This book outlines the rich history of more than 250 women who worked as war correspondents up through World War II, while demonstrating the ways in which the press and the military both promoted and ...prevented their access to war. Despite the continued presence of individual female war correspondents in news accounts, if not always in war zones, it was not until 1944 that the military recognized these individuals as a group and began formally considering sex as a factor for recruiting and accrediting war correspondents. This group identity created obstacles for women who had previously worked alongside men as “war correspondents,” while creating opportunities for many women whom the military recruited to cover woman’s angle news as “women war correspondents.” This book also reveals the ways the military and the press, as well as women themselves, constructed the concepts of “woman war correspondent” and “war correspondent” and how these concepts helped and hindered the work of all war correspondents even as they challenged and ultimately expanded the public’s understanding of war and of women.
Our collective memories of World War II and Vietnam have been shaped as much by memoirs, novels, and films as they have been by history books. InWelcome to the Suck, Stacey Peebles examines the ...growing body of contemporary war stories in prose, poetry, and film that speak to the American soldier's experience in the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War.
Stories about war always encompass ideas about initiation, masculinity, cross-cultural encounters, and trauma. Peebles shows us how these timeless themes find new expression among a generation of soldiers who have grown up in a time when it has been more acceptable than ever before to challenge cultural and societal norms, and who now have unprecedented and immediate access to the world away from the battlefield through new media and technology.
Two Gulf War memoirs by Anthony Swofford (Jarhead) and Joel Turnipseed (Baghdad Express) provide a portrait of soldiers living and fighting on the cusp of the major political and technological changes that would begin in earnest just a few years later. The Iraq War, a much longer conflict, has given rise to more and various representations. Peebles covers a blog by Colby Buzzell ("My War"), memoirs by Nathaniel Fick (One Bullet Away) and Kayla Williams (Love My Rifle More Than You); a collection of stories by John Crawford (The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell); poetry by Brian Turner (Here, Bullet); the documentaryAlive Day Memories; and the feature films In the Valley of Elahand the winner of the 2010 Oscar for Best Picture,The Hurt Locker, both written by the war correspondent Mark Boal.
Books and other media emerging from the conflicts in the Gulf have yet to receive the kind of serious attention that Vietnam War texts received during the 1980s and 1990s. With its thoughtful and timely analysis,Welcome to the Suckwill provoke much discussion among those who wish to understand today's war literature and films and their place in the tradition of war representation more generally.
Controlling Sex in Captivity is the first book to examine the nature, extent and impact of the sexual activities of Axis prisoners of war in the United States during the Second World War. Historians ...have so far interpreted the interactions between captors and captives in America as the beginning of the post-war friendship between the United States, Germany and Italy. Matthias Reiss argues that this paradigm is too simplistic. Widespread fraternisation also led to sexual relationships which created significant negative publicity, and some Axis POWs got caught up in the U.S. Army’s new campaign against homosexuals. By focusing on the fight against fraternisation and same-sex activities, this study treads new ground. It stresses that contact between captors and captives was often loaded with conflict and influenced by perceptions of gender and race. It highlights the transnational impact of fraternisation and argues that the prisoners’ sojourn in the United States also influenced American society by fuelling a growing concern about social disintegration and sexual deviancy, which eventually triggered a conservative backlash after the war.
With expert scholars and great sensitivity, Out of Line, Out of Place illuminates and analyzes how the proliferation of internment camps emerged as a biopolitical tool of governance. Although the ...internment camp developed as a technology of containment, control, and punishment in the latter part of the nineteenth century mainly in colonial settings, it became universal and global during the Great War.Mass internment has long been recognized as a defining experience of World War II, but it was a fundamental experience of World War I as well. More than eight million soldiers became prisoners of war, more than a million civilians became internees, and several millions more were displaced from their homes, with many placed in securitized refugee camps. For the first time, Out of Line, Out of Place brings these different camps together in conversation. Rotem Kowner and Iris Rachamimov emphasize that although there were differences among camps and varied logic of internment in individual countries, there were also striking similarities in how camps operated during the Great War.
