History Commons^™

A Distinction Without A Difference: Vietnam, Sir Robert Thompson, And The Policing Failures Of Vietnam, Mark J. Rothermel

Madison Historical Review

The scholarship analyzing the failure of the American involvement in Vietnam began even before the war finished. Whether the Orthodox School which considered the war unwinnable or the revisionist which argued there was a path to victory for the Americans, there have been libraries of tomes arguing who or what was to blame for the American defeat. An increased amount of scholarship recently has been written regarding the influence of British officer Sir Robert Thompson and his attempt to advise both the South Vietnamese and American war efforts.

Thompson, who gained fame as one of the key leaders for the …

Casualties Of War? Refining The Civilian-Military Dichotomy In World War I, Eric Grube

Madison Historical Review

Throughout the First World War, newspapers around the world mocked the British state for its lavish spending on captured German officers kept at Donington Hall, a refurbished English estate. Why was this camp such a controversial space of perceived decadence? I argue that its comforts seemed to linger from an earlier era, one in which military men exuded genteel civility as integral to their supposedly heroic service. The British state essentially enabled such treatment, and the public decried this space for sustaining the anachronism of aristocratic privilege in the face of a globalized total war. However, the German inmates expected …

Russia's Empress-Navigator: Transforming Modes Of Monarchy During The Reign Of Anna Ivanovna, 1730-40., Jacob S. Bell

Madison Historical Review

The eighteenth century was a markedly volatile period in the history of Russia, seeing its development and international emergence as a European-styled empire. In narratives of this time of change, historians tend to view the century in two parts: the reign of Peter I (r. 1682-1725), who purportedly spurned Russia into modernization, and Catherine II (r. 1762-96), the German princess-turned-empress who presided over the culmination of Russia’s transformation. Yet, dismissal of nearly forty years of Russia’s history does a severe disservice to the sovereigns and governments that molded and crafted the process of change. Specifically, Empress Anna Ivanovna (r. 1730-40) …

Classical Literature And The Retroaction Of Socialist Ideology—The Sovietization Of A Medieval Georgian Epic Poem And Its Mysterious Author, Diego Benning Wang

Madison Historical Review

Shota Rustaveli, presumed author of the medieval Georgian epic poem vepkhistqaosani (The Knight in the Panther's Skin), was one of the most celebrated cultural and historical figures in Soviet Georgia. However, not much is known about Rustaveli apart from his work. In this essay, I argue that a series of policies under the Soviet government transformed Rustaveli into a national symbol of Georgia, but the celebration of Rustaveli and his poem scarcely deviated from the ideological guidelines of the Soviet state. In discussing the impact and legacy of the Soviet promotion of Rustaveli, I purport to highlight the "national in …

Interview With Danielle Dybbro, Danielle Dybbro

Madison Historical Review

Interview with Danielle Dybbro, Winner of the 2018 James Madison Award for Excellence in Historical Scholarship

Crossing No Man’S Land: Bridging The Gender Gap Of World War I Through The Works Of Vera Brittain, Danielle R. Dybbro

Madison Historical Review

Vera Brittain wrote in both her memoir and in a letter to her fiancé that, “women get all the dreariness of war and none of its exhilaration.” She was just beginning her life as a student at Oxford when Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in the summer of 1914, and at the time “the war at first seemed” to be “an infuriating personal interruption rather than [the] worldwide catastrophe” that it would eventually become. Brittain soon interrupted her studies at Oxford by becoming a nurse and eventually became a member of the Voluntary Aid Detachment for the duration of the …

Digital History Profile, Angela Sutton

Madison Historical Review

This year at the Madison Historical Review, we chose to profile an exciting digital history project out of Vanderbilt University. We interviewed Angela Sutton who is a historian and Postdoctoral fellow in Digital Humanities at Vanderbilt University, where she helps manage projects with the Slave Societies Digital Archive (SSDA). Her publications about the archive and its contents can be found in sx archipelagos (Issue 2, September 2017) and the Afro-Hispanic Review (coming out later in 2018).

Single, Unwed, And Pregnant In Victorian London: Narratives Of Working Class Agency And Negotiation, Virginia L. Grimaldi

Madison Historical Review

Unmarried working women who got pregnant in Victorian London and were abandoned by the fathers were in a sticky situation. If a woman kept the baby, she would unlikely be able to provide for it, especially under the ‘Bastardly Act’ of the 1834 Poor Law, which deemed all illegitimate children under the sole responsibility of the mother. If she concealed her pregnancy and abandoned the child, or risked her life by having an illegal abortion, she would at best be held liable for infanticide, at worst, dead. One institutional option available to these vulnerable mothers was the London Foundling Hospital …

Book Review: To End All Wars: A Story Of Loyalty And Rebellion 1914-1918, Kristen M. Vitale

Madison Historical Review

No abstract provided.

Imagining A Nation: Society, Regionalism, And National Identity In The Greek War Of Independence, Christopher Kinley

Madison Historical Review

ABSTRACT: Modern Greece has held a marginal existence in the study of nationalism, and yet there is a wealth of information that it provides, which can broaden our understanding of nationalism and state-building, especially in the Balkans. The purpose of this article is to examine the various facets of Greek identity during the outbreak of the independence movement, and how identity shaped and affected the movement itself. This article argues that Greek identity was too multifarious to create a strongly defined national identity. Furthermore, this lack of national identity led to several years of civil war during the independence …

Interview With Kristin V. Brig

Madison Historical Review

No abstract provided.

"Torn From Their Mother's Breasts": The Battle For Impoverished Souls In Ireland, 1853-1885, Kristin V. Brig

Madison Historical Review

A world history analysis, this paper examines the struggle between Protestant governmental and Catholic private philanthropy in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland, exploring how each side waged a war of political and religious misunderstanding in an effort to gain control over the Catholic Irish poor. Ireland’s philanthropic scene in this period became a battleground on which the British government fought for political control and Catholics for religious control; however, neither group understood what the other fought for, waging a war of cross-purposes. Through an examination of this battle for control, this paper depicts the emergence of modern Irish welfare from the famine era …

Book Review: Between Two Worlds: How The English Became Americans. By Malcolm Gaskill. New York: Basic Books, 2014. 512pp., George Patrick O'Brien

Madison Historical Review

No abstract provided.

The Vehiculatio In Roman Imperial Regulation: Particular Solutions To A Systematic Problem, Russell S. Gentry

Madison Historical Review

Category: World History

As the Roman Empire pushed its frontiers beyond the Mediterranean world, imperial authorities from Augustus onward faced a serious challenge: information transfer. The government of the early Roman Empire was famously lean in its bureaucracy and relied on small teams of imperial specialists (hated as spies) and military officers selected by governors to carry official documents great distances. These individuals traveled using an ad hoc system designed to take advantage of whatever hospitality existed along the Roman roadways. Messengers commandeered food, buildings, animals, and even guides for most legs of their journey. Official travel passes issued with …

The Medieval Canon And The Renaissance Image Of The Turk: A Brief Historiography Of Pre-Modern European Conceptions Of The Muslim World, A. Blake Denton

Madison Historical Review

This historiographic essay examines the scholarly debate over pre-modern European “images,” or conceptions, of the Muslim World during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Adopting a thematic approach, this study is guided by four themes shared by two or more works. While this essay largely revolves around the image studies of Nancy Bisaha, Norman Daniel, and Robert Schwoebel, the interpretations of additional scholars are presented as well. Though points of convergence exists between the works presented here, far more telling is the fact that the sharp contrasts between these historians aptly illustrates the challenge of determining the precise nature of …