Mark R. Stoneman

  Citizenship

Nov 4, 2024 ∞



"Susan B. Anthony to the women of today: 'Everything but the vote is still to be won'" by Nina Allender (1872–1957) for the Women's National Party, Equal Rights: Official Weekly Organ of the National Woman's Party, February 24, 1923, via Library of Congress.

Nov 3, 2024 ∞

DC Residents Still Have No Vote in Congress

For more than 25 years, I had no representation in Congress because I lived in DC. That’s changed because of my caregiving responsibilities, so it will be bittersweet on Tuesday when I cast a straight Democratic ballot in Conway, NH. Yes, I have representation now, but that doesn’t change anything for my wife, friends, and former colleagues and neighbors in DC. A territory in the United States with more than 700,000 residents,¹ DC has more people than Vermont and Wyoming. That’s why its license plates read “Taxation without Representation.” Other DC PR work has included these 2006 posters.²





Rubbing DC residents' noses in it, representatives sent by the rest of the country interfere in the city’s local life.³ In particular, Republicans who don’t approve of local measures or have a social experiment in mind can interfere with local policies. I remember school vouchers and condoms for high school students. Democrats are not immune to such behavior either, however, as this 2023 tweet by President Biden demonstrates.⁴

I support D.C. Statehood and home-rule—but I don’t support some of the changes D.C. Council put forward over the Mayor’s objections—such as lowering penalties for carjackings.

If the Senate votes to overturn what D.C. Council did—I’ll sign it.

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1. DC Statehood website. ↩︎

2. “Trusted with kids, not with a vote…” (DC Vote, 2006), Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010650572/; “Both will save your life. Only one has a vote in Congress…” (DC Vote, 2006), https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2010650571/. ↩︎

3. Ike Allen, “A History of Congress Messing With DC: 50 years of home rule—and federal meddling," Washingtonian, November 8, 2023. ↩︎

4. President Biden will allow Congress to overturn new D.C. crime law, NPR, March 2, 2023. ↩︎

Nov 2, 2024 ∞

This evening, I watched two short films from The Kyiv Independent’s YouTube channel about people in uniform. In The Witches of Butcha, we meet a woman’s unit tasked with shooting down Shahed drones. The other introduces Ukrainian prisoners training to fight as infantrymen: “I want to come home not as some ex-convict, but a hero."

Nov 2, 2024 ∞

The past is being whitewashed at the National Archives museum.

The changes to the new exhibits are remarkable. A photo of King was replaced with one of Richard Nixon meeting Elvis Presley. A “proposed exhibit exploring changes to the Constitution since 1787,” including “amendments abolishing slavery and expanding the right to vote,” was reduced in size, and employees were told that “focusing on the amendments portrayed the Founding Fathers in a negative light.” Shogan “told employees to remove Dorothea Lange’s photos of Japanese-American incarceration camps from a planned exhibit because the images were too negative and controversial, according to documents and current and former employees” and her aides “also asked staff to eliminate references about the wartime incarceration from some educational material.” An exhibit on coal communities “cut references to the environmental hazards caused by the mining industry.” Shogan’s aides “also ordered the removal of labor-union pioneer Dolores Huerta and Minnie Spotted-Wolf, the first Native American woman to join the Marine Corps, from the photo booth, according to current and former employees and agency documents.” A photo of Betty Ford wearing an Equal Rights Amendment pin was removed from a video, and in an exhibit of “patents that changed the world,” the birth control pill was replaced with, of all things, the bump stock.

Nathan J. Robinson, “It’s Going to Take a Constant Fight to Preserve the Historical Record,” Current Affairs, October 31, 2024.

Oct 31, 2024 ∞

Brought my mother to the town hall so she could drop off her absentee ballot and show her ID in person. No crowds, no fear of getting knocked over.

Oct 27, 2024 ∞



Photo of “African American demonstrators outside the White House, with signs ‘We demand the right to vote, everywhere’ and signs protesting police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama” by Warren K. Leffler, March 12, 1965. Source: U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014645538/.

Oct 24, 2024 ∞

Helped my octogenarian mom pick up her absentee ballot so she can fill it out at home in her own good time and avoid the crowds on Nov. 5. I’m glad this accommodation is available in NH.

Oct 21, 2024 ∞

We no longer live in a world where the very wealthy can do business with autocratic regimes, sometimes promoting the foreign policy goals of those regimes, while at the same time doing business with the American government, or with European governments, and enjoying the status and privileges of citizenship and legal protection in the free markets of the democratic world. It’s time to make them choose.

Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc. (Doubleday 2024), Epilogue, “Decouple, De-Risk, Rebuild”

Jun 29, 2024 ∞

Reading about Israel's Inequitable Application of Military Conscription

In Thursday’s Hareetz, Ofer Aderet offers some useful background on the exemption of yeshiva students from military service. In 1948, there were only some 400 yeshiva students. Preserving their schools seemed a priority in the wake of the destruction of so much Jewish learning. The exemption was supposed to be temporary, but it still exists. Nowadays, there are more than 60,000 yeshiva students, and the religious and cultural situation of 1948 improved decades ago. Given Israel’s current security situation, there is enormous societal pressure to make the burden of mandatory military service equitable. The current government, which includes ultra-Orthodox Jews, has avoided doing so, but the High Court of Justice ruled it has to. John Strawson talks about what this means for Netanyahu in a question-and-answer piece in The Conversation. This second piece assumes less background knowledge on the part of the reader, while also going a bit deeper into the current political context.

Links to developments closer to home: Conscription, what Americans call “the draft,” is a powerful tool for war, but it requires a broad political consensus about the justness of the war and a sense that conscription’s implementation is fair. The U.S. Army and its political masters learned this lesson the hard way during the Vietnam War, after which the country moved to a volunteer force. By contrast, the Federal Republic of Germany held onto conscription until 2011 because its political leadership valued the link between military service and citizenship, a liberal tradition with roots in nineteenth-century political, military, and constitutional developments. Conscription is still in the country’s Basic Law, but the number of people being called up made conscription inequitable and therefore untenable, at least during a time when a major war in Europe no longer seemed likely.

Jun 25, 2017 ∞

War Savings Stamps Poster, 1917



I find this 1917 poster interesting because it seems to target urban, working-class immigrants.¹ Besides the dress of the people waiting in line to lend Uncle Sam some money, there is the American flag held by the child, whose enthusiasm attracts the attention of the adults around her.

Children, whether immigrants themselves or native born, seem to have played a special role in immigrant families, mediating in different ways the adults' encounter with the culture and institutions of the new country. Certainly the authorities saw such potential in these children.²

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1. World War I poster advertising savings stamps for the war effort, via the Library of Congress. ↩︎

2. On this last point, see Simone Lässig, “The History of Knowledge and the Expansion of the Historical Research Agenda,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 59 (Fall 2016): 29–32. ↩︎

Jun 23, 2017 ∞

War, Gender, and Nation in 19th-Century Europe: A Preliminary Sketch



I wrote this preliminary introduction for a thematic handbook article that was not to be (see "Historiographical Impasse"). Looking back at this 2015 draft, I think it contains enough ideas to make it worth sharing.

If military service had become a rite of passage for young men in much of Europe well before the mutual slaughter began in the summer of 1914, neither its ubiquity nor its meaning to those it embraced were foregone conclusions. To be sure, the fundamental challenge offered by the declaration of the levée en masse in revolutionary France in 1793 represented an important first step, as did monarchical Prussia’s turn in 1813 to the near-general conscription of those men considered young and fit enough to join the fight. Indeed, Prussia’s response to the Napoleonic challenge intertwined military service, citizenship, and manhood in the gendered construction of a nation at war that bore a striking resemblance to those ideals manifest in the mobilizations of 1914.¹ Nonetheless, near-universal manhood conscription took many more decades to predominate on the continent (never mind the United Kingdom, which did not resort to it until 1916).²

Moreover, the path was not at all direct, not from the state’s and army’s side nor from the general population’s. For the state and its military leadership, big citizens’ armies could be desirable for fighting a foreign enemy, but they could also present a threat to the domestic-political status quo because they might not allow themselves to be used to suppress protest or insurrection at home. A further decisive factor was technology and how military leaders came to use it. Especially important were the railroads and the development of strategic thought and organizational structures that placed a premium on mobilizing large numbers of men at once for a decisive blow of the kind Helmuth von Moltke pulled off for Prussia at Königgrätz (aka Sadowa) in 1866 and at Sedan in 1870 during the wars that produced a German nation-state.³

Of course, an approach to war of this kind also required large numbers of trained conscripts and experienced reservists. But first things first. The men targeted by conscription (and then the reserves) and the families and communities in which they had been raised first needed to learn to see the state’s call to the colors as legitimate and inescapable, let alone perceive value in the prospect.

