A matter of choice: strategy and discretion in the shadow of World War Two

American policy-makers are predisposed towards the idea of a necessary war of survival, fought with little room for choice. This reflects a dominant memory of World War II that teaches Americans that they live in a dangerously small world that imposes conflict. Critics argue that the ‘choice versus necessity’ schema is ahistorical and mischievous. This article offers supporting fire to those critiques. America’s war against the Axis (1941–45) is a crucial case through which to test the ‘small world’ view. Arguments for war in 1941 pose overblown scenarios of the rise of a Eurasian super-threat. In 1941 conflict was discretionary and not strictly necessary in the interests of national security. The argument for intervention is a closer call that often assumed. This has implications for America’s choices today.

The Liberal Way of War? French representations of the Allies, 1944-2008

This chapter looks at the ways in which Anglo-American participants in the Liberation of France have been represented in French narratives in the decades since the Second World War, through the developing French historiography of Allied participation in the War, and through the various roles assigned to the Allies in key postwar memorialisation ceremonies in France.

The First World War in biscuits

This is a mixed-media exhibition incorporating objects, sound and film, and drawing on archives held at Reading Museum and MERL. It focuses on the role of the Huntley and Palmers biscuit factory in Reading during the First World War.

Frames and the interpreter in the Imperial War Museum photographic archive

Using Azoulay's frame of the civil gaze, this chapter examines selected Second World War images, catalogued under 'interpreter' in the IWM's photographic archive, looking at representative situations in which interpreters typically operate in wartime - communicating with clandestine forces, liaising between the army and civilians, and dealing with the aftermath of war.

Entrepreneurship and cities: evidence from the post-communist world

While attributing urban success to more abundant supply of entrepreneurship, more recent studies on entrepreneurship have shifted their focus to examining cross-city variation in entrepreneurial activity. Despite a growing number of spatial-oriented studies of entrepreneurship worldwide to our best knowledge no empirical evidence exists on the determinants of cross-city variation in entrepreneurship in the context of the Former Soviet Union (FSU) states. Estrin and Mickiewicz (2010) show that transition economies generally exhibit lower rates of entrepreneurship than observed in most developed and developing market economies. This difference is even more pronounced for the FSU compared to Central and Eastern Europe. This paper investigates variation in entrepreneurial activity across FSU cities, attempting to bridge the city-level gap in spatial-oriented empirical research.

Il realismo di un nuovissimo medio evo: Boccaccio in the age of neorealism

After the war Italian artists and intellectuals saw a significant and necessary confluence between their political desire to create a "new." Italy and their cultural ambition to re-invigorate the study of medieval Italy. This tendency is particularly evident, I argue, in the post-war scholarly and critical focus on Boccaccio, and especially Boccaccio’s Decameron. Not only within the academy but also in the popular press, Boccaccio was granted pride of place in the canon, venerated as the pioneer of socially conscious vernacular literary realism, the archetype for the pursuit of artistic truth in the face of social upheaval. As a result, I wish to suggest, Italian neorealism, which rose to prominence in the first years after the Second World War, was in a significant sense imbued with and realised through a profound engagement with the work of Boccaccio. In turn, the cultural currents affiliated with neorealism influenced Boccaccio studies, whose operative notions of medieval «realism» were to a perhaps surprising degree stimulated by approaches to the neo-realist poetics at work in the Italian films, novels, and criticism of the 1940s and ’50s. Situating the critical discourse surrounding Boccaccio within the post-war Italian context can therefore serve to shed unexpected light on both the cultural affirmation of neorealism and the disciplinary configuration of Italian medieval studies.

The fractured lives of German Bohemian children, born 1933-40 in the area known as Sudetenland: a memory study, Nablonz-Neugablonz

At the Paris Peace Conferences of 1918-1919, new states aspiring to be nation-states were created for 60 million people, but at the same time 25 million people found themselves as ethnic minorities. This change of the old order in Europe had a considerable impact on one such group, more than 3 million Bohemian German-speakers, later referred to as Sudeten Germans. After the demise of the Habsburg Empire In 1918, they became part of the new state of Czechoslovakia. In 1938, the Munich Agreement – prelude to the Second World War – integrated them into Hitler’s Reich; in 1945-1946 they were expelled from the reconstituted state of Czechoslovakia. At the centre of this War Child case study are German children from the Northern Bohemian town and district, formerly known as Gablonz an der Neisse, famous for exquisite glass art, now Jablonec nad Nisou in the Czech Republic. After their expulsion they found new homes in the post-war Federal Republic of Germany. In addition, testimonies have been drawn upon of some Czech eyewitnesses from the same area, who provided their perspective from the other side, as it were. It turned out to be an insightful case study of the fate of these communities, previously studied mainly within the context of the national struggle between Germans and Czechs. The inter-disciplinary research methodology adopted here combines history and sociological research to demonstrate the effect of larger political and social developments on human lives, not shying away from addressing sensitive political and historical issues, as far as these are relevant within the context of the study. The expellees started new lives in what became Neugablonz in post-war Bavaria where they successfully re-established the industries they had had to leave behind in 1945-1946. Part 1 of the study sheds light on the complex Czech-German relationship of this important Central European region, addressing issues of democracy, ethnicity, race, nationalism, geopolitics, economics, human geography and ethnography. It also charts the developments leading to the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia after 1945. What is important in this War Child study is how the expellees remember their history while living as children in Sudetenland and later. The testimony data gained indicate that certain stereotypes often repeated within the context of Sudeten issues such as the confrontational nature of inter-ethnic relations are not reflected in the testimonies of the respondents from Gablonz. In Part 2 the War Child Study explores the memories of the former Sudeten war children using sociological research methods. It focuses on how they remember life in their Bohemian homeland and coped with the life-long effects of displacement after their expulsion. The study maps how they turned adversity into success by showing a remarkable degree of resilience and ingenuity in the face of testing circumstances due to the abrupt break in their lives. The thesis examines the reasons for the relatively positive outcome to respondents’ lives and what transferable lessons can be deduced from the results of this study.