NBC Goes to War Cassidy, James; Sweeney, Michael
03/2022
eBook
The diary of radio correspondent James Cassidy presents
a unique view of World War II as this reporter followed the Allied
armies into Nazi Germany. James Joseph Cassidy was one of
362 American ...journalists accredited to cover the European Theater
of Operations between June 7, 1944, and the war's end. Radio was
relatively new, and World War II was its first war. Among the
difficulties facing historians examining radio reporters during
that period is that many potential primary documents-their live
broadcasts-were not recorded. In NBC Goes to War ,
Cassidy's censored scripts alongside his personal diary capture a
front-line view during some of the nastiest fighting in World War
II as told by a seasoned NBC reporter. James Cassidy was ambitious
and young, and his coverage of World War II for the NBC radio
network notched some notable firsts, including being the first to
broadcast live from German soil and arranging the broadcast of a
live Jewish religious service from inside Nazi Germany while
incoming mortar and artillery shells fell 200 yards away. His diary
describes how he gathered news, how it was censored, and how it was
sent from the battle zone to the United States. As radio had no
pictures, reporters quickly developed a descriptive visual style to
augment dry facts. All of Cassidy's stories, from the panic he felt
while being targeted by German planes to his shock at the deaths of
colleagues, he told with grace and a reporter's lean and engaging
prose. Providing valuable eyewitness material not previously
available to historians, NBC Goes to War tells a
"bottom-up" narrative that provides insight into war as fought and
chronicled by ordinary men and women. Cassidy skillfully placed
listeners alongside him in the ruins of Aachen, on icy back roads
crawling with spies, and in a Belgian bar where a little girl
wailed "Les Américains partent!" when Allied troops retreated to
safety, leaving the town open to German re-occupation. With a
journalistic eye for detail, NBC Goes to War unforgettably
portrays life in the press corps. This newly uncovered perspective
also helps balance the CBS-heavy radio scholarship about the war,
which has always focused heavily on Edward R. Murrow and his
"Murrow's Boys."
After a war breaks out, what factors influence the warring parties' decisions about whether to talk to their enemy, and when may their position on wartime diplomacy change? How do we get from only ...fighting to also talking?
InThe Costs of Conversation, Oriana Skylar Mastro argues that states are primarily concerned with the strategic costs of conversation, and these costs need to be low before combatants are willing to engage in direct talks with their enemy. Specifically, Mastro writes, leaders look to two factors when determining the probable strategic costs of demonstrating a willingness to talk: the likelihood the enemy will interpret openness to diplomacy as a sign of weakness, and how the enemy may change its strategy in response to such an interpretation. Only if a state thinks it has demonstrated adequate strength and resiliency to avoid the inference of weakness, and believes that its enemy has limited capacity to escalate or intensify the war, will it be open to talking with the enemy.
Through four primary case studies-North Vietnamese diplomatic decisions during the Vietnam War, those of China in the Korean War and Sino-Indian War, and Indian diplomatic decision making in the latter conflict-The Costs of Conversationdemonstrates that the costly conversations thesis best explains the timing and nature of countries' approach to wartime talks, and therefore when peace talks begin. As a result, Mastro's findings have significant theoretical and practical implications for war duration and termination, as well as for military strategy, diplomacy, and mediation.
In A World At War, 1911-1949, scholars of the cultural history of warfare, inspired by the work of Professor John Horne, break down the traditional barriers between the historiographies of the First ...and Second World Wars.
This "excellent, wonderfully-researched" chronicle of WWII journalism explores the lives and work of embedded reporters across every theater of war (Chris Ogden, former Time magazine bureau chief in ...London). Luminary journalists Ed Murrow, Martha Gellhorn, Walter Cronkite, and Clare Hollingworth were among the young reporters who chronicled World War II's daily horrors and triumphs for Western readers. In Reporting War, fellow foreign correspondent Ray Moseley mines their writings to create an exhilarating parallel narrative of the war effort in Europe, Pearl Harbor, North Africa, and Japan. This vivid history also explores the lives, methods, and motivations of the courageous journalists who doggedly followed the action and the story, often while embedded in the Allied armies. Moseley's sweeping yet intimate history draws on newly unearthed material to offer a comprehensive account of the war. Reporting War sheds much-needed light on an abundance of individual stories and overlooked experiences, including those of women and African-American journalists, which capture the drama as it was lived by reporters on the front lines of history.
From 1942 to 1945, a small, influential group of media figures willingly volunteered their services to form the Writers' War Board (WWB), accepting requests from government agencies to create ...propaganda. Members included mystery writer Rex Stout, Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner Pearl S. Buck, novelist and sports writer Paul Gallico, Book-of-the-Month Club editor and popular radio host Clifton Fadiman, and Broadway lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. The WWB mobilized thousands of other writers across the country to spread its campaigns through articles, public appearances, radio broadcasts, and more.
The WWB received federal money while retaining its status as a private organization that could mount campaigns without government oversight. Historian Thomas Howell argues that this unique position has caused its history to fall between the cracks, since it was not recognized as an official part of the government's war effort. Yet the WWB's work had a huge impact on the nation's wartime culture, and this fascinating history will inform contemporary thinking on propaganda, the media, and American society.
'Prisoners of the Sumatra Railway' details the experiences of British former prisoners of war (POWs) who were forced to construct a railway across Sumatra during the Japanese occupation. It is also ...the first study to be undertaken of the life-writing of POWs held captive by the Japanese during the Second World War, and the transgenerational responses in Britain to this period of captivity.