Nineteenth-century discourses and attitudes regarding conscription were informed by normative assumptions about manhood in connection with a wide range of topics—civic or national duty and martial sacrifice, forbearance and manliness, masculinity and bravery, willpower and human flesh versus modern weaponry (especially later in the century), the impact of length of service on soldiers’ relationship to civilian society, civilian upbringings and soldiers’ political reliability, the reputational impact of military service on veterans returning to civilian life, and so on. The gendered matrix of military service and citizenship was integral to warfare and its sociopolitical effects in Europe. This matrix is the subject of the first of three thematic sections comprising this [unrealized] chapter. Ordinary men in uniform occupy the center of this analysis, but other men and women who joined or supported the armed struggles—interstate and intrastate—are also considered.

The importance and meaning of conscription in this period was also affected by the increasing cachet of nationality as an organizing principle for the European state system, or at least as a cultural manifestation that states could leverage.⁴ Whether in the ranks as conscripts, as substitutes for conscripts, as wartime volunteers, or by vocation, soldiers were beginning to be identified—and even identify themselves, at least in wartime—with the nation-state or the national cause that they served. Many fought in conflicts that had national resonance among the general population, such as the Crimean War (1853–56), and many others fought in wars that led to the creation of the Italian and German nation-states (achieved in 1861 and 1871, respectively). The last case also entailed the national humiliation of France—widely felt in that country—in a series of disastrous defeats (1870–71).

These conflicts did not just involve soldiers in the service of the state, however. The rise of nationality and “the people” as relevant factors saw men (and even women) join irregular formations to attain their national goals or, in the case of Italy, at least redeem their nation’s honor, whether that meant overturning a foreign or particularistic ruler (especially during the European revolutions of 1848) or defending their nation against a foreign invader or dying in the attempt. Or so the nationalist narratives went, even if some probably took up arms to defend their home and locality against the privations of requisitioning and marauding.

These decades also saw men and women (and youth) in cities resort to violence in order to change constitutional structures or protest economic and social conditions.⁵ Whether or not any military experience was involved in the barricade building of 1848, memories of earlier revolts had certainly been passed down to the frequently subaltern generations of that time, a legacy that was also evident during the Paris Commune’s struggle in 1871.⁶ Intertwined with implicit and explicit discourses about citizenship and belonging—and thus about manhood and womanhood, too—these episodes also belonged to the complex, often violent process of nation formation and consolidation. At the same time, in this context of nation-making wars and insurrections, the seemingly contradictory phenomenon of international volunteers serving a national cause must also be considered.⁷

The circles of social actors and norms to potentially include in a gendered analysis of the above mentioned wars and insurrections could be expanded a great deal further, if space constraints and available research permitted it. Whenever gender played a role in constructing or understanding the motivation and practices of those fighting, that role conceptually comprised both masculinity and femininity because gender, like class and race, is a relational concept. If the military world had become almost exclusively male and masculine in the nineteenth century, that manhood still presupposed relationships with women and femininity.

Normative femininity might be embodied in the appearance and comportment of women accompanying the army (in France, holdovers like the cantinère) or nursing the wounded (in the Crimea, Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale). There were also the women at home for whom one fought, or the girl one intended to marry after completing active duty. Normative images of women in the minds of soldiers could affect those soldiers’ reactions to encounters with women in wartime, in the course of requisitioning food from civilians or sleeping in civilians’ homes or outbuildings—or when fighting irregulars or taking a town street by street. Finally, a siege army could not make distinctions between soldiers and civilians, men and woman, adults and children in a besieged city (as in the Prussian-German siege of Paris in 1870–71). On the other hand, policy decisions reached in the besieged city itself (or policy lacunae) could create great differences—between rich and poor, soldiers and civilians (and therefore also between men and women), and so on.

No matter how powerful memories of the levée en masse continued to be in the middle decades of nineteenth century France, to take the most famous example of a nation in arms, patriotism and élan were not enough to win wars. One also needed professional expertise to train and lead men in war or in the suppression of an insurrection. With different educational levels and frequently a more elevated social background, officers might well embody masculinity differently than the men in their charge, especially if they were noblemen. Furthermore, as military technologies grew and military organizations became more complex, the knowledge required by at least some of the officers expanded. As the job changed, so too could the men doing it.

