Afterword: War Play

PMLA ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 124 (5) ◽  
pp. 1886-1895 ◽  
Author(s):  
Diana Taylor
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Iraq War ◽  
Civil Liberty ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
Big Band ◽  
Low Intensity

On 27 February 2009, The Essays for this PMLA issue on war were coming in, against a background of various wars. The Iraq War had claimed over 100,000 civilian lives. The newly elected Obama administration vowed to amp up efforts in Afghanistan. The rubble in Gaza still smoldered from the recent Israeli attacks. The ongoing conflict in Darfur had already left 300,000 people dead, not to mention the 2.5 million displaced. When President George W. Bush left office, his boundless war on terror had exacted more lives, money, civil-liberty concessions, and international goodwill than one could even begin to tally. These were just the newsworthy wars that happened to be featured that month in the New York Times. Other, “low-intensity” wars—the devastating fighting in East Congo, the ongoing Zapatista uprising, Colombia's fifty-year-old armed conflict, Sri Lanka's civil war, and similar struggles—simmered on the back burner. The topic of war seemed as urgent that February morning as it had two years earlier, when the editors proposed this special issue. Ironically, that morning's Times showcased “Weekend at War” in its Escapes section (Sokol). The oversize image showed a crowded ballroom full of happy dancers in World War II outfits swinging to a big band orchestra—the uniforms, insignia, hats, hairdos all conjured up another time. The caption read, “It's winter 2009, but for hundreds of reenactors, it's December 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge.”

Africans and the Two Great Wars: A General Overview

2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110548
Author(s):  
EC Ejiogu ◽  
Nneka L. Umego
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
World War ◽  
Crack Open ◽  
American Century ◽  
The World

Historically, the World Wars represented different realities for the different countries, nay nations and peoples that participated in them. Just recently, in their online daily weekday newsletter, The Morning, of September 10, 2021 a New York Times writer, David Leonhardt, observed, inter alia, that for America, “World War II helped spark the creation of the modern middle class and cemented the so-called American Century.”1 Leonhardt’s assertion are in the positive realm. For Africans, who were still subject peoples to the European powers that colonized them when both World Wars were waged, the story of the realities that they represented is most complicated, especially if it is viewed critically. Even then, any critical assessment of the two wars vis-a-vis Africa and its peoples will reveal that such a complicated story is a part of the extensive trajectory of the exploitation of the continent, its vast resources, and peoples by the former. This article and the Special Issue of the Journal of Asian and African Studies where it’s published, crack open a dedicated discourse on Africans and the World Wars by a select list of scholars who contributed articles to the Special Issue.

Civil Defense—the New Debate

Worldview ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 40-41
Author(s):  
Paul H. Nitze
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Civil Defense ◽  
World War ◽  
Nuclear War

George Kennan, in an interview published by the New York Times Magazine, affirmed the proposition that it is better to be “Red than dead.” Since the end of World War II the United States has been engaged in a successful effort to demonstrate that the choice thus implied is wrong. We have demonstrated, at least to date, that it is not necessary to be either “Red or dead“; it has been possible both to remain free and to avoid a nuclear war. The essential task is to continue so to do.In the last half of the 1950's, at the time of Sputnik, serious doubts arose as to whether a time would shortly arise when that issue—“Red or dead“—could become serious. It had not been a serious choice during the period when we had a nuclear monopoly, or even when we had an overwhelming and stable nuclear deterrent. But with the Soviet development of ICBMs, the technological practicality of which was first demonstrated by Sputnik, it became possible, perhaps probable, that the “better Red than dead” issue would arise in all seriousness in a few years.

