<i>A Freedom Bought with Blood: African American War Literature from the Civil War to World War II</i>, and: <i>The Great War and the Culture of the New Negro</i> (review)

Irving Berlin’s all-soldier World War I revue, Yip Yip Yaphank, made a unique impact on Broadway in 1918 and in Berlin’s work for decades to come. The show forged a compelling and comic connection between theatrical conventions and military protocols, using elements from minstrelsy, the Ziegfeld Follies, and Berlin’s distinctive songs. Featuring such Berlin standards as “Sterling Silver Moon” (later revised as “Mandy”) and “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” it was revised for World War II as This Is the Army, and scenes from it reappear, transformed, in Berlin’s films Alexander’s Ragtime Band and White Christmas.

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Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), man of dissent

Notes and Records the Royal Society journal of the history of science ◽

10.1098/rsnr.2009.0020 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 63 (4) ◽

pp. 365-379 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Ivor Grattan-Guinness

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Soviet Union ◽

World Wide ◽

Bertrand Russell ◽

Nuclear Disarmament ◽

Great War ◽

World War ◽

Private Citizen ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

The Great War

Russell argued against the Great War, but he also wanted to drop atomic bombs on the Soviet Union after World War II, and later he advocated nuclear disarmament. How could a great logician accommodate such inconsistencies? How, as a private citizen, did he make such a world-wide impact in his late years?

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Introduction

10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190611354.003.0001 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Philip Roessler ◽

Harry Verhoeven

Keyword(s):

World War Ii ◽

Democratic Republic ◽

Great War ◽

African History ◽

World War ◽

Turn On ◽

Republic Of The Congo ◽

Central Argument ◽

The Great War ◽

The Way

Chapter one begins with a critical juncture in African history—the expulsion of the Rwandan Patriotic Front from the Democratic Republic of the Congo in July 1998. Building on this vignette, it motivates the book with a puzzle: fifteen months after overthrowing one of Africa’s longest serving dictators, Mobutu Sese Seko, why did the revolutionaries and their regional allies turn on each other, ushering in the deadliest conflict since World War II? It then lays out the book’s central argument: that the seeds of Africa’s Great War were sown in the struggle against Mobutu—the way the revolution came together, the way it was organized and, paradoxically, the very way it succeeded. While the collapse of the Zairian state and the Rwandan genocide were important antecedents to the Great War, Why Comrades Go to War argues these factors mattered primarily in the way they shaped the organization and structure of the anti-Mobutu revolution. The penultimate sections of the chapter summarize the book's approach and contributions.

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Brown Beauty

10.18574/nyu/9781479875108.001.0001 ◽

2018 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Laila Haidarali

Keyword(s):

African American ◽

World War Ii ◽

Social History ◽

Print Culture ◽

Visual Language ◽

Multiple Forms ◽

World War ◽

New Negro ◽

Cultural Currency ◽

Central Interest

Between the Harlem Renaissance and the end of World War II, a discourse that privileged a representative ideal of brown beauty womanhood emerged as one expression of race, class, and women’s status in the modern nation. This discourse on brown beauty accrued great cultural currency across the interwar years as it appeared in diverse and multiple forms. Studying artwork and photography; commercial and consumer-oriented advertising; and literature, poetry, and sociological works, this book analyzes African American print culture with a central interest in women’s social history. It explores the diffuse ways that brownness impinged on socially mobile New Negro women in the urban environment during the interwar years and shows how the discourse was constructed as a self-regulating guide directed at an aspiring middle class. By tracing brown’s changing meanings and showing how a visual language of brown grew into a dynamic racial shorthand used to denote modern African American womanhood, Brown Beauty works to unpack a set of intertwined values and judgments, compromises and contradictions, adjustments and resistances, that were fused into social valuations of women.

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