scholarly journals Sherman's March to the Sea: A March in Brilliance

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Gallipoli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Total War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Warfare ◽  
Sherman's March

In November 1864, Union General William Sherman launched his "March to the Sea" campaign in order to destroy the Confederate forces. Even though his plan was considered to be risky by others during his time, the march would come to symbolize an evolution in the history of warfare as Sherman willingly broke numerous entrenched 'military principles' and ushered in 'hard war' tactics, which preceded the 'total war' tactics of the twentieth century. Sherman's March was a key campaign in the development of modern warfare.

The Social Space of Terror: Towards a Civil Interpretation of Total War

1987 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
K Hewitt
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Weapons Of Mass Destruction ◽  
Main Concern ◽  
Mass Destruction ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Warfare ◽  
Urban Places ◽  
Second World

In the paper I seek to interpret modern warfare from the perspective of civil society and its geography. I emphasize the predicament of civilians who are subject to direct and deliberate armed assaults. Particular attention is given to enforced uprooting or removals of population, and to annihilation of urban places with weapons of mass destruction. Two case histories are explored, both taken from the last months of the Second World War. They are, the expulsion of German civilians from Eastern Europe, and the firebombing of Japanese cities, especially Tokyo. Damages and casualties are detailed. However, the main concern is to establish the composition, plight, and responses of civilian populations, and this includes their relation to national war efforts. It is concluded that the vast majority, because of gender, age, health, occupation, and class, were essentially marginal to, and little involved in, the war efforts of their respective states. This contrasts sharply with the assumptions or rhetoric of the theory of ‘total war’, and the practice of targetting civilians and nonmilitary areas. It is suggested that the majority of home populations remain civilians in the fullest sense of the term, even in wartime. From this it follows that assaults upon them by military forces are primarily strategies of terror, and that the ‘social space’ attacked is essentially civilian. Such uprootings and mass destruction of human settlements have, however, become an ever larger part of the war strategies, and the history of warfare, of most powers since 1945.

3. International history of the twentieth century

2019 ◽  
pp. 54-69
Author(s):  
Len Scott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Total War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter focuses on some of the principal developments in world politics from 1900 to 1999: the development of total war, the advent of nuclear weapons, the onset of cold war, and the end of European imperialism. It shows how the confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union became the key dynamic in world affairs, replacing the dominance of—and conflict among—European states in the first half of the twentieth century. It also examines the ways that the cold war promoted or prevented global conflict, how decolonization became entangled with East–West conflicts, and how dangerous the nuclear confrontation between East and West was. Finally, the chapter considers the role of nuclear weapons in specific phases of the cold war, notably in détente, and then with the deterioration of Soviet–American relations in the 1980s.

James Axtell, Wisdom’s Workshop. The Rise of the Modern University.

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sheldon Rothblatt
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
The Past ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Warfare

This concluding chapter explores the rise of the modern university. The history of the modern university, especially the twentieth-century university, cannot be understood without considering the century of wars, because modern warfare promotes the highest level of technological development and creates a demand for it that extends beyond the duration of hostilities. The historian's task is to explain how the past became the present. Ultimately, not every cause of an outcome can be completely explained. While some institutions, as the result of their benefactions, income, and enviably-placed graduates, have a relatively free hand in setting campus priorities in order to pursue the best, most others cannot. Most, both private and public, are not so happily situated with respect to either history or markets.

The Trading with the Enemy Acts in the age of expropriation, 1914–49

2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 81-99
Author(s):  
Nicholas Mulder
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Private Property ◽  
The United States ◽  
Total War ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Us ◽  
History Of ◽  
Domestic Use ◽  
The New Deal

AbstractThis article examines one of the most consequential legal–political models for the confiscation of private property in the twentieth century: the Trading with the Enemy Acts (TEAs). Two laws with this name were passed in Britain (1914) and the United States (1917), enabling the large-scale expropriation of ‘enemies’ and ‘aliens’. The extra-territorial application of these laws during the era of total war led to the globalization of its paradigm of expropriation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The TEAs made the administrative process of dispossession effective and profitable for liberal states. The US law was repurposed for domestic use during the New Deal, while its British counterpart played an unforeseen role during decolonization and the great partitions of the late 1940s, as the nascent nation-states of India, Pakistan, and Israel used it to constitute themselves as territorial and economic units by taking land and property from ‘evacuees’ and ‘absentees’. The article provides a short history of these four national cases in their international context and argues that the history of the TEAs shows that state-driven mass expropriation was much more common throughout the mid twentieth century than usually supposed; the ‘age of extremes’ was also in part an ‘age of expropriation’.

The Age of Noise in Britain

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
James G. Mansell
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Noise Abatement ◽  
Social Body ◽  
Total War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Britain ◽  
The Everyday ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Sonic Environment

Early twentieth-century Britons thought that they were living in the “age of noise,” sensing the historical changes going on around them as a series of disturbing shifts in the sonic atmosphere. From motorcar engines and wireless loudspeakers to the terrifying interruptions of mechanized warfare, the feeling of living in topsy-turvy times arrived via the ear. Yet historians have not listened to the sounds of early twentieth-century Britain nor unravelled what it meant to live in an “age of noise”. This book turns a critical ear to the “ways of hearing” operating in Britain between 1914 and 1945 and argues that attempts to shape encounters with everyday sound were expressive of hopes and fears for modernity. Competing expert groups – doctors, psychologists, planners, mystics, even – thought differently about how best to attune the individual hearing self to the sounding social body in modernity. Examining noise abatement campaigns, scientific as well as enchanted interventions in the everyday sonic environment, and attempts to manage the auditory culture of total war, the book offers the first auditory history of modern Britain.

Introduction

2001 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 345-351 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Vincent
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Home Front ◽  
New Era ◽  
Total War ◽  
Child Bearing ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Europe ◽  
Main Thing

‘Certain things go inevitably with war and are war. The main thing is fighting, winning, killing and being killed, being masculine and aggressive and abnormally vigorous, violent and physical.’The experience of total war dominated the history of Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Not only did the First World War inaugurate a new era in warfare, but its memory, commemoration and image was also incorporated in a profound sense into the culture of the interwar period. Combatants' memories and cinematic images contributed to keeping the war ever-present, as much in the pacifist desires of those who abhorred it as in the militarist ambitions of those intoxicated by it. The spirit of the trenches was to be reborn in the new fascist man of the 1920s and 1930s. As the opening quotation suggests, soldiering was the quintessential masculine experience. Military service – repackaged as national service during peacetime – was a school for forging men from callow boys, a cultural supposition which spanned the political divides of left and right, democracies and dictatorships. The experience of war restated and exaggerated conventional expectations of men and women. Indeed, for some theorists, war in the twentieth century was men's equivalent to women's experience of child-bearing. The front was an heroic, male arena, explicitly contrasted to the home front where women, children and those ‘unmanned’ by age or injury provided support and succour for the soldiers.

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