences caused the serious conflicts during the London Conference. Jackson noted in his report that the "antagonistic concepts"_³ between the Soviet and Anglo-American representatives about the independence of the judiciary were particularly troublesome. However, it is important to question this allegation critically, particularly given the fact that Jackson's attitude toward the Soviet negotiators was far from impartial.⁴"

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  From War to Peace: The Allied Occupation of Germany and Japan

  David M. Crowe

  "The State Department's Division of Special Research began planning for the defeat and occupation of Germany and Japan in early 1941. After Pearl Harbor and the German declaration of war on the US, it created an Advisory Committee that studied this question further, followed by separate studies by the State, Navy, and Treasury Departments as well as the White House, the OSS, and other agencies. In late 1944, the White House created the State, War, Navy Coordinating Committee (SWNCC) to oversee interdepartmental analyses about postwar Japan and Germany."

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  MacArthur, Keenan and the American Quest for Justice at the IMTFE

  David M. Crowe

  "In the summer of 1946, John H. Higgins, the recently appointed US judge to the
  International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE; Tokyo trial), hastily
  resigned to return to his position as Chief Justice of the Superior Court of
  Massachusetts. Joseph B. Keenan, the tribunal’s chief prosecutor, who had
  opposed Higgins’s appointment, was incensed, as was Tom C. Clark, the Attor
  ney General of the United States, who had insisted on it. Though Higgins stated
  in his letters to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander for the
  Allied Powers (SCAP), Clark and Keenan that his decision was based solely on
  the fact that he had been misled about the potential length of the trial and
  problems replacing him on the Massachusetts court. He told his daughter in a
  private letter in July that he was also deeply troubled by Keenan’s ‘organizing
  ability and tact for the difficult task of molding the confidence of associate
  prosecutors’. Keenan, he went on, also ‘failed in his contact and associations
  with his fellow Americans’. He also told her that though Keenan’s staff had
  gathered a remarkable body of evidence, these problems led to a prosecutorial
  ‘failure in the presentation of this case’ before the tribunal. This, coupled with
  what Higgins said were ‘several instances of [Keenan’s] conduct that I don’t
  care to mention’, left him with serious doubts about the future of the trial."

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  The German Plunder and Theft of Jewish Property in the General Government

  David M. Crowe

  "Th e German conquest of Poland in the fall of 1939 unleashed the full horror of Nazi racial ideals that saw the gradual evolution of policies that ultimately led to the mass murder of 90 percent of prewar Poland’s 3.3–3.5 million Jews. The geographical center for what the Germans would ultimately call the Final Solution—a plan that Alfred Rosenberg explained meant 'the biological eradication of the entire Jewish people'—was the Generalgouvernement für die besetzten polnischen Gebiete (General Government for the Occupied Areas of Poland). Over time, the General Government would become not only Nazi Germany’s principal racial laboratory but also what its leadership considered a 'dumping ground' for those in Europe deemed untermensch or Lebensunwertes Leben ('subhuman' or 'lives unworthy of living'). As such, it would become the site for four of Nazi Germany’s six death camps once the Final Solution became operational in late 1941."

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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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  Jewish Resistance to ‘Romanianization’, 1940-44

  Stefan Cristian Ionescu

  In this chapter, Jewish legal resistance to the Antonescu regime is investigated, focusing on the use of the law to bypass the Romanianization of businesses and urban real estate. Despite multiple attempts, Antonescu’s government failed to completely expropriate Jewish urban buildings in favor of the state and subsequently distribute those properties to ethnic Romanians. The Romanianization of businesses yielded similar results.

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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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  Legal Tools Instead of Weapons: Jewish Resistance to the State Takeover of Urban Real Estate and Businesses during the Antonescu Regime

  Stefan Cristian Ionescu

  "I will investigate the different forms of Jewish resistance to the Antonescu regime, focusing on the use of legalities to bypass the process of Romanianization or Aryanization or state takeover of businesses and urban real estate, a process that aimed to exclude Jews from the local economy and, ultimately, from society.¹ The use of legal tools, mainly sabotage and judicial contestation by tens of thousands of Romanian Jews, was resistance to the Holocaust at its best.² If the seizure of Jewish properties, businesses, and jobs, as envisioned by Romanianization’s social architects, had succeeded, it would have meant starvation, homelessness, forced labor detachments, deportation to Transnistria, and the destruction of Jewish communities.3 According to contemporary accounts (diaries), Jews considered the struggle to stay alive and preserve their livelihoods (including properties, jobs, and businesses) as resistance to Antonescu’s antisemitic policies.⁴ Additionally, the Antonescu bureaucrats considered Jews’ massive use of legalities as resistance to Romanianization using terms such as 'resistance,' 'opposition,' and, most frequently, 'sabotage.'⁵ My study is based on official documents produced by state bureaucrats, judicial bodies, Jewish communities, foreign diplomats, and personal narratives of Romania’s inhabitants.⁶ I will begin with an overview of the World War II Antonescu regime and its antisemitic policies, especially Romanianization, and a brief history of Jewish responses to these persecutions. I will then explore legal resistance and sabotage as the main forms of Jewish resistance to the Romanianization of urban real estate and businesses."

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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."