scholarly journals View Magazine and the Mass Visual Culture of World War II

Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 41
Author(s):  
Gregory Gilbert
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Media Industry ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
World War ◽  
American Government ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
News Reports ◽  
Corporate Advertising ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Media

Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the American government impressed upon the media industry and corporate advertising the cooperative need to boost morale and enlist nationalist support for the war effort. Public opinion was shaped through an active campaign of visual propaganda and media censorship in which the social trauma of war, in particular, representations of death and destructive disorder, was erased from official news reports. However, avant-garde art and writing in View magazine during the early 1940s can be analyzed as a radical form of counter-discourse that challenged the media’s representation of the war. View had been founded in 1940 by the poet Charles Henri Ford, who vowed to create a magazine devoted to what he called the “new journalism”, a form of international reporting by poets and visual artists that would provide visionary critical insight on the forthcoming political catastrophe in Europe. Lacking their own publishing forum, a number of Surrealist émigrés and American adherents of Surrealism gravitated towards View. As this article will examine, Surrealist imagery and prose in View evoked a profound sense of the bodily trauma and physical destruction omitted from mass media, subverting the government’s highly sanitized and ideologically manipulated representations of World War II.

scholarly journals The Union of South Africa Propaganda Campaigns during the World War II

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anli Le Roux
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
South African ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
The Media ◽  
War Experiences ◽  
Strategic Imperative ◽  
Second World

THE UNION OF SOUTH AFRICA PROPAGANDA CAMPAIGNS DURING THE SECOND WORLD WAR (1939–1945). Part 1: The African Mirror Newsreels IntroductionAccording to Danny Schechter, when one fights a war, "there is a need to create and maintain ties of sentiment between soldiers and citizens, as well as a need for popular mobilisation and media support" (2004:25). During the Second World War the case was no different in South Africa. The Union of South Africa propaganda campaigns in all its forms were aimed at "motivating, managing, and feeding the media" - which in turn fed the nation. This was a key strategic imperative to try to build, strengthen and maintain a consensus and united front behind the war effort (Schechter, 2004:25).The significance of contemporary filmic visualisation or off-screen enactments of war experiences and their place in South African historiography of the Second World War has long been an under-researched area....

It’s Easy for a Soldier Boy to Catch Rides

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-72
Author(s):  
Jack Reid
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Law Enforcement Officials ◽  
The Media

This chapter explores how several factors during World War II made hitchhiking widely accepted and commonly practiced on the home front. Gasoline and tire rationing, increased volunteerism during the war effort, and the fact that most hitchhikers were now servicemen in uniform instead of unemployed transients led many Americans to look more favourably upon the practice. Even critics of hitchhiking during the Depression years came to see offering soldiers lifts to and from their bases—as well as civilians heading to work—as a patriotic duty. As a result, the media, government regulators, and law-enforcement officials typically looked past periodic acts of violence associated with ride solicitation—focusing instead on ideas of duty and sacrifice in the name of the war effort.

Country Radio

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Weisbard
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Internet Access ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Programming Approach ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
New Business ◽  
The Media ◽  
New Business Models

This chapter considers the role played by radio in popularizing and defining country music. Radio as a format pursued a commercially driven mediation of identity that worked against applying an artistically driven musical genre definition. In particular, these debates revolved around gendered presentation and women as listeners and performers. From the 1920s through World War II, radio’s prominence in country turned on live radio shows as the media introduction of southern whites. A second era, from the end of the war to mid-1970s, saw a shift to disc jockeys and records: personality radio. Format radio country, a tighter programming approach, solidified from the mid-1970s to the mega mergers of the late 1990s. Most recently, in an era of Internet access and new business models for music, country has confronted the less sympathetic position of networked radio.

‘Japan Fight. Aboriginal People Fight. European People Fight’: Yolngu Stories from World War II

2008 ◽  
Vol 37 (S1) ◽  
pp. 65-72
Author(s):  
Noah Riseman
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
Northern Territory ◽  
Oral Histories ◽  
World War ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Australian Soil

Abstract Did you know that a Bathurst Islander captured the first Japanese prisoner of war on Australian soil? Or that a crucifix saved the life of a crashed American pilot in the Gulf of Carpentaria? These are excerpts from the rich array of oral histories of Aboriginal participation in World War II. This paper presents “highlights” from Yolngu oral histories of World War II in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Using these stories, the paper begins to explore some of the following questions: Why did Yolngu participate in the war effort? How did Yolngu see their role in relation to white Australia? In what ways did Yolngu contribute to the security of Australia? How integral was Yolngu assistance to defence of Australia? Although the answers to these questions are not finite, this paper aims to survey some of the Yolngu history of World War II.

Direct Legislation: Some Implications of Open Housing Referenda

1970 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 124-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Howard D. Hamilton
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
American Government ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Pass Through ◽  
Direct Legislation ◽  
Direct Government ◽  
Open Housing

Any middle-aged member of the political science guild in a retrospective mood might ponder a question: “What ever happened to direct democracy?” In our halcyon student days the textbooks discussed the direct democracy trinity—initiative, referendum, and recall—described their mechanics and variations, explained their origin in the Progressive Era, told us that the United States, Australia, and Switzerland were leading practitioners of direct democracy, cited a few eccentric referenda, gave the standard pro and con arguments, and essayed some judgments of the relative merits of direct and representative democracy. Latter day collegians may pass through the portals innocent of the existence of the institutions of direct government. Half of the American government texts never mention the subject; the others allocate a paragraph or a page for a casual mention or a barebones explanation of the mechanics.A similar trend has occurred in the literature. Before 1921, every volume of this Review had items on the referendum, five in one volume. Subsequently there have been only seven articles, all but two prior to World War II. “The Initiative and Referendum in Graustark” has ceased to be a fashionable dissertation topic, only four in the last thirty years. All but two of the published monographs antedate World War II.

