Youth at War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young People ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Youth Leaders

World War II was the ultimate test of Soviet youth culture. The USSR’s heavy reliance on youth in the pre-war period increased as Stalin’s regime drafted youth into the army, in factories and as keepers of order on the home front. Soviet practices of mobilization and coercion developed during the interwar period continued and intensified during the war. As victory appeared imminent, youth leaders pondered how wartime brutalization and the compromises young people had made under occupation had changed the requirements of official youth culture. The victory reinforced the righteousness of pre-war practices as the correct way to raise youth under socialism.

Raised under Stalin

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Bernstein
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young People ◽  
Youth Culture ◽  
Socialist Society ◽  
World War ◽  
Moral Socialization ◽  
Young Communist League

Communist Upbringing under Stalin: Young Communists and War in a Socialist Society, 1929-1945 examines Stalinist mass youth culture in the period of the Great Terror and World War II. For the Bolsheviks, youth were the “new people” who would someday build communism. Despite Stalinist assertions that the country was marching inexorably toward communism, though, there was no blueprint for raising a socialist generation. “Communist upbringing”—the program of moral socialization of the Young Communist League (Komsomol)—absorbed the violent atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s. Even as it surrounded them with violence, Stalin’s regime provided young people with opportunities, shaping socialist youth culture and socialism more broadly through the threat and experience of war.

A war hero or a Hitler soldier?

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-57
Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Committee ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third Reich

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.

Cultures in Contact

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Watson
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
World War ◽  
Working At Home ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
Novel Of Manners ◽  
At Home

In this chapter I investigate the paradox that the writer who most vividly embodied the exchange between literature and anthropology during this period, Michel Leiris, worked hard to maintain separate identities and spaces for his life as an anthropologist (working at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris) and as a writer and memoirist (working at home). While Leiris came of age professionally and aesthetically during the fertile interwar period in France of “ethnographic surrealism,” his anthropological writings in the period after World War II show a surprising fidelity to disciplinary protocols. The chapter argues that Leiris’s ethnography of the Francophone Caribbean, Contacts de civilisations en Martinique et en Guadeloupe, tries to subvert those protocols, turning from a social science survey into something like a novel of manners by the end. Ultimately, however, this literary turn falls prey to tropes of imperial romance that Leiris ostensibly seeks to undercut.

“A Woman's World”: The University of California, Berkeley, During the Second World War

2008 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 534-564 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Dorn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Female Students ◽  
Home Front ◽  
University Of California ◽  
World War ◽  
Young Women's Christian Association ◽  
Christian Fellowship ◽  
The University

The fairer sex takes over and the campus becomes a woman's world. They step in and fill the shoes of the departing men and they reveal a wealth of undiscovered ability. The fate of the A.S.U.C. [Associated Students of the University of California] and its activities rests in their hands and they assume the responsibility of their new tasks with sincerity and confidence. —Blue and Gold, University of California, Berkeley, 1943During World War II, female students at the University of California, Berkeley—then the most populous undergraduate campus in American higher education—made significant advances in collegiate life. In growing numbers, women enrolled in male-dominated academic programs, including mathematics, chemistry, and engineering, as they prepared for home-front employment in fields traditionally closed to them. Women also effectively opposed gendered restrictions on extracurricular participation, filling for the first time such influential campus leadership positions as the presidency of Berkeley's student government and editorship of the university's student newspaper. Female students at Berkeley also furthered activist causes during the war years, with the University Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) serving as one of the most popular outlets for their political engagement. Historically rooted in a mission of Christian fellowship, by the 1940s the University YWCA held progressive positions on many of the nation's central social, political, and economic issues. Throughout the war years, women dedicated to promoting civil liberties, racial equality, and international understanding led the organization in its response to two of the most egregious civil rights violations in U.S. history: racial segregation and Japanese internment.

Canada at Peace and Soldiers at War: Canadian U.N. Soldiers in Korea, Egypt, and Vietnam

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bronwyn Jaques
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Conflicts ◽  
High Regard ◽  
Canadian Military ◽  
The Cold War

In recent years, Canadian peacekeeping and UN involvement has assumed a place of high regard, reverence, and veneration, often at the expense of Canada’s military past. While its glorification is in many ways justified, the mythology surrounding Canada’s peacekeeping role has compelled many Canadians to view Canada solely as a peacekeeping nation. As a result, peacekeeping has become the “touchstone of our identity.” This mythology distorts the reality of Canadian military action to the point where Canadian veterans of NATO conflicts are often forgotten and it ignores the fact that many of the first peacekeepers left Canada “virtually unnoticed,” without the recognition and support of their nation. The mythology of peacekeeping misrepresents Canadian military conflicts and ignores that, in spite of the characterization of peacekeepers as nonviolent and unbiased actors, the majority of them were first and foremost Canadian soldiers, many of whom veterans of World War II. For the soldiers who came of age on the battlefields of Europe, the role of peacekeeping was a frustrating and politically charged experience, whereby they held no power and they felt they made very little positive impact. Despite the virtually universal glorification and celebration of peacekeepers in recent years, investigation of the “Cold War Home Front” demonstrates the difficulties faced by Canadian NATO soldiers, U.N. peacekeepers and their families in a society that wanted to move beyond the years of struggle, pain and sacrifice in war time and had little sympathy for the men and women who ‘chose’ to leave their families to serve in wars their nation was not fighting.

scholarly journals Introduction: Physics, Technology, and Technics during the Interwar Period

2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 251-261
Author(s):  
Shaul Katzir
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Government Funding ◽  
World War ◽  
The Core ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
The University ◽  
University Industry

Historians, philosophers, and physicists portray the 1920s and 1930s as a period of major theoretical breakthrough in physics, quantum mechanics, which led to the expansion of physics into the core of the atom and the growth and strengthening of the discipline. These important developments in scientific inquiry into the micro-world and light have turned historical attention away from other significant historical processes and from other equally important causes for the expansion of physics. World War II, on the other hand, is often seen as the watershed moment when physics achieved new levels of social and technical engagement at a truly industrial scale. Historians have shown that military interests and government funding have shaped physics to unprecedented degree, and according to some, to the extent of discontinuity with earlier practices of research (Forman 1987; Kevles 1990; Kaiser 2002). In this vein, Stuart Leslie wrote, “Nothing in the prewar experience fully prepared academic scientists and their institutions for the scale and scope of a wartime mobilization that would transform the university, industry, and the federal government and their mutual interrelationships” (Leslie 1993, 6). While one can never befullyready for novelties, the contributors to this issue show that developments in interwar physics did prepare participants for their cold war interactions with industry and government.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document