The Culture of Defeat

Author: Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780312423193
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 420

Book Description
Focusing on three seminal cases of military defeat--the South after the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany following World War I--Wolfgang Schivelbusch reveals the complex psychological and cultural responses of vanquished nations to the experience of loss on the battlefield. Drawing on reactions from every level of society, Schivelbusch charts the narratives defeated nations construct and finds remarkable similarities across cultures. Eloquently and vibrantly told, The Culture of Defeat is a brilliant and provocative tour de force of history.

Embracing Defeat

Author: John W Dower
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393320275
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 692

Book Description
This study of modern Japan traces the impact of defeat and reconstruction on every aspect of Japan's national life. It examines the economic resurgence as well as how the nation as a whole reacted to defeat and the end of a suicidal nationalism.

A Fabric of Defeat

Author: Bryant Simon
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807864498
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 372

Book Description
In this book, Bryant Simon brings to life the politics of white South Carolina millhands during the first half of the twentieth century. His revealing and moving account explores how this group of southern laborers thought about and participated in politics and public power. Taking a broad view of politics, Simon looks at laborers as they engaged in political activity in many venues--at the polling station, on front porches, and on the shop floor--and examines their political involvement at the local, state, and national levels. He describes the campaign styles and rhetoric of such politicians as Coleman Blease and Olin Johnston (himself a former millhand), who eagerly sought the workers' votes. He draws a detailed picture of mill workers casting ballots, carrying placards, marching on the state capital, writing to lawmakers, and picketing factories. These millhands' politics reflected their public and private thoughts about whiteness and blackness, war and the New Deal, democracy and justice, gender and sexuality, class relations and consumption. Ultimately, the people depicted here are neither romanticized nor dismissed as the stereotypically racist and uneducated "rednecks" found in many accounts of southern politics. Southern workers understood the political and social forces that shaped their lives, argues Simon, and they developed complex political strategies to deal with those forces.

The Culture of Defeat

Author: Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466851171
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 427

Book Description
A fascinating look at history's losers-the myths they create to cope with defeat and the steps they take never to be vanquished again History may be written by the victors, Wolfgang Schivelbusch argues in his brilliant and provocative book, but the losers often have the final word. Focusing on three seminal cases of modern warfare-the South after the Civil War, France in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War, and Germany following World War I-Schivelbusch reveals the complex psychological and cultural reactions of vanquished nations to the experience of military defeat. Drawing on responses from every level of society, Schivelbusch shows how conquered societies question the foundations of their identities and strive to emulate the victors: the South to become a "better North," the French to militarize their schools on the Prussian model, the Germans to adopt all things American. He charts the losers' paradoxical equation of military failure with cultural superiority as they generate myths to glorify their pasts and explain their losses: the nostalgic "plantation legend" after the fall of the Confederacy; the cult of Joan of Arc in vanquished France; the fiction of the stab in the back by "foreign" elements in postwar Germany. From cathartic epidemics of "dance madness" to the revolutions that so often follow battlefield humiliation, Schivelbusch finds remarkable similarities across cultures. Eloquently and vibrantly told, The Culture of Defeat is a tour de force that opens new territory for historical inquiry.

Ghosts of the Confederacy

Author: Gaines M. Foster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019977210X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

Book Description
After Lee and Grant met at Appomatox Court House in 1865 to sign the document ending the long and bloody Civil War, the South at last had to face defeat as the dream of a Confederate nation melted into the Lost Cause. Through an examination of memoirs, personal papers, and postwar Confederate rituals such as memorial day observances, monument unveilings, and veterans' reunions, Ghosts of the Confederacy probes into how white southerners adjusted to and interpreted their defeat and explores the cultural implications of a central event in American history. Foster argues that, contrary to southern folklore, southerners actually accepted their loss, rapidly embraced both reunion and a New South, and helped to foster sectional reconciliation and an emerging social order. He traces southerners' fascination with the Lost Cause--showing that it was rooted as much in social tensions resulting from rapid change as it was in the legacy of defeat--and demonstrates that the public celebration of the war helped to make the South a deferential and conservative society. Although the ghosts of the Confederacy still haunted the New South, Foster concludes that they did little to shape behavior in it--white southerners, in celebrating the war, ultimately trivialized its memory, reduced its cultural power, and failed to derive any special wisdom from defeat.

Three New Deals

Author: Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429900873
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 260

Book Description
From a world-renowned cultural historian, an original look at the hidden commonalities among Fascism, Nazism, and the New Deal Today Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal is regarded as the democratic ideal, the positive American response to an economic crisis that propelled Germany and Italy toward Fascism. Yet in the 1930s, shocking as it may seem, these regimes were hardly considered antithetical. Now, Wolfgang Schivelbusch investigates the shared elements of these three "new deals" to offer a striking explanation for the popularity of Europe's totalitarian systems. Returning to the Depression, Schivelbusch traces the emergence of a new type of state: bolstered by mass propaganda, led by a charismatic figure, and projecting stability and power. He uncovers stunning similarities among the three regimes: the symbolic importance of gigantic public works programs like the TVA dams and the German autobahn, which not only put people back to work but embodied the state's authority; the seductive persuasiveness of Roosevelt's fireside chats and Mussolini's radio talks; the vogue for monumental architecture stamped on Washington, as on Berlin; and the omnipresent banners enlisting citizens as loyal followers of the state. Far from equating Roosevelt, Hitler, and Mussolini or minimizing their acute differences, Schivelbusch proposes that the populist and paternalist qualities common to their states hold the key to the puzzling allegiance once granted to Europe's most tyrannical regimes.

