In Be Good, Sweet Maid: The Trials of Dorothy Joudrie (1999), Audrey Andrews recounts the life and trial of Dorothy Joudrie, a so-called wealthy socialite who was arrested in Calgary in 1995 for attempting to murder her estranged husband after decades of domestic abuse. Andrews tells Joudrie’s story in the form of a semi-auto/biographical text that quotes other scholarly and creative literary works in an intertextual dialogue about violence against women, post-World War II gender socialization, and the “battered women syndrome” defence. This thesis takes this highly referential dialogue as its starting point, and then extends Andrews’ cultural work by tracing a genealogy of colonialism in Canadian domestic violence laws with the help of selected intertexts – including Yvonne Johnson’s Stolen Life: Journey of a Cree Woman (1998), the trial of Angelique Lavallee, and Lorena Bobbitt’s infamous case. First, I source the epigraphs that Andrews strategically places at the start of each chapter and discern the layer of meaning that these external texts bring to Joudrie’s story in order to raise questions about how Andrews rearticulates the work of others and the politics of such a rearticulation. Second, I similarly frame Joudrie’s 1995 trial as a referential and intertextual discourse based in precedent established by the Supreme Court in 1990 when it ruled that expert testimony on the “battered woman syndrome” was admissible in the R. v. Lavallee case (Shaffer 1). This allows me to consider a consequence of the ruling often overlooked in feminist literature: due to the fact that the original defendant, Angelique Lavallee, was a Métis woman whose identity was erased in the courtroom and in case law, subsequent trials employing the “battered woman syndrome” defence repeat settler relations entrenched in colonial violence. Third, I expose how representations can fail by thinking through what Stephen Couser calls the auto/bio/ethics of life writing, which reveals the limits of Canadian laws and literatures. Ultimately, this discussion generates questions about who is considered human under the law and how life writing might re-imagine the “reasonable” human in more just and compassionate ways. / Thesis (Master, Gender Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-07-28 10:28:24.988

No description available.

This dissertation examines the ways in which military personnel interacted with religion during World War II. It argues that the challenges of wartime service provided the impetus and the opportunity to improvise religious practices, refine religious beliefs amid new challenges, and broaden religious understanding through interaction with those from other traditions. Methodologically, this dissertation moves beyond existing analyses that focus primarily on institutions and their representatives such as military chaplains. Instead, it explores first-person accounts left by men and women who were not part of the chaplain corps and analyzes ways in which non-chaplains engaged religion. The exigencies of war contributed to religious innovation as soldiers and sailors improvised religious practices. Lay leaders sometimes filled in to lead services as chaplains were often not available. Soldiers and sailors also modified individual religious practices such as diet, fasting, and prayer to fit the context of military service. The challenges of wartime service also led troops to refine previously held religious beliefs as well as to adopt new interpretations based on personal experiences. Soldiers and sailors often clung to whatever religious beliefs or practices they saw as potentially beneficial. Finally, religious mixing combined with social dislocation and stress to create an atmosphere in which troops questioned and reformulated their religious identities. As soldiers and sailors formed bonds with those from other traditions, it became more difficult to maintain previous assumptions rooted in suspicion and rumor about other faiths. Understanding how soldiers and sailors interacted with religion in World War II anticipates significant aspects of what many scholars have described as a religious revival in the two decades following the war. It suggests that many veterans returned to civilian life with more confidence in their own religious agency and with sharpened conceptions of what they considered religious essentials.

The Making of Soviet Chernivtsi: National “Reunification,” World War II, and the Fate of Jewish Czernowitz in Postwar Ukraine Doctor of Philosophy Svitlana Frunchak Graduate Department of History University of Toronto 2014 Abstract This dissertation revisits the meaning of Soviet expansion and sovietization during and after World War II, the effects of the war on a multiethnic Central-Eastern European city, and the postwar construction of a national identity. One of several multiethnic cities acquired by the USSR in the course of World War II, modern pre-Soviet Chernivtsi can be best characterized as a Jewish-German city dominated by acculturated Jews until the outbreak of World War II. Yet Chernivtsi emerged from the war, the Holocaust, and Soviet reconstruction as an almost homogeneous Ukrainian city that allegedly had always longed for reunification with its Slavic brethren. Focusing on the late Stalinist period (1940–1953) but covering earlier (1774–1940) and later (1953–present) periods, this study explores the relationship between the ideas behind the incorporation; the lived experience of the incorporation; and the historical memory of the city’s distant and recent past. Central to this dissertation is the fate of the Jewish residents of Czernowitz-Chernivtsi. This community was diminished from an influential plurality to about one percent of the city’s population whose past was marginalized in local historical memory. This study demonstrates a multifaceted local experience of the war which was all but silenced by the dominant Soviet Ukrainian myth of the Great Patriotic War and the “reunification of all Ukrainian lands.” When the authors of the official Soviet historical and cultural narratives represented Stalin’s annexation as the “reunification” of Ukraine, they in fact constructed and popularized a new concept of “historical Ukrainian lands.” This concept—a blueprint for the Soviet colonization of the western borderlands in the name of the Ukrainian nation—tied ethnically defined Ukrainian culture to a strictly delineated national territory. Applied to the new borderlands and particularly to their urban centres characterized by cultural diversity, this policy served to legitimize the marginalization and, in several cases, the violent displacement of ethnic minorities, bringing to an end Jewish Czernowitz.

