scholarly journals Contemporary historiography on the phenomenon of the social cohesion in the period of the Second World War

Author(s):  
Liudmila V. Alieva ◽  
Lidia V. Antonova ◽  
Tatiana G. Khrishkevich

The historiography of World War II is one of the most extensive research topics in historical science. Over the years, a comprehensive study of the military, political and economic history of wartime has been conducted. Particular attention during recent decades has been given to the social aspects of the war. However, the topic of social cohesion in the warring countries remains insufficiently analyzed. Thus, the main objective of the article is to analyze the current state of research on social cohesion in the context of World War II in contemporary British, German and Russian historical literature. The present study of the reflection of cohesion problems in Soviet Union, Great Britain and Germany during World War II is based on the principles of a new interdisciplinary branch of social science – anthropology of war. It integrates the achievements, subject areas and research tools of history, sociology, military psychology, cultural studies, pedagogy, medicine and other disciplines that study the existence of people and society at large in wartime conditions. A comparative analysis of the chosen historiography shows that at the present stage there is a commonality of approaches among historians related to interest in certain personalities, everyday life during World War II and war’s gender dimension. The differences in assessments and methods are determined by the role and place of a particular state in the military-political confrontation as well as by prevailing historiographical paradigms. In any case, the theme of social cohesion was not adequately reflected in these studies. In conclusion, the authors note the research potential of analyzing the problems of social cohesion during World War II.

2020 ◽  
Vol 5(160) ◽  
pp. 221-228
Author(s):  
Paweł Gotowiecki

The reviewed publication contains post-conference materials, presented during the conference held in 2016 in Warsaw, entitled “The Deposit of Independence. National Council of the Republic of Poland in Exile (1939–1991)”. The volume consists of 18 articles, published in chronological and topical order, devoted to the selected issues of the history of the Polish parliamentarianism in exile during World War II and in the post-war period. The authors of the articles discussed various aspects of the activities of the National Council of the Republic of Poland in Exile, such as the participation of national minorities in the work of the quasi-parliament, biographies of the chosen parliamentarians, or the selected elements of “parliamentary practices”. This publication is not a synthesis but it supplements and develops the current state of research on the activities of the Polish quasi-parliamentary institutions in exile.


Author(s):  
Galina N. Kaninskaya ◽  
Natalya N. Naumova

The article is devoted to the participation of French pilots of the Normandy squadron in battles on the Soviet-German front as part of the Red Army in 1943-1945. After the defeat of France at the first stage of World War II (1940), the occupation of its territory by Germany and the organization of the Resistance movement “Fighting France” in London by General Charles de Gaulle, the pilots joined him expressed a burning desire to fight the enemy in the skies over Soviet soil. Their participation in the ranks of the Soviet Air Force was a unique event in the history of the Great Patriotic War of the Soviet Union (1945-1945). The article analyzes the information of the Soviet press during the war years about the French squadron “Normandie-Niemen”, which fought in the Soviet Air Force on the Soviet-German front. It is shown that Soviet readers during the Great Patriotic War could get a very complete and reliable idea of the military exploits of French pilots, find out the names of heroes, get acquainted with the military everyday life of officers, appreciate their patriotism and sincere friendly feelings for the Soviet Union and its people. Along with stories about the air battles of the Normandy, the articles of Soviet correspondents contained information about the history of France, how the pilots reacted to the defeat of their country, how and where they fought in the first stage of the Second World War. The press of the war years gave brief sketches of the everyday life of French fighters on Soviet soil, about the curious events that happened to the pilots of the squadron. On the example of newspaper publications 1943-1945. about the military alliance of our and French pilots, you can get an idea of how the cooperation of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition developed and strengthened.


Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
David Shneer

I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be persecuted by the highest levels of the state. I ended up uncovering the social history of Soviet Jews and their relationship to photography, as I also explored how their training in the 1920s and 1930s shaped the photographs they took during World War II.


Author(s):  
James Mark ◽  
Quinn Slobodian

This chapter places Eastern Europe into a broader history of decolonization. It shows how the region’s own experience of the end of Empire after the World War I led its new states to consider their relationships with both European colonialism and those were struggling for their future liberation outside their continent. Following World War II, as Communist regimes took power in Eastern Europe, and overseas European Empires dissolved in Africa and Asia, newly powerful relationships developed. Analogies between the end of empire in Eastern Europe and the Global South, though sometimes tortured and riddled with their own blind spots, were nonetheless potent rhetorical idioms, enabling imagined solidarities and facilitating material connections in the era of the Cold War and non-alignment. After the demise of the so-called “evil empire” of the Soviet Union, analogies between the postcolonial and the postcommunist condition allowed for further novel equivalencies between these regions to develop.