The Long Defeat

Author: Akiko Hashimoto
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190239158
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
In The Long Defeat, Akiko Hashimoto explores the stakes of war memory in Japan after its catastrophic defeat in World War II, showing how and why defeat has become an indelible part of national collective life, especially in recent decades. Divisive war memories lie at the root of the contentious politics surrounding Japan's pacifist constitution and remilitarization, and fuel the escalating frictions in East Asia known collectively as Japan's "history problem." Drawing on ethnography, interviews, and a wealth of popular memory data, this book identifies three preoccupations - national belonging, healing, and justice - in Japan's discourses of defeat. Hashimoto uncovers the key war memory narratives that are shaping Japan's choices - nationalism, pacifism, or reconciliation - for addressing the rising international tensions and finally overcoming its dark history.

The Ottoman Culture of Defeat

Author: Eyal Ginio
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781849045414
Category : Balkan Peninsula
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
When the first Balkan War broke out in October 1912, few Ottomans anticipated that it would prove to be a watershed moment for the Empire, ending in ignominy, national catastrophe, and the loss of its remaining provinces in the Balkans. Defeat at the hands of an alliance of Balkan powers comprising Bulgaria, Greece, Serbia and Montenegro set the stage for the Balkan Crisis of 1914 and would serve as a prelude to WWI. It was also a moment of deep national trauma and led to bitter soul-searching, giving rise to a so-called 'Culture of Defeat' in which condemnation and criticism flourished in a way seemingly at odds with the reformist debate which followed the Young Turk Revolution of 1908.Eyal Ginio's clear-eyed and rigorously researched book uncovers the different visual and written products of the defeat, published in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Ladino, with the aim of understanding the experience of defeat - how it was perceived, analysed and commemorated by different sectors in Ottoman society - to show that it is key to understanding the actions of the Ottoman political elite during the subsequent World War and the early decades of the Turkish Republic.

Victory in Defeat

Author: Gregory Urwin
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
ISBN: 1612510043
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 514

Book Description
Told here for the first time in vivid detail is the story of the defenders of Wake Island following their surrender to the Japanese on December 23, 1941. The highly regarded military historian Gregory Urwin spent decades researching what happened and now offers a revealing look at the U.S. Marines, sailors, soldiers, and civilian volunteers in captivity. In addition to exhaustive archival research, he interviewed dozens of POWs and even some of their Japanese captors. He also had access to diaries secretly kept by the prisoners. This information has allowed Urwin to provide a nuanced look at the Japanese guards and how the Americans survived three-and-a-half years in captivity and emerged with a much lower death rate than most other Allies captured in the Pacific. In part, Urwin says, the answer lies in the Wake Islanders’ establishment of life-saving communities that kept their dignity intact. Their mutual-help networks encouraged those who faltered under the physical and psychological torture, including what is today called water boarding. The book notes that the Japanese camp official responsible for that war crime was sentenced to life imprisonment by an American military tribunal. Most spent the war at a camp just outside Shanghai, one of the few places where Japanese authorities permitted the Red Cross to aid prisoners of war. The author also calls attention to the generosity of civilians in Shanghai, including Swiss diplomats and the American and British residents of the fabled International Settlement, who provided food and clothing to the prisoners. In addition, some of the guards proved to be less vicious than those stationed at other POW camps and occasionally went out of their way to aid the men. As the first historical work to fully explore the captivity of Wake Island’s defenders, the book offers information not found in other World War II historie

Why Air Forces Fail

Author: Robin Higham
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813167612
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
Includes two new chapters! “One of the more interesting and better books on military aviation to appear in the last few years.”—Journal of Military History Since the publication of the first edition of Why Air Forces Fail, the debate over airpower’s role in military operations has only intensified. Here, eminent historians Robin Higham and Stephen J. Harris assemble a team of experts to add essential new details to their cautionary tale for current practitioners of aerial warfare. Together, the contributors examine the complex, often deep-seated, reasons for the catastrophic failures of the Russian, Polish, French, British, Italian, German, Argentine, and American air services. Complemented by reading lists and suggestions for further research, this seminal study with two new chapters provides an essential and detailed analysis of defeat. “Contains many interesting insights and interpretations . . . an excellent introduction to the study of military failure in general and air forces in particular.”—Journal of America’s Military Past “I recommend this book to those who are interested in air forces and air power, whether amateur or professional, past, present and future.”—Richard Cobbold, Bryanston: The Yearbook “Provides an excellent analysis of the root causes of failure; this engaging study goes far beyond the aerial battlefield to examine the circumstances leading to defeat.”—Dennis Drew, Colonel, USAF (Ret.)