Entrepreneurial dynamics and higher education institutions in the post-communist world

This study draws on the institutional and regional entrepreneurship literature to develop a conceptual framework that analyses the impact of higher education institutions on entrepreneurial dynamics. It is used to examine the cities of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) during the period 1995–2008. Extending the multi-pillar institutional concept, it is found that higher education institutions play a prominent role in fostering entrepreneurial dynamics in CIS cities through multiple channels, including human capital development, cultivating a positive attitude towards entrepreneurship, affecting the perceptions of the knowledge and skills needed to start up a successful business, and knowledge spillovers.

National World War II Memorial

This poster is an image of a painting created by Joe McKendry of an architectural war memorial designed by Friedrich St. Florian that was given to RISD President Roger Mandle. The memorial is located in Wahington, D.C.

Parâmetros de concretização judicial do direito fundamental à saúde no fornecimento de medicamentos

In Brazil, social rights have always been considered secondary legal categories, whose implementation could wait for the pending of political decisions. At the end of the Second World War, International Law emphasizes the protection of human beings, raising his dignity as a legal pillar of the legal orders and one of the main foundations of Constitutions. At the post-positivism Constitutionalism, the realization of social rights receives special attention with the assumption of supremacy and normativity of the Constitutions, while the judiciary participates in the realization of democracy, not only as applicator of laws, but also as the guardian of constitutionality of the acts and administrative omissions, creatively contributing to the constitutional achievement, filling gaps and normative state omissions. In this aspect, the supply of medicines, whose costs can not be supported by the individual, keep a close connection with the right to life, health and dignity of the human being, as the subject of numerous lawsuits directed against the Public Administration. Such phenomenon has caused intense debate regarding judicial activism and legitimacy of these decisions, particularly on the need to define what are the limits and possibilities considering the principle of separation of powers and the principle of reserve of the possible; bieng this the problematic developed in this research. Thus, this research aims to verify the legitimacy of judicial decisions that determines to the Public Administration the compulsory providing of medicine to those who can not afford the cost of their treatment, as well as, contribute to the dogmatic constructions of parameters to be observed by judicial interference. Regarding the methodology, this research has an investigative and descriptive caracter and an theoretical approach based on bibliographical data collection (judicial and doutrine decisions) that received qualitative treatment and dialectical approach. As a result, it is known that the judicial decision that determines the supply of medicines to those individuals who can not afford them with their own resources is legitimate and complies with the democratic principle, not violating the principle of separation of powers and the reserve of the possible, since the judicial decison is not stripped with an uniform and reasonable criteria, failing to contain high burden of subjectivism and witch signifies a possible exacerbation of functions by the judiciary, suffering, in this case, of requirement of legal certainty. It is concluded that the Court decision that determines the government the providing of medicine to those who can not afford the cost of treatment should be based on parameters such as: the protection of human dignity and the minimum existencial principle, the inafastable jurisdiction principle; compliance critique of the possible reserve principle; subsidiarity of judicial intervention; proportionality (quantitative and qualitative) in the content of the decision; the questioning about the reasons for non-delivery of the drug through administrative via; and, finally, the attention not to turn the judiciary into a mere production factor of the pharmaceutical industry, contributing to the cartelization of the right to health

O Japão na Amazônia: condicionantes para a fixação e mobilidade dos imigrantes japoneses (1929-2009)

Investiga a inserção dos imigrantes japoneses na Região Norte e as condicionantes que levaram a consolidação (fixação) das colônias agrícolas no estado do Pará e a dissolução (mobilidade) das colônias agrícolas de outros estados, tendo como foco da análise comparativa as colônias de Tomé-Açu (Pará) e do Amapá, a primeira considerada um caso de sucesso, enquanto que a segunda, o inverso. Para discussão foram abordadas as principais correntes teóricas das migrações, o panorama das migrações internacionais, a participação do Brasil e do Japão no contexto das grandes migrações internacionais e no contexto nacional. No âmbito local, discute algumas questões relacionadas às negociações entre o governo e as empresas promotoras das imigrações dirigidas que ocorreram nos estados do Amazonas, Pará e Amapá, as políticas públicas adotadas para fixação dos imigrantes antes e após a Segunda Guerra Mundial, os percalços das diferentes colônias japonesas que foram instaladas nos estados da Região Norte. A pesquisa fundamenta-se no referencial bibliográfico e nas entrevistas realizadas com os imigrantes. A partir da análise dos dados, conclui-se que o modelo de migração planejada, assentada em locais previamente selecionados pelos representantes japoneses no atual município de Tomé-Açu no início da migração (1929) e os sucessivos investimentos das empresas japonesas, e do governo japonês depois da Segunda Guerra Mundial, foram determinantes para a fixação desses imigrantes em Tomé-Açu. Enquanto que o modelo de migração dirigida (pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial) para as colônias do Amapá, sem o devido planejamento e pesquisa pelas autoridades competentes, dificultaram sobremaneira o plantio e o escoamento da produção, agravado pela incidência de doenças endêmicas que comprometeram a saúde e a vida dos imigrantes, fatores que contribuíram para a mobilização da maioria de imigrantes em busca de alternativas para a sua sobrevivência.