Patriotism & Nationalism
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See a related poster for American men on this blog, one of them Black, captioned “Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!" ↩︎
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See Karen Hagemann, Männlicher Muth und teutsche Ehre: Nation, Militär und Geschlecht in der Zeit der Antinapoleonischen Kriege Preussens (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2001). ↩︎
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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. ↩︎
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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). ↩︎
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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). ↩︎
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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/. ↩︎
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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). ↩︎
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Gilles Pécout, ed., International Volunteers and the Risorgiment, special issue of Journal of Modern Italian Studies 14, no. 4. (2009): 413–90. ↩︎
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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. ↩︎
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See Lucy Riall, Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008). ↩︎
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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. ↩︎
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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”). ↩︎
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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). ↩︎
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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. ↩︎
Enjoyed a Ukrainian concert tonight that Jerry Heil gave in Kyiv last March. Lots of kids in the audience who knew the words, youtu.be….🎵🇺🇦
World War Two Poster Marking the Dignity and Humanity of Black Women on the Home Front
The American Front for Victory – This poster from World War Two operates on two levels. First, it emphasizes the contribution of “The American Front” to the victory for which the nation was fighting. American front because this was about the home front, the people, many of them women, contributing to victory in industry, in agriculture, through service, and with their savings. Second, the name makes an important statement about the women it pictures working. They are Black. In large parts of the country, racist Americans cast the fitness of Black people as American citizens in doubt, to say nothing of questioning their very humanity.1 Here, by contrast, four Black women are depicted doing dignified work for the national cause.
Moving clockwise from the top, one woman, wearing some kind of civilian uniform, is holding a bucket marked “save” and is participating in either the sale or purchase of “Defense Bonds”; another is working a potato field with the words “strong bodies” underneath; there is a woman in a nurse’s uniform above the label “volunteer service”; and a woman can be seen working on an airplane, perhaps installing its propeller. This is a poster proclaiming the importance of the home front and the dignity and honor of the Black women fighting on it.
Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_061.
The AHA’s members and their colleagues teach students how to think, not what to think. Preparing future generations to read, think, and analyze provides a much stronger foundation for informed patriotism and civic participation. This executive order does just the opposite, providing a blueprint for widespread historical illiteracy.…
– James Grossman, “On the K–12 Education Executive Order,” American Historical Association.
Reading Notes: 'Last Call at the Hotel Imperial' by Deborah Cohen
I finished reading Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took On a World at War (Random House 2022) by Deborah Cohen. At times I got impatient because it was as much about the journalists' private and inner lives as their reporting, but I realized that this was the point and decided not to skip over those sections. Cohen’s protagonists were people with experiences and viewpoints relevant to their work and our understanding of it. As journalists, they had been taught “impartiality” (resembling bothsidism today) but the dictatorships, wars, and atrocities they witnessed demanded a viewpoint, even if their editors disagreed. It was for these viewpoints that I had begun reading the book in the first place.
Cohen focuses on the four biggest star journalists of the era, John Gunther, H. R. Knickbocker, James Vincent Sheean, and Dorothy Thompson, whose lives became closely entwined, and who left behind a prodigious written record for Cohen to mine. Thus, we learn about their upbringings, educations, and early career experiences; their love, sex, and reproductive lives; their sexuality and mental health; their exposure to psychoanalysis, and more. This period of changing cultural mores adds an important backdrop to the events and people they wrote about, and it helps us understand the reporters themselves.
Cohen’s focus on these individuals and their significant others, especially Frances Fineman Gunther, hints at the relevance of the individual in a few other ways besides context and viewpoint. First, there is the question of private lives in situations where public affairs tend to crowd everything private out. Next, there is the question of the role of individual agency in history. This issue concerned Cohen’s protagonists, who met many of the leading political figures of the day. It was also relevant to the issue of the masses and the extent to which circumstances or individual characteristics made them into Nazis, for example. Finally, there is the question of the reporters' own impacts.
Cohen notes in the prologue that the image of the United States embodied by the large number of American journalists overseas was at odds with the old isolationist stereotype. Clearly there was an appetite for information about the world. Moreover, the travels by ship and plane of her protagonists points to the many economic, professional, and personal entanglements of the United States with the rest of the world despite the strength of nationalisms and protectionist tariff regimes. Cohen’s book takes us across Europe, including to fascist Italy, the Spanish Civil War, as well as Weimar and Nazi Germany, to whose murderous intentions they were by no means blind. We also see Ethiopia at the moment of Mussolini’s invasion, Palestine, Egypt, the USSR, pre- and postcolonial India, and civil-war China, not to mention the U.S. Jim Crow South.
The book is long, probably too long to teach undergraduates, unless one assigned specific sections, but it is accessibly written, affordably priced, and has received favorable reviews outside the academy, including in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune. Readers should be prepared to look up names and descriptive vocabulary they might not know, which is easy enough with today’s mobile phones.
