Everyday Peace on the Battlefield

This chapter examines informal truces and acts of humanity and reciprocity during violent conflict. It is interested in the ‘hard cases’ of all-out warfare and draws on World War I and World War II personal diaries and memoirs. The chapter demonstrates that in some circumstances, everyday peace—or at least everyday tolerance and civility—has been possible during warfare. It contains multiple examples of ‘ordinary’ combatants showing humanity, compassion, and generosity to their supposed opponents. These cases are particularly interesting from the point of view of this book as they often occurred ‘under the radar’ or outside the surveillance of the state and others. Indeed, in many cases, they were expressly forbidden by military organisations and were contrary to the prevailing national mood of antagonism towards the enemy. They show individual and group initiative, as well as resistance to a national or wider group.

The Streaming Souls of White Folk

In the second July of the ongoing pandemic, with his cinephilia fading, Film Quarterly columnist Bilal Qureshi was jolted awake by the biting excellence of HBO’s six-part series The White Lotus, the undeniable water-cooler show of the summer. A classis whodunnit set among a collective of entitled, smug, and vindictive wealthy tourists at a Hawaiian luxury resort, The White Lotus proved a provocative meditation on class, privilege, and the frayed national mood. To have a work of mainstream “prestige” TV—with is lavish production values and characteristic wealthy white angst—inspire confusion and disagreement over issues of whiteness and privilege strikes Qureshi as a welcome shift from streaming’s usual habit of lulling audiences into one-dimensional distraction and cements The White Lotus’s status as a definitive pandemic-era piece of filmmaking.

From stressed utopias to pervasive anxiety

Three films imagining post-apocalyptic dystopias - Smog (Petersen Germany 1973), Operation Ganymed (Erler Germany 1977) and Die Hamburger Krankheit (Fleischmann Germany 1979) - concretise and dramatise environmental, political and social stresses on the West German national imaginary during the 1970s. Articulating cultural motifs hitherto associated with national success within the conventions of the disaster film, the films would exacerbate cultural stress throughout the decade by gradually uncoupling it from its historically specific sources and rendering it as a diffuse yet inescapable national mood. Taken together and read in sequence, the three films show how dystopian thinking takes hold while its specific causes grow less clear and obvious, expressing fundamental doubts about ‘post-war’ utopian aspirations.

Mormons at Midcentury

This chapter describes the American national mood in the middle of the twentieth century that made things feel so welcoming for Latter-day Saints. It highlights the golden era of Mormonism that happened between the end of World War II and the end of John F. Kennedy's presidency. It also talks about the era of the 1950s when Latter-day Saints may have felt that they were in step with the wider American culture. The chapter analyzes the press's treatment of Mormonism at mid-century that implies an underlying message that the matters of politics trumped matters of theology. It discusses American journalists that were writing about Mormons in 1947, which was the year that marked the centennial of the Latter-day Saints' epic trek west to their new Great Basin home.

Policy Agenda for Sustainable Intermodal Transport in China: An Application of the Multiple Streams Framework

Intermodal transport is widely believed to be an efficient way of organizing transportation activities because of its significant role in reducing logistics costs and emissions of air pollutants, which copes with the ever-increasing economic and environmental concerns. This paper applies the multiple streams framework (MSF) to analyze three streams (e.g., the problem stream, policy stream, and politics stream) in setting policy agenda for sustainable intermodal transport in China. By restricting the attention to the opening of the policy window and the coupling of the three streams, the motivation, process, and trend of formulating intermodal transport policy are systematically discussed. The findings show that the key to setting the policy agenda for sustainable intermodal transport in China is to strengthen collaboration among multiple interest groups, boost the national mood, and diversify the identity of policy entrepreneurs. This paper not only verifies the applicability of the MSF, but also helps us to better understand how sustainable intermodal transport policy is formulated in China, thus promoting future policy making.

