Leonard V. Smith

Citizen-soldiers and manly warriors : military service and gender in the civic republic [sic] tradition

What happens in a tradition that links citizenship with soldiering when women become citizens? Citizen Soldiers and Manly Warriors provides an in-depth analysis of the theory and practice of the citizen-soldier in historical context. Using a postmodern feminist lens, Snyder reveals that within the citizen-soldier tradition, citizenship and masculinity are simultaneously constituted through engagement in civic and martial practices.

Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory: Twenty‐five Years Later

This article probes some of the issues The Great War and Modern Memory raises today, whether by Fussell himself, by critics at the time of its original publication, or by rereading the book anew now, in the context of a veritable renaissance in the study of World War I and of the revolution effected by the “literary turn” in historical study. I situate Fussells book against the backdrop of three foundational works or points of view in cultural history that came to the forefront after 1975. My purpose is not to chide Fussell for failing to anticipate the future directions of the cultural history of war, but rather to show how his work fits into the development of that history. I argue that The Great War andModern Memory itself became a lieu de memoire or “site ofmemory” of the Great War. But like many very successful works, Fussells bookbecame famous not exclusively or even primarily because of its originality, but because of itsability to reformulate or reinscribe pre-existing ways of understanding. As critic and as veteran,Fussell reasserted the “evidence of experience” as the cornerstone of war writingin the twentieth century. In addition, some of the impact of The Great War and ModernMemory can be explained by the way it supported the most venerable narrative explanationof the Great War, that of tragedy.

The Wilsonian Challenge to International Law

After the Great War, Woodrow Wilson challenged the foundations of international law based on fully sovereign states. “Wilsonianism” as elaborated in the Fourteen Points, and in other speeches, rested on a logic that made a universalized liberal individual the locus of sovereignty in the new world order. The truly radical implications of Wilsonianism had no sterner critic than Robert Lansing, Wilsons secretary of state and one of the founders of the American Journal of International Law. