Tortured Benevolence: The Philippine-American War, 1898 – 1902 The Philippine-American War of 1898 to 1902, also known as the Philippine Insurgency, encompassed instances of extreme patriotic fervor and intense brutality, founded on misunderstanding and miscommunication between the United States and the native revolutionary forces of the Philippines. In many ways this relationship followed […]
Andre Bazin Assesses Chaplin Charlie Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925) is often cited among his most popular and critically praised films. How might the French film theorist Andre Bazin have assessed this film, especially as regards its treatment of realist and neorealist technique? Writing chiefly in the 1950’s, Bazin developed an implied system for […]
Freud at the Movies: Psychoanalyzing Early Responses to Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943) Alfred Hitchcock, a movie director alleged by many to have been driven by psychological demons and suppressed desires, made dozens of films over his long career. Although he began directing in England, Hitchcock moved to […]
Come and See How Russian Cinema Changed For nearly seventy years after the Revolution, the apparatus of the Soviet state rigidly controlled the content and aesthetics of Russian film output. Although the doctrine of “Socialist Realism” called for the “concrete representation of reality”, filmmakers understood that their work had to depict critical components of the […]
Invisible Heroes: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade and American Culture “Those who have entered it honorably, and no men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.” ~ Ernest Hemingway, On the American Dead in Spain[1] There is a hole in American culture. We are a […]
The Regimes of Chivalric Military Experience: Training – Tournament – Battle As a professional soldier, the medieval knight participated in several discrete regimes of orchestrated violence. Military training, the tournament, and the military campaign were each imbued with clearly escalating levels of threat, and each presented closely-related but markedly different levels of control over […]
Absent Players Choose the Victors Within the space of thirty years, two able commanders fought battles that determined the fate of their respective countries. Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated his rival at Sekigahara in 1600 and thereafter created a Japanese shogunate that would last for over 250 years. Gustavus Adolphus defeated the forces of the Holy […]
Three Historians Investigate the Elephant: Paul Kennedy, William McNeill, Jeremy Black Three acclaimed historians – Paul Kennedy, William McNeill, and Jeremy Black – have attempted to identify the primary engines of war in human society. Although they frequently examine the same periods, regions, and cultures, they disagree about the principal sources of these conflicts. […]
In Pursuit of Folly: War and American Society in the 21st Century Human violence has myriad forms – domestic (wife beating), accidental (car wrecks), voluntary (soccer), spectator (professional sports) – the list is extensive. War is one highly specialized kind of human violence. Individuals do not make war, but socio-political entities like tribes and […]
Caught in the Dictator’s Vise: The Historiography of Operation Barbarossa’s Victims, 1941 – 1945 Operation Barbarossa launched Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. It ended in the complete destruction of Hitler’s empire. During the first forty years after the close of World War II, histories of this campaign relied almost totally […]