Very little historical scholarship specifically analyzes or explores the absence of chemical weapons in World War II. This thesis seeks to fill the gaps in the historical narrative by providing insight into the personal and external factors that influenced Hitler’s chemical weapons policy. This thesis also touches upon the wartime violence perpetrated by both the Axis and the Allies, thereby offering a neutral, unbiased historical account. From 1939-1941, Hitler did not deploy chemical weapons because his blitzkrieg of Europe was progressing successfully – chemical warfare was unnecessary. With the failure of Operation Barbarossa from 1942-1943, Armaments Minister Albert Speer oversaw a massive increase in the production of the lethal nerve agent tabun, indicating Hitler’s desire to deploy chemical gas on the Eastern Front. However, by the request of Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill threatened to retaliate against Nazi Germany with chemical strikes on German cities in May 1942. Hitler backed down because of the inadequacy of German air defense and his desire to protect the “Aryan” people – based on his own trauma with gas in World War I. However, in the final years of the war in 1944-1945, the stress of the Allied advance on Berlin caused the deterioration of the German dictator’s mental and physical state. Hitler’s thoughts became suicidal and destructive – the German people deserved extinction for their failure in World War II. Thus, Hitler issued the Nero Decree in March 1945. However, the architect turned Armaments Minister, aware of the war’s foregone conclusion, sought to obstruct Germany’s path to catastrophe. Likewise, Hitler sought to initiate chemical warfare. Again, Speer prevented unnecessary civilian casualties by shutting down chemical production plants. The German dictator did not take matters into his own hands because following the failure of the Ardennes Offensive in January 1945, Hitler also grew increasingly apathetic to governing the Third Reich. By April 1945, with Hitler a ghost of his former self, his subleaders fought for control of Nazi Germany, and their inability to cooperate led to a crisis of leadership. Thus, World War II concluded in Europe without chemical warfare. Ultimately, this thesis promotes an awareness of the legacy of violence ushered in by “modern warfare,” a contemporary issue yet to be adequately addressed.

Göranzon, Ingrid: From concept to reality - Uppsala Municipal School of Music. Master thesis, 30 credits. Uppsala: Department of Musicology. 2013. This thesis aims to explain how and why the municipal school of music (kommunala musikskolan) in Uppsala was formed. Municipal schools of music are a Swedish phenomenon that was formed all over Sweden after the Second World War. Each school is individual since they are entirely controlled at a municipal level. Although several factors have been identified as reasons for the creation of municipal schools of music, research in the area is limited. The material forming the basis of the survey is municipal documents from Uppsala city archives. The method that has been chosen to analyze the material is critical ideology analysis. This means that the content of the documents is analyzed in relation to its context, to clarify both the manifest and latent ideologies. The study shows that the formation of a municipal school of music in Uppsala was part of a larger movement, both nationally and locally. Sweden went through great changes during the period after the Second World War, politically, socially and culturally. The development of municipal schools of music was influenced mainly by the ideas about education and culture. The guiding idea was that all citizens should have equal access and opportunity. Technological advances such as radio and gramophone had made high culture more accessible, but it also contributed to the spread of what was considered inferior culture. Studies of the time showed that the solution was to give people the knowledge needed to make the right choice. The municipal school of music in Uppsala was created with the aim of forming a culturally educated public. Key words: municipal school of music (kommunal musikskola), Uppsala, public education (folkbildning), cultural politics (kulturpolitik), critical ideology analysis, post World War II / <p>ISBN UU-MSU-SER-60-E</p>

In this thesis, I explore the experiences of some 2,000 allied civilians in the Japanese-run Weihsien Internment Camp () in Shandong, China from 1943 to 1945. Beyond serving as a counterpoint to the Japanese internment in North America during the Second World War, the Weihsien Camp also represents a rare point of contact between Western civilians and the Japanese that came about as part of Japan's effort to sweep away any remaining vestiges of Western colonial society in Asia. Government documents, supplemented by both published and unpublished memoirs, letters, and diaries reveal the ways in which the internee community organised camp life under Japanese guard in a manner that defies straightforward categorisation as either "resistance" or "collaboration." Instead, the internees as a community reached an accommodation to the realities of life in a Japanese internment camp that allowed them considerable latitude and agency in their daily life. / History

During World War II, 106 Australian medical officers were taken prisoner of war by the Japanese, along with 22,000 Australian troops and many thousands more British and Dutch. Over three and a half years, they accompanied work parties of Allied prisoners sent to camps all over southeast Asia and Japan, living in a variety of harsh and dangerous conditions. Despite the doctors’ efforts, one in three Australian POWs died in captivity. Of those who survived, most attributed this not to inner strength or to luck, but to the care of their medical personnel. Yet apart from the attention recently accorded to Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop, who was only one of these doctors, the experiences and work of all Australian POW medical officers in World War II has been largely overlooked. / Medical officers were crucial for the survival of Australian prisoners, both physically and psychologically. Doctors attempted to keep men of all nationalities alive with little medication, tools or diagnostic equipment, and battled a variety or medical conditions, starvation and systematic physical brutality from their captors. As survival became more difficult, the increased status and responsibilities of the doctors had significant ramifications for the military chain of command and for the burdens on the doctors themselves. / This thesis explores many aspects of Australian POW doctors’ experience of captivity: the complexities of practising modern medicine without any of its tools; the development of unique strategies to combat a wide variety of environmental limitations and life-threatening medical conditions; the unique relationship between medical personnel and their captors; the relationships between Australian POW medical officers and combatant officers and a comparison with relationships in the British military in captivity; the daily dilemmas faced by doctors trying to reconcile their professional ethics with their military obligations, and how they coped with these responsibilities. Doctors’ continuing roles in the postwar lives of ex-POWs, and the influence captivity had on their own lives and careers after the war are also analysed. / While examination of the influence of medical officers on other prisoners’ lives is important, studying their experience as a group in their own right is equally valuable. In this thesis, both these areas are investigated to bring a variety of perspectives to understanding the complexity and importance of Australian POW doctors’ captivity experience.

The presented diploma project places emphasis on introducing the Order of the Knight Cross in context of the Czech history of the half of the twentieth century. This order took its place in the Czech history not as a symbol of liberating wars, which it was in time of its birth, but as an implement of totalitarian regime. Apart from the description of the development of the order itself, this project aims at presenting the holders of the Knight Cross as the highest level of the Iron Cross which was given to soldiers of German defence power of Czechoslovak origin during the second world war. This project also includes short personal stories of these veteran soldiers of " Czechoslovak " origin enhanced with a lot of personal information. The integral part of this dissertation is also the explanation of importance of symbol of the Iron Cross and its position in the society of the time of the Third Reich. There is also shown its coherent story on which it is possible to illustrate its own transformation under the terms of historical development. The dissertation is divided into several parts. The introductory part covers a brief history of the Order of the Iron Cross from its birth to the end of the second world war. The next chapter deals with the birth and the importance of the Knight Cross and its...

The work presented here, aims to investigate the participation of Alagoas ex-combatants who participated directly and indirectly in the Second World War, as summoned of the Brazilian Armed Forces between the years 1944-45. Their participation should be examined in order to confirm not only sending 148 men from Alagoas to the fields of Italy, but also to check the convening of others men who defended the Brazilian coast and its subsequent process of social reintegration for through the creation of the Association of Ex-combatants in Brazil Alagoas Section (AECB-AL). To study this issue after nearly seventy years since the end of World War II, in a state that develops little incentive to register your memory or memory of their natural, was one of the factors that greatly hindered the construction of this dissertation. The existence of a few men still alive here in Alagoas and willing to express their experiences on the period in question, adds to the overall picture of difficulties encountered during these more than two years of research, but were gradually overcome . We did not have sufficient records of men from Alagoas called in this official literature, it had to resort the statements by some men, with more than eighty years, that proposed to serve as reviewers of this research, reporting their experiences before, during and after war. / O trabalho aqui apresentado tem como objetivo investigar a trajetória de ex-combatentes alagoanos que participaram direta e indiretamente da Segunda Guerra Mundial, como convocados das Forças Armadas brasileiras entre os anos de 1944-45. A sua participação deverá ser analisada com o intuito de confirmar não só o envio de 148 alagoanos para os campos da Itália, mas, também, de verificar a convocação de outros alagoanos que defenderam o litoral brasileiro e o seu posterior processo de reintegração social, por intermédio da criação da Associação dos Ex-combatentes do Brasil Secção Alagoas (AECBAL). Estudar esse tema após quase setenta anos do fim da Segunda Guerra Mundial, em um estado que desenvolve pouco incentivo para o registro de sua memória ou da memória de seus naturais, foi um dos fatores que dificultou sobremaneira a construção dessa dissertação. A existência de um número reduzido de alagoanos convocados ainda vivos e com vontade de expressar as suas experiências sobre o período em questão, soma-se ao quadro geral de dificuldades encontradas durante esses mais de dois anos de pesquisa, mas que foram aos poucos sendo superadas. Por não se ter registros suficientes de alagoanos convocados na bibliografia oficial, teve-se que recorrer a depoimentos de alguns homens, com mais de oitenta anos, que se propuseram a servir como colaboradores desta pesquisa, relatando as suas experiências antes, durante e após a guerra.