These developments were accompanied by public and internal debates about military leadership. What qualities did officers require? From which stock was recruitment most desirable? What training did they require? What was their relationship to their men supposed to look like? How did they treat their subordinates? And what about their relationship to acknowledged social equals and supposed inferiors—especially men—outside the military? How did their expertise and comportment figure into their practice of masculinity and its reception? What did military service and sacrifice mean to these men? How did social background and family history shape that meaning? Finally, what about their private lives? How did marriage and family fit into their military careers? To what extent did the bourgeois ideal of a separate domestic sphere obtain in this context? Of course, each of these questions could lead to more than one answer because officer corps were by no means homogeneous.⁸ Furthermore, some important military leaders did not fit within this framework at all, most prominently Giuseppe Garibaldi, whose biography, relationship to his fighters, and influential public image form an instructive counterpoint.⁹

Moreover, if soldiers were citizens acting on behalf of the nation, their actions might be expected to bear a closer relationship to the values and norms that guided their behavior in civilian life. Actual or alleged practices in wartime that appeared contrary to the predominant normative conception of war—still largely informed by the metaphor of a dual between two equal and honorable parties—exposed the perpetrator to charges of acting in an unmanly or unwomanly way and, by extension, his or her nation to charges of dishonorable, uncivilized behavior. Purported atrocities and other perceived wrongdoings also created opportunities for soldiers to exact revenge with drastic countermeasures that could contradict taboos on destroying property and even those on killing women.

Of course, such measures were never just about the attitudes of soldiers, but also the command climate, discipline, and policy goals. Furthermore, gendered contemporary reports and commentaries on the violence could be more about demonizing the enemy than about actual events or understanding what happened. The main examples explored in this section involve face-to-face encounters between German soldiers and French civilians in 1870–71 and the extreme use of violence by Thiers’s forces against the Commune in 1871.¹⁰

All three sections [so was my plan] proceed from the fundamental premise that practices and experiences of manhood and womanhood are historically contingent, that men and women change over time, that normative masculinities and femininities change with them. The seemingly natural in their attitudes and behaviors is cultural and therefore a product of history. The second corollary premise is that war and warriors are creatures of their times, influenced by—and influencing—them. Contrary to many narrowly conceived histories, not to mention widespread ahistorical elements of popular culture, there is no universal soldier or military leader.¹¹ Here, too, biology need not be destiny, whereas culture, if not properly analyzed in historical context, very well could be.¹²

The third premise is that although the dual political and technological revolutions of the nineteenth century match up chronologically with the emergence of “total war” in the twentieth century, the journey never involved only a single plot line that led inexorably to 1914. Focusing on the role of gender—a fundamental component of human culture—can help to make other formative strands of the story visible. It then becomes possible to complicate Stig Förster’s powerful typology of warfare’s development in the modern era—cabinet war, people’s war, industrialized people’s war, and total war—whose emphasis on parallel developments in war and politics can resemble a teleology, one subverted by events after 1945 and hard to reconcile with developments in warfare in other eras and cultures.¹³

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1. See Karen Hagemann, Männlicher Muth und teutsche Ehre: Nation, Militär und Geschlecht in der Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preussens (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001). ↩︎

2. See esp. Christian Jansen, ed., Der Bürger als Soldat: Die Militarisierung europäischer Gesellschaften im langen 19. Jahrhundert: Ein internationaler Vergleich (Essen: Klartext Verlag, 2004); David M. Hopkin, Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, 1766–1870 (2002; London: The Royal Historical Society/The Boydell Press, 2013); Ute Frevert, Die kasernierte Nation: Militärdienst und Zivilgesellschaft in Deutschland (Munich: Beck, 2001); and Dierk Walter, Preußische Heeresreformen 1807–1870: Militärische Innovation und der Mythos der “Roonschen Reform” (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2003). The history of military service still requires much more research, especially if one wishes to talk about Europe as a whole. ↩︎

3. On the implementation of this technology in this era, see Dennis E. Showalter, Railroads and Rifles: Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1975); and Arden Bucholz, Moltke and the German Wars, 1864–1871 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2001). ↩︎

4. The literature on nationalism in nineteenth–century Europe is vast. Some good starting points: E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1789: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd ed. (1992; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ida Blom, Karen Hagemann, and Catherine Hall, eds., Gendered Nations: Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Berg, 2000); Lloyd Kramer, Nationalism in Europe and America: Politics, Culture, and Identity since 1775 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011). ↩︎

