World War II and the Illusion of Equality

2020 ◽  
pp. 164-190
Author(s):  
Terry L. Birdwhistell ◽  
Deirdre A. Scaggs

As new president Herman Lee Donovan began at UK in 1941, Dean Sarah Blanding left and Sarah Bennett Holmes became Dean of Women. World War II heavily influenced enrollment patterns on campus, and male students left for war while military units began training and living on campus. Women students and faculty obtained unprecedented status and influence on the campus. The number of women faculty increased, and women students, for the first time, fully participated in a coed student government and university marching band. But many, if not most, of the gains quickly disappeared in the postwar return to “normalcy.” Dean Holmes fought hard to keep women students from being pushed aside by returning veterans and continued to be concerned about employment opportunities for women graduates.

1992 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-60 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Higgs

Relying on standard measures of macroeconomic performance, historians and economists believe that “war prosperity” prevailed in the United States during World War II. This belief is ill-founded, because it does not recognize that the United States had a command economy during the war. From 1942 to 1946 some macroeconomic performance measures are statistically inaccurate; others are conceptually inappropriate. A better grounded interpretation is that during the war the economy was a huge arsenal in which the well-being of consumers deteriorated. After the war genuine prosperity returned for the first time since 1929.


Author(s):  
Stanislav Polnar

Since the end of World War II, the investigation of anti-state delinquency of military personnel was realised by the military intelligence. It originated with Czechoslovak military units in the USSR and were influenced by Soviet security authorities. After 1945 and 1948 these bodies remained in the structure of the Ministry of National Defense, but from the beginning of the 1951 they moved to the structure of the Ministry of the Interior following the Soviet model. The legal status of these bodies was always unclear and did not correspond to the legal regulation. Another important article in the investigation of the political delinquency of soldiers was the military prosecutor’s office as part of the socialist-type prosecutor’s office, which was subjected to general trends in the regulation of criminal proceedings.


2021 ◽  
pp. 323-350
Author(s):  
Jon D. Wisman

The United States was an anomaly, beginning without clear class distinctions and with substantial egalitarian sentiment. Inexpensive land meant workers who were not enslaved were relatively free. However, as the frontier closed and industrialization took off after the Civil War, inequality soared and workers increasingly lost control over their workplaces. Worker agitation led to improved living standards, but gains were limited by the persuasiveness of the elite’s ideology. The hardships of the Great Depression, however, significantly delegitimated the elite’s ideology, resulting in substantially decreased inequality between the 1930s and 1970s. Robust economic growth following World War II and workers’ greater political power permitted unparalleled improvements in working-class living standards. By the 1960s, for the first time in history, a generation came of age without fear of dire material privation, generating among many of the young a dramatic change in values and attitudes, privileging social justice and self-realization over material concerns.


2021 ◽  
pp. 101-138
Author(s):  
Thomas A. Guglielmo

Chapter 3 examines African Americans’ struggle to integrate military units during World War II. Integration of this kind became for the first time ever a core element of black people’s civil rights demands, around which growing numbers of them and their allies rallied during the war. Their efforts fell far short of their intended goal. The forces in favor of the segregated status quo—Congress and the White House, military brass and military tradition, federal law and white public opinion—proved too formidable. Even so, African Americans’ wartime integrationist struggle laid the foundation for the postwar desegregation of the armed forces.


Worldview ◽  
1979 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 23-36
Author(s):  
Jeremiah Novak

A crucial turning point in geopolitical history occurred on November 1, 1978, when President Carter announced a massive borrowing of foreign currencies to save the U.S. dollar. For the first time since World War II the U.S. was forced to borrow from the International Monetary Fund; and for the first time since 1893 the U.S. Treasury will have to issue bonds denominated in foreign monies—in this case Japanese yen, West German marks, and Swiss francs.What all this means is that the U.S. has acknowledged two things: that the European Economic Community (the EEC) and Japan are now its economic equals; and that America has forfeited the international economic supremacy it enjoyed since 1915.