Fake News and Propaganda: Trump’s Democratic America and Hitler’s National Socialist (Nazi) Germany

This paper features an analysis of President Trump’s two State of the Union addresses, which are analysed by means of various data mining techniques, including sentiment analysis. The intention is to explore the contents and sentiments of the messages contained, the degree to which they differ, and their potential implications for the national mood and state of the economy. We also apply Zipf and Mandelbrot’s power law to assess the degree to which they differ from common language patterns. To provide a contrast and some parallel context, analyses are also undertaken of President Obama’s last State of the Union address and Hitler’s 1933 Berlin Proclamation. The structure of these four political addresses is remarkably similar. The three US Presidential speeches are more positive emotionally than is Hitler’s relatively shorter address, which is characterised by a prevalence of negative emotions. Hitler’s speech deviates the most from common speech, but all three appear to target their audiences by use of non-complex speech. However, it should be said that the economic circumstances in contemporary America and Germany in the 1930s are vastly different.

That Splendid Enclosure

This chapter describes how the spirit of commemoration of those killed in the Great War, which became such a hallmark of national culture in the years ahead, always remained overwhelmingly Southern and Greek. What was involved was not just aesthetic in a purely artistic sense. The legacy of physical disfigurement from war service was one prime reason why consciousness of beauty was habitual in society at large. Simplicity, minimalism, and the whiteness of marble were inherent in this rejuvenation of classical principles. For instance, the bare austerity of Edwin Lutyens's Cenotaph in Whitehall, erected in 1920, drew upon ancient Greek tombs at Xanthos. In her 1925 volume of essays, The Common Reader, Virginia Woolf captured essential elements in this national mood during the first years after the war by relating the British condition to the ancient Greek mind.

FROM MORAL THREAT TO SYMBOLIC PROMISE: SHIFTING VIEWS OF POPULAR CULTURE

Some twenty years ago, the American sociologist Robert Wuthnow found in an opinion survey that his subjects consistently expressed extraordinarily conflicting attitudes toward money, proclaiming in one breath that Americans are too materialistic, and then in the next breath unashamedly affirming money's central importance, and wishing they had more of it. At the time, Wuthnow argued that these strikingly contradictory results probably reflected something in the national mood during a time of economic stagnation. But I think we are safe in guessing that his findings are not too different from what a similar survey of Americans would find at almost any time in the recent past. The ambivalences he detected in his survey have about them the ring of truth, the feel of something enduring. Even conspicuous comets of material ambition may be trailed by long tails of moral misgiving; and something like the reverse, conspicuous rectitude veiling grand acquisitive passion, may also be the case. Prosperity generates an “embarrassment of riches,” as Simon Schama put it, which is why “the tensions of a capitalism that endeavoured to make itself moral were the same whether in sixteenth-century Venice, seventeenth-century Amsterdam, or eighteenth-century London.”

Questioning the Future: Polling Americans at the Turn of the New Millennium

Elected in 1996 to serve as President into a new century, Bill Clinton announced a national mood of expectation in his second inaugural address: “It is our great good fortune that time and chance have put us not only at the edge of a new century, in a new millennium, but on the edge of a bright new prospect in human affairs — a moment that will define our course, and our character, for decades to come.” It was a moment, in short, when Americans, used to thinking ahead, were asked intensely about the future. Known for his close attention to polling data in policy making, Clinton responded to a frequently reported categorization of Americans during the 1990s as self-absorbed. Clinton's homespun message in his second inaugural address called on Americans planning their individual destinies to think collectively when he said simply, “[T]he future is up to us.” As the year 2000 approached, American polls repeatedly measured the national “mood” in light of individual beliefs about the future. Gallup, Torrance, Zogby, CNN (Cable News Network), USA Today, ABC News, and the Pew Research Center, among others, polled Americans about their feelings for the impending millennium “event” and their hopes and fears for the next year, generation, and century. Based on the experience of the last turn of the century, many publishers, educators, and politicians encouraged reflections on the century just past as much as the era ahead, but it was a rare poll that actually asked Americans about their view of the past. To be sure, authorities were queried for the greatest events, presidents, books, films, and television shows of the last century, but it was as much a sign of the difference in their historical perspective from the man or woman on the street as it was some national reflective urge.