5. The image accompanying this post was published by Nathaniel Currier in 1848. It is a detail from “Combat at the military station: Of Chateau d’ Eau, 24th February 1848 / combat au poste: Du Château d’ Eau, 24 Févr. 1848,” available uncut with bilingual captions at Library of Congress PPOC, http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/90716191/. ↩︎

6. See Mike Rapport, 1848: Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2009); Jill Harsin, Barricades: The War of the Streets in Revolutionary Paris, 1830–1848 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Mark Traugott, The Insurgent Barricade (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2010); Robert Tombs, The War against Paris, 1871 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1981); and John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (New York: Basic Books, 2014). ↩︎

7. Gilles Pécout, ed., International Volunteers and the Risorgiment, special issue of Journal of Modern Italian Studies 14, no. 4. (2009): 413–90. ↩︎

8. For these issues in Germany with a focus on the period after the German nation–state was forged, see Mark R. Stoneman, “Bürgerliche und adlige Krieger: Zum Verhältnis von sozialer Herkunft und Berufskultur im whilhelminischen Armee–Offizierkorps,” in Heinz Reif, ed., Adel und Bürgertum in Deutschand II: Entwicklungslinien und Wendepunkte im 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2001), 25–63; Stoneman, “Wilhelm Groener, Officering, and the Schlieffen Plan” (PhD diss., Georgetown University, 2006), chaps. 1–2. ↩︎

9. See Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). ↩︎

10. On the first example, see Mark R. Stoneman, “The Bavarian Army and French Civilians in the War of 1870–1871: A Cultural Interpretation,” War in History 8, no. 3 (2001): 271–93; and Stoneman, “Die deutschen Greueltaten im Kriege 1870/71 am Beispiel der Bayern,” in Sönke Neitzel and Daniel Hohrath, eds., Kriegsgreuel: Die Entgrenzung der Gewalt in kriegerischen Konflikten vom Mittelalter bis ins 20. Jahrhundert (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2008), 223–39. On the second example, see Tombs, War against Paris; and Merriman, Massacre. ↩︎

11. See John A. Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture from Ancient Greece to Modern America, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2008), Kindle edition, preface (entitled “Requiem for the Universal Soldier”). ↩︎

12. Consider, for example, the powerful myth of the fallen soldier; George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). ↩︎

13. By way of introduction to these issues, see the earliest and the latest volumes to arise from a series of international conferences whose subject matter extended from the mid–nineteenth–century nation–making wars to the twentieth–century total wars and then back to the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars: Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler, eds., On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871 (New York: German Historical Institute/Cambridge University Press, 1997); Roger Chickering and Stig Förster, eds. War in the Age of Revolution, 1775–1815 (New York: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2013). The latter cites other volumes and debates arising from the conference series. ↩︎

Jan 22, 2017 ∞

Feminism



Seen yesterday at the Women’s March in Washington, DC.

Photo by author

Jul 4, 2008 ∞

Received Rights versus Human Rights in the 'Declaration of Independence'



Featured image: The famous "Declaration of Independence" painting by John Trumbull

Today citizens of the United States celebrate Independence Day. On this day, 232 years ago, thirteen American colonies proclaimed their independence from Great Britain in a famous document that Thomas Jefferson wrote, the Declaration of Independence. As a history teacher, I find this document fascinating, because it fuses together two different political traditions. On one hand, it recalls seventeenth-century English constitutionalism and its arguments about what had supposedly always been the rights of Englishmen. On the other hand, it advances the kind of powerful and universalizing claims about natural law and human rights spawned in the Enlightenment and given their most dramatic expression during the French Revolution. These connections make the document an interesting object lesson for the history classroom. They also can act as a healthy reminder to Americans that our Declaration of Independence displays not only differences from European political traditions, but also powerful affinities for them.

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May 15, 2008 ∞

Human Rights in the History Survey

I have been teaching History 100, the one-semester survey of Western Civilization that is required for all students at George Mason University. Yes, really. One semester. As I mentioned earlier, this semester I decided to abandon the old chronological approach and follow a thematic one instead. I organized the course into six major themes, plus an introductory unit on historical thinking. One of those themes was "Politics and Human Rights."

If one looks at Western Civ textbooks or the reading lists from my days as a graduate student, human rights are not going to be an obvious subject of study, especially not for a history survey that can only afford to choose six major topics. Yet they are not only important to learn about, they also offer a powerful integrative vehicle for talking about a variety of issues that have been central to the history of the West since the eighteenth century.

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