Important thread by political historian Seth Coltar that extrapolates from a couple centuries of print culture and civic nationalism to our current moment.
In This is Not Propaganda (end of part 2), Peter Pomerantsev writes of his Russian family, based in Kyiv, becoming stateless in the late 1970s. The KGB had accused his father, Igor, of “circulating defamatory fabrications, regular listening to hostile broadcasts and contacts with foreigners.” They recommended he emigrate.
In many ways Igor was lucky. He had the semblance of choice. The [KGB] major had made it clear that if he stayed, he would have the full seven years in prison and five exiled in the Soviet provinces to face. If he had been a Ukrainian-language poet, [Pomerantsev continues, Igor] would have been locked up immediately. Repression in Ukraine focused on exterminating any signs of independent Ukrainian culture outside the cultural crèche of state-sanctioned Soviet ‘Ukrainianness’. But Igor wrote in Russian, the language of the coloniser.
Delirious Television Propaganda
“Forms of Delirium” is the third act of Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014). Now deep in the section titled “A Brief History of Sects in Post-Soviet Russia,” it dawns on me that this material provides useful context for the bizarre, messianic, wartime rhetoric I’ve heard come out of Russian propagandist Vladimir Solovyov’s mouth in the television clips that Julia Davis translates for English-speaking audiences.
This is not to say that Solovyov necessarily believes all the poison he spews. The first act of the same book, “Reality Show Russia,” provides plenty of background on that subject, even if it is based on prewar Russia. Still, the combination of mysticism, religion, ethnic Russian nationalism, and ostensibly anti-imperialist imperialism dripping from parts of the final act of this excellent book offers at least some reason for not dismissing a talking head like Solovyov out of hand. He may use the privilege of the fool to say extreme things, but he knows his words are landing.
“We believe Russia is a great empire that other powers want to tear away parts from. We need to restore our power, occupy our lost lands, grab Crimea from the Ukrainians,” the football supporters say, then in the same breath: “We want a Russia for Russians, all these darkies from the Caucasus and Central Asia need to go home.”
This has always been the paradox of the new Russian nationalism: on the one hand wanting to conquer all regions around, on the other wanting an ethnically pure great power. And all that comes out of this confusion is an ever-growing anger.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 3, section: “The Call of the Void”.
How do you build a history based on ceaseless self-slaughter and betrayal? Do you deny it? Forget it? But then you are left orphaned. So history is rewritten to suit the present.
Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York: PublicAffairs, 2014), act 2, section: “Another Russia”.
The Changing Faces of Nationalism
As a historian who sometimes teaches about Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I have to give Trump credit for one thing: His constant upending of the broad political consensus that emerged after World War II and the Cold War means that basic historical terms are constantly making it into the news and national discourse as quasi new problems, new questions. As upsetting as these times are, as abhorrent as Trump is, it is hard to deny the value of Ron Elving’s reaction to the president’s recent statement about being a nationalist: “We are about to have a national conversation about the word nationalist. And Elving wants to offer nuances to the term’s meanings in past and present—well, as much as anyone can in some 1,100 words.
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
Hate Speech and Fresh Air
Hate speech is like mold: Its enemies are bright light and fresh air.
– Howard Gillman, “Bigots at the Gate: Universities Shouldn’t Duck the Fight against White Nationalism," Los Angeles Times, December 20, 2016.
Historiographical Impasse
Of Bellicosity and Patriotism
I can take the Republican crowd in Dayton on Friday chanting the name of their candidate enthusiastically (00:00 of C-SPAN video).
JOHN MC CAIN
JOHN MC CAIN
JOHN MC CAIN
But I find it uncanny when the same crowd slips into a chant about the United States, eliding one three-syllable chant into another, the candidate into the country (23:00).
U S A
U S A
U S A
The aggressive tone is no different than the one many Americans use at the Olympics, a tone they consider harmless, because they don’t suffer from any concerns about the public image of the Loud American overseas. Only this wasn’t abroad, so there was no need to assert the supposed physical superiority of Americans in such a confrontational way, unless I were to interpret the chanting as support for John McCain’s bellicose foreign policy rhetoric, which it was (21:48).
I couldn’t also help but feel that it was aimed at Democrats, who these people don’t see as real Americans.
U S A
U S A
U S A
John McCain stood there and beamed, as if acknowledging his and his supporters' open secret: only Republicans love their country. Of course, that statement is only true if patriotism equals bellicosity. But it doesn’t. McCain would be a better man if he would acknowledge the following statement by Barack Obama. But he won’t.
. . . Let us agree that patriotism has no party. I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain. The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a red America or a blue America – they have served the United States of America.
So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.
It takes a true patriot to acknowledge the humanity in and ideals of one’s political opponent
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.