Worldview ◽  
1973 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 37-41
Author(s):  
Donald F. Keys

The movement for a governed world has undergone a mutation recently and shows signs of again becoming an important factor in the intellectual and political worlds—for the first time since the early 1950's. The new federalism, or, if you like, neo-federalism, is no less idealistic than the old, but the time scales are different and the policies more pragmatic.Organizations and movements are not the same thing. The movement for a federated world really got under way immediately following World War II, and at first there was a high degree of congruency between the United World Federalists and the movement.


1967 ◽  
Vol 167 (1007) ◽  
pp. 134-140

Twenty years have elapsed since the introduction on a wide scale of the residual insecticides in preventive medicine, and it is perhaps useful at this moment to pause, to see what has been accomplished, and try to foresee what lies ahead. The history of the two best known synthetics, DDT and gammexane runs almost parallel: DDT was discovered as a student’s exercise by Zeidler in Germany in 1874, its insecticidal properties by Muller in Switzerland in 1936 and its applicability to medical problems by Buxton and others during World War II; benzene hexachloride was synthesized by Faraday in 1824, but it was not introduced as an insecticide until 1941— These and other substances became extensively used after the war, and for the first time it became possible to eradicate, often fairly easily, an insect vector of disease, instead of merely to reduce its numbers


Author(s):  
Philipp Gassert

By 1945, the spectre of Americanisation had been haunting Europe for half a century. With the United States still struggling to establish colonial rule over the Philippine Islands, European observers began framing the ‘American challenge’ as a cultural and most of all economic threat to national independence. Controversies about the impact of ‘America’ often served as a stand-in for a more fundamental reckoning with processes of modernisation. The initial period of sustained Americanisation was the 1920s, when American film, music, and automobiles were conquering Europe for the first time. A second heyday of Americanisation ‘from below’ started with the ‘American occupation of Britain’ and that of continental Europe during and after World War II. This article focuses on Western Europe and Americanisation, highlighting Americanisation from above and Americanisation from below. It looks at two concepts that often come up within debates about Americanisation: Westernisation and anti-Americanism.


Author(s):  
Barbara Lounsberry

Virginia Woolf, The War Without, The War Within completes Lounsberry’s trilogy on Virginia Woolf’s luminous diary and the diaries she read. It offers the first treatment of Woolf’s final diary stage (1929–1941), in which she turned more to her diary—and to others' diaries—as the war pressures of the unfurling 1930s grew. It reveals her artistic wars within as the encroaching outer war (World War II) approached. For the first time, this book will explore each of Woolf’s 12 final diary books in depth and trace her final flowering as a diarist. We watch as Woolf increases her number of diary entries in the 1930s and uses her diary more and more as a morning prop (as well as a post-tea-time act). We see her wish to write a “meatier” diary in 1940: an “evening” diary for “Old Virginia.” Interwoven into her own diary as it unfolds are the 18 key diaries that helped shape both her semi-private diary style and her public prose, including the diaries of Leo and Countess Tolstoy, Dorothy Wordsworth, Guy de Maupassant, Alice James, and André Gide. This book functions as a new Woolf biography, marking her life through her diaries from age forty-seven to four days before her suicide in 1941. Additionally, a new reading of Woolf’s suicide is offered—one based on her diaries.


Author(s):  
Andrea Mariuzzo

The struggle in projects, ideas and symbols between the strongest Communist Party in the West and an anti-Communist and pro-Western government coalition was the most peculiar founding element of the Italian democratic political system after World War II. Until now, most historians have focused their attention on political parties as the only players in the competition for the making of political orientations and civic identities in Italian public opinion. Others have considered Italian political struggle in the 1940s and 1950s in terms of the polarisation between Communism and organized Catholicism, due to the undoubted importance of the Church in Italian culture and social relations. This book enlarges the view, looking at new aspects and players of the anti-Communist ‘front’. It takes into account the role of cultural associations, newspapers and the popular press in the selection and diffusion of critical judgements and images of Communism, highlighting a dimension that explains the force of anti-communist opinions in Italy after 1989 and the crisis of traditional parties. The author also places the case of Italian Cold War anti-Communism in an international context for the first time.


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