News from the Great Wide World: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Black Popular Music, 1927–1943

Prospects ◽  
1993 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 483-506 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis A. Erenberg
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Special Role ◽  
World War ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Big Band ◽  
Black America ◽  
Northern Cities ◽  
Secular Rituals

In numerous essays Ralph Ellison highlighted the special role that musicians and big swing bands played in defining a new future for black America from the late 1920s through World War II. Led by sophisticated and glamorous Dukes and Counts, big swing bands represented a flowering of black folk culture in the new urban centers of the black migration. With New York City acting as their national capital, moreover, these bands acted as traveling representatives of the modern city as they conducted national tours, produced endless recordings, and performed live on radio for a new mass audience for jazz music. While their travels took them through the indignities of a segregated society, black bands offered release from the Depression and expressed heightened expectations for people whose lives were still bound by racial restraints. As Ellison recognized, they provided ecstasy and communion to their many followers, performed in secular rituals on the dance floor. As such, the most famous bands of the 1930s and 1940s held out an urban model of freedom that climaxed with the renewed mass migrations to Northern cities during World War II. In the big band form, folk culture and modern life were united in new ways to offer optimism tinged by hard reality in the middle of the Depression. In the process, black entertainers stood as heroes.

Mr. Roberts and American Remembering; or, Why Major Major Major Major Looks Like Henry Fonda

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Philip D. Beidler
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
New York Times ◽  
World War ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Subject ◽  
To Come

Although the idea may be hard for us to imagine fifty years later, especially given the historical weight of the subject, the first of the great postwar entertainment classics to come out of the American experience of World War II took shape initially as a set of comic short stories by Thomas Heggen about the backwater Pacific Navy. Gathered into a slim 1946 novel, the stories became the basis of a hit Broadway play of 1948; and that play in turn became the basis of an extraordinarily popular 1955 movie. The classic so described, of course, was Mr. Roberts, with the titular hero eventually so thoroughly identified with the actor playing him on stage and screen that by the end of the decade in question, a New York Times Reviewer would observe of the actor, Henry Fonda, “it now appears he is Mr. Roberts.”

THE AMERICAN WAR FOR THE GREATER MIDDLE EAST: FROM DIPLOMACY TO MILITARY INTERVENTION

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 757-765
Author(s):  
Craig Daigle
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Middle East ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Western Desert ◽  
Front Page ◽  
World War ◽  
American Military ◽  
The Government ◽  
Egyptian Desert

Emblazoned across the front page of The New York Times on Sunday, 15 November 1981 was a large photograph of hundreds of US soldiers from the army's 82nd Airborne Division parachuting into the vast western desert of the Sinai Peninsula. The photo was eerily reminiscent of the images from October 1956 when Israeli soldiers dropped into the same desert as part of their effort, along with British and French forces, to topple the government of Egyptian President Jamal ʿAbd al-Nasir. But the American soldiers were on a much different mission. Rather than attempting to bring down Egypt's government, they were there to participate, alongside Egyptian forces, in “Operation Bright Star,” the largest American military exercise in the Middle East since World War II. During the next ten days, more than 6,000 US soldiers participated in the “war games,” which stretched from Egypt to Sudan, Somalia, and Oman, at an estimated cost of more than 50 million dollars (157 million dollars in current figures). On 25 November, the penultimate day of the operation, a half dozen American B-52s flying from North Dakota dropped a cluster of bombs over the Egyptian desert and then returned home on a thirty-two-hour journey without stopping, demonstrating the vast reach of the American military.

Lincoln Kirstein’s Social Modernism and the Cultural Front

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Harris
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Relevance ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Biographical Approach ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Economic

This chapter takes a biographical approach to Lincoln Kirstein’s creation of a modernist theory of ballet to situate its development in the 1930s cultural wing of the Popular Front and explore its evolution through and after World War II. Fueled by the cultural front’s belief in the role of the arts in social revolution, Kirstein seized the opportunity to decouple ballet from existing biases about its elitism and triviality, and formulate new ideas about its social relevance in the Depression period. After exploring the development of Kirstein’s social modernism in the cultural front, chapter 2 then turns to the challenges posed to the 1930s belief that art could be productively combined with politics through two major turning points in Kirstein’s life. These are his experiences in World War II, and the erosion of his own artistic role in the ballet company after the formation of the New York City Ballet and the ascendance of George Balanchine’s dance-for-dance-sake aesthetic in the late 1940s. The chapter illustrates Kirstein’s attempts to negotiate the social modernist aesthetic he crafted under the wing of the cultural front within the volatile political, economic, and artistic circumstances of World War II, anticommunism, and the Cold War.

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