The Prairie View Co-Eds: Black College Women Musicians in Class and on the Road during World War II

1999 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 93 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherrie Tucker
Author(s):  
Peter Kolozi

Post World War II conservative thinking witnessed a marked shift in criticism away from capitalism itself and to the state. Cold War conservatives’ anti-communism led many on the right to perceive economic systems in stark terms as either purely capitalistic or on the road to communism.


Author(s):  
Carol Dougherty

This chapter offers a reading of Michael Ondaatje’s 1992 novel The English Patient in which four characters take refuge in an abandoned Italian Villa outside Florence in the final year of World War II trying to put themselves and their stories back together again. While Odysseus, too, takes up temporary residence with Calypso, Circe, and the Phaeacians as he makes his way home, the Odyssey doesn’t choose to dwell on or in these homes on the road for long, focusing instead on its hero’s return to Ithaca, and so reading the Odyssey together with The English Patient suggests that the comforts of home might be complemented by the possibilities of travel as much as they are put in tension with movement. A recurrent theme in Michael Ondaatje’s fiction is a fascination with “people who are tentative about where they belong,” and The English Patient appropriates a sense of the complications of and complementarities between travel and return that are already at play in Homer’s Odyssey and elaborates their potential in a contemporary postcolonial, postwar context. Not only can you take your home with you wherever you go, you can make your home wherever you go, as well, his novel suggests.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Fennell

There is a very extensive volume of literature on the British army and World War II. This is not solely down to the iconic status of the war in British memory, or its role in shaping British identity. The debates surrounding the causes of great victories and defeats still fire the imagination. The role of the army in the collapse of the British Empire provokes controversy, as indeed does the part played by citizen soldiers on the “road to 1945”—Labour’s unexpected landslide election victory at the conclusion of hostilities. The great generals—Montgomery, Slim, Auchinleck, and others—were remarkable characters, who closely guarded their reputations; their interventions in the decades following the Axis defeat provoked much rancor. A pervasive desire to understand “what it was like” has led to an upsurge of personal memoirs and “experience” books and analyses of how the war, and the institution of the army, impacted individuals in terms of their mental and physical health, their politics and identity. And still there is a debate about whether the army was any good. Did the country mobilize effectively for war? Did wartime leaders get strategy right, in terms of the lead up to and conduct of the war? Did senior officers devise an effective doctrinal and conceptual solution to the challenges of 20th-century industrial warfare? The answers to many of these questions can be found in the sample of literature below. A careful examination of these works will also, undoubtedly, lead to more questions and hopefully spark new histories and perspectives on Britain’s army in World War II.


2021 ◽  
pp. 127-145
Author(s):  
Yurii Klymenko ◽  
Oleksandr Potiekhin

Abstract. The Russian Federation’s military aggression against Ukraine, preceded by the war of the Russian Federation against Georgia, raised the question of a joint repulse of democratic states to actions aimed at undermining European stability. The problem of protecting small and medium-sized states from the threat posed by Russia has arisen in a new way. In this context, the inability of leading European states to stop the aggression of Nazi Germany is repeatedly mentioned. To assess the relevance of such parallels with modernity, the authors of this article seek to briefly and objectively analyse what was happening in the 1930s. The threat of a military catastrophe and complete destabilisation of Europe had been growing since 1933, when Hitler came to power in Germany. He and his entourage gradually dragged Europe into a series of international conflicts and the World War II. According to the authors of the article, the leading motive for the inaction of Western powers within the military and political allied cooperation was not the desire to balance Germany’s military power and thus deter aggression but the attempt to avoid involvement in a world war by appeasing Hitler. In pursuit of European stability, France aimed to secure the military support of as wide a range of European countries as possible, and Great Britain was seeking to build a stable European system without making clear military commitments to the continental powers. London felt at peace with Berlin’s continental ambitions, as they did not cover the seas. London entertained the illusion that its security could be guaranteed without interfering in the war on the mainland. The authors emphasise that only in a state of conscious self-blindness could Western politicians for years retain the illusion of the prospect of civilising and taming the German dictator by satisfying his whims. Such illusions, however, never concerned Stalin. In the pre-war period, the Stalinist regime did its best to prevent the Soviet Union from being involved in building a system of collective security in Europe. The authors come to the following conclusion: in an effort to preserve at least the remnants of stability in Europe, the states have consistently moved towards continuous destabilization and war. Keywords: Europe, military and political union, World War II, Germany.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-150
Author(s):  
AMY LYNN WLODARSKI

AbstractGeorge Rochberg often attributed his postmodern shift to the death of his son in 1964. Accordingly, the literature has described his practice of ars combinatoria (“art of combination”) as an “abrupt about-face”—a sudden rejection of modernist aesthetics. But the composer's unpublished essays, diaries, correspondence, and musical sketchbooks suggest that the road to ars combinatoria had well-laid roots in two of his least considered biographical periods: his service during World War II and his serial period. During these two decades, Rochberg actively sought positive models for humanistic composition, historical figures who rose to the level of musical heroes in that they served humanity through their art. But as the war had taught him, heroes are necessarily defined by their struggle against nemeses in ethical conflicts. Correspondingly, he constructed the other side of the artistic world as a realm of vain egoists who sought self-promotion and seemed unconcerned with humanistic modes of expression. As his ideas matured, Rochberg assigned different figures to these archetypes, but the guiding ethical criteria remained fairly consistent throughout. I therefore argue that ars combinatoria was less a sudden aesthetic reversal than it was the result of a longer cumulative process of self-assessment and compositional maturation.


1995 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 555-574 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farhad Kazemi

This essay reviews six recent books on modern Iranian politics. It suggests that Iranian politics can be analyzed from the perspective of four basic traditions and models: monarchical, liberal nationalist, religious, and leftist. Each model abstracts the essential elements of the political system and demonstrates the dominance of a certain perspective. The first three of these models have been implemented in post—World War II Iran, and even the left has had an impact. The essay concludes by stating that current Iranian domestic politics can be better understood by paying attention to five enduring features: historical continuity of the nation-state, steady increase in state power, persistence of patrimonialism, intense interaction between domestic and foreign policies particularly as it relates to control over oil, and the vitality of civil society even under the Islamic Republic.


Author(s):  
Steven Casey

The United States was extremely reluctant to get drawn into the wars that erupted in Asia in 1937 and Europe in 1939. Deeply disillusioned with the experience of World War I, when the large number of trench warfare casualties had resulted in a peace that many American believed betrayed the aims they had fought for, the United States sought to avoid all forms of entangling alliances. Deeply embittered by the Depression, which was widely blamed on international bankers and businessmen, Congress enacted legislation that sought to prevent these actors from drawing the country into another war. The American aim was neutrality, but the underlying strength of the United States made it too big to be impartial—a problem that Roosevelt had to grapple with as Germany, Italy, and Japan began to challenge international order in the second half of the 1930s.


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