The Meaning of Resilience: Soviet Children in World War II

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 521-535
Author(s):  
Lisa A. Kirschenbaum
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Mixed Messages ◽  
Failure To Protect

During World War II, the Soviet media depicted children suffering as well as children actively participating in the war effort and mothers making sacrifices for them. Such mixed messages served clear political purposes, publicizing Nazi atrocities while deflecting attention from the Soviet state’s failure to protect its children. Historians have tended to approach such images and stories within a framework of trauma that validates stories of children’s suffering, despite their political purposes, while also discounting wartime accounts and postwar (and post-Soviet) reminiscences that highlight children’s strength and recovery. The concept of resilience, as developed in psychology, psychiatry, and anthropology, however, allows historians to understand such material as authentic and vital components of survivors’ understandings and memories of the war.

scholarly journals Politicizing Religion

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-99
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter defines Graham’s crusades in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom in the 1950s as powerful cultural orchestrations of Cold War culture. It explores the reasons of leading political figures to support Graham, the media discourses that constructed Graham’s image as a cold warrior, and the religious and political worldviews of the religious organizers of the crusades in London, Washington, New York, and Berlin. In doing so, the chapter shows how hopes for genuine re-Christianization, in response to looming secularization, anticommunist fears, and post–World War II national anxieties, as well as spiritual legitimizations for the Cold War conflict, blended in Graham’s campaign work. These anxieties, hopes, and worldviews crisscrossed the Atlantic, allowing Graham and his campaign teams to make a significant contribution to creating an imagined transnational “spiritual Free World.”

Presidential Address: Area Studies as a Critical Discipline

1980 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-25 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin I. Schwartz
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Presidential Address ◽  
World War ◽  
Area Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
War Effort

As we all know, the modest, colorless, and ambiguous term “area studies” emerged during the course of World War II as a way of describing one minor enterprise in the war effort. It was an enterprise designed to achieve an encapsulated understanding of the unknown areas of the world in which we suddenly found ourselves engaged. During and after the war, most area studies were contemporary in orientation and, given the circumstances of their origin, extremely vulnerable to the charge of serving “nonscholarly” political or military interests.

Emergence of the Modern Research University: Harvard and M.I.T., 1945–1970

1992 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Freeland
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Research University ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Massachusetts Institute Of Technology ◽  
World War ◽  
The Social ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Institute Of Technology ◽  
Institutional Model

Harvard and M.I.T. were ideally positioned to exploit the advantageous possibilities for development that arose after World War II. Both did so, pursuing routes that reflected their different histories, stages of development, organizational characteristics, and current priorities. Both became, in the process, contrasting versions of a modern research university, together helping to define a new institutional model for the nation’s academic community. For most universities, World War II continued the difficult circumstances of the Depression, but the wartime role of academics also fostered hopes for recognition and growth in the postwar years. This optimism prompted organized planning for institutional development well before the end of the war. As Conant put it in 1943: “The period immediately following the cessation of hostilities ... will be a time when [Harvard’s] educational house can be put in order, when changes perhaps long overdue can be made most readily.” The leaders of M.I.T. anticipated even more dramatic gains. Referring in 1944 to the Institute’s contributions to the war effort, Compton observed that “the value, effectiveness and prestige of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have never been at so high a level; this is certainly a strategic vantage point from which to initiate the next advance.” The prewar years at Harvard had left little doubt about the “changes ... long overdue” on which Conant would focus. From the beginning of his presidency, he had insisted that Harvard’s goal should not be expansion but “intensification”: the raising of intellectual standards within established programs and the reducing of concern with the social, localistic values associated with Harvard’s Brahmin traditions. The two major expressions of these policies prior to 1940 had been the efforts to tighten scholarly standards for promotion in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and to attract more able undergraduates by recruiting in public and non-northeastern secondary schools. As Conant anticipated the postwar years, especially in the context of the veterans’ program, he was aware that the new popularity of higher education might support a level of growth that had not been possible during the Depression, but he continued to oppose expansion. If demand for admission increased, Conant argued in the mid-1940S, Harvard should raise standards, not increase in size.

Making Waves

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-36
Author(s):  
Andrew Zangwill
Keyword(s):  
Quantum Mechanics ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Experimental Work ◽  
Research Laboratory ◽  
Naval Research ◽  
Study Group ◽  
World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Prep School ◽  
Van Vleck

Sixteen-year-old Phil Anderson does not fit in well with the prep school boys at Harvard, but he finds a congenial study group (including future historian of science Thomas Kuhn) and does well academically. The beginning of World War II causes him to change his major to Electronic Physics. His class graduates in three years so they can contribute to the war effort. Anderson does his service as a radar (microwave) engineer at the Naval Research Laboratory where he learns quantum mechanics, learns he is probably not suited for experimental work, and grows up socially. John Van Vleck visits NRL and helps convince Anderson to return to Harvard for graduate school.

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