2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 82-90
Author(s):  
Boris Valentinovich Petelin ◽  
Vladilena Vadimovna Vorobeva

In the political circles of European countries attempts to reformat the history of World War II has been continuing. Poland is particularly active; there at the official level, as well as in the articles and in the speeches of politicians, political scientists and historians crude attacks against Russia for its commitment to objective assessments of the military past are allowed. Though, as the authors of this article mention, Russian politicians have not always been consistent in evaluation of Soviet-Polish relationships, hoping to reach a certain compromise. If there were any objections, they were mostly unconvincing. Obviously, as the article points, some statements and speeches are not without emotional colouring that is characteristic, when expressing mutual claims. However, the deliberate falsification of historical facts and evidence, from whatever side it occurs, does not meet the interests of the Polish and Russian peoples, in whose memory the heroes of the Red Army and the Polish Resistance have lived and will live. The authors point in the conclusions that it is hard to achieve mutual respect to key problems of World War II because of the overlay of the 18th – 19th centuries, connected with the “partitions of Poland”, the existence of the “Kingdom of Poland” as part of the Russian Empire, Soviet-Polish War of 1920. There can be only one way out, as many Russian and Polish scientists believe – to understand the complex twists and turns of Russo-Polish history, relying on the documents. Otherwise, the number of pseudoscientific, dishonest interpretations will grow.


Mahjong ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Annelise Heinz

The Introduction provides an orientation to the book and its key questions: What did it mean to become “modern” in the early twentieth century? How did American ethnicities take shape in the years leading up to and after World War II? How did middle-class women experience and shape their changing roles in society, before the social revolutions of the late twentieth century? How are these things related? The Introduction also covers an overview of mahjong’s trajectory in the United States. It examines background related to the history of leisure, gender, and consumerism in addition to introducing key sources and methodologies. The introduction sets up the book to tell the story of mahjong’s role in the creation of identifiably ethnic communities, women’s access to respectable leisure, and how Americans used ideas of China to understand themselves.


2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-117
Author(s):  
Margarida Maria Rocha Bernardes ◽  
Alexandre Barbosa de Oliveira ◽  
Sônia Kaminitz ◽  
Antônio Marcos Tosoli Gomes ◽  
Sérgio Corrêa Marques ◽  
...  

ABSTRACT Objective: To analyze the symbolic effects of the official military uniform of the nurses from Brazilian Army in World War II. Method: This research was developed using the historical method, with iconographic sources. The data were discussed based on the concepts of the social world theory, by Pierre Bourdieu. Results: The images selected demonstrate the own meaning of the uniforms, evidencing the functions and the social position of those who wear it, being private and obligatory to use it in the military field. Final considerations: In the case of the nurses from the Brazilian Expeditionary Force, the appropriation of uniforms promoted the visual communication representing military nurse in the context of war, at the same time it served for distinction purposes in the army, but not necessarily in the nursing field. Symbolically, they remained amongst the walls of the barracks even after the end of the war and, thus, they remained unknown and marked by the symbols of forgetfulness.


Author(s):  
Margaret L. King

Scholars largely neglected the history of the family until after World War II, when they began to employ theoretical perspectives imported from the social sciences. In the 1960s, two principal figures triggered its study: Philippe Ariès, associated with the French Annales school, and Peter Laslett, cofounder at Cambridge University, England, of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Since that period, studies have proliferated on the history of family and household in Europe and its subregions and on the related topics of childhood and youth.


1967 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 218-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Böhme

Although the first decade of the German Empire has long been a central topic of historical research, the question with which this essay is concerned—Bismarck's relationship to the pressure groups at this time—cannot be answered satisfactorily on the basis of the material known hitherto. This is due to the fact that until very recently historians have concentrated on the diplomatic-political occurrences. Bismarck's eastern policy, the Livadia affair, the ‘war-in-sight crisis’, the Berlin Congress, and the change from the Three Emperors' Alliance to the ‘Eternal’ Treaty with the Danube monarchy—these are the events always used to demonstrate Bismarck's ‘genius’ in the field of foreign policy. On the problem of the ‘Kulturkampf’ much less effort has been expended. Here Bismarck's outstanding political skill was not as apparent as it was in his judgement of international relations. Moreover, this question was bound up from the very beginning with a strong ideological bias which only slightly weakened after World War II for the first time. Even less attention has been paid to the problems of domestic and social policy and economic developments have been almost totally neglected. It is true that these items have recently obtained new historical relevance from the new socio-political point of view, but up to the present day they have not been clarified. The chief general contributions of this kind have been published by non-German historians (e.g. Rosenberg, Lambi, and Pflanze) in the United States or in Canada. These studies, however, give inadequate answers to specific questions, as do the detailed essays of Karl-Erich Born and Wolfgang Zorn with their systematizing way of reflexion. They do not deal with our formulation of the question: the relationship between economic development and political events in a comparatively short period. Nevertheless, the essays of Born and Zorn will serve as a starting-point for our own investigation. Born in particular realizes the urgent need for more detailed research in the social and economic sphere, and pleads for a ‘supplementary’ approach (Ergänzungsgeschichte). He states thatthe history of the aristocracy during the industrial age has to be completed by studies dealing with the history of the trade unions; by dissertations on the history of industrial branches, commercial centres, and companies; and last but not least by works on the disintegration of the old bourgeoisie. Then we shall be able to extend the political history of the German Empire, which is largely clarified, to a comprehensive view of a German historical epoch by adding the social and economic history of the late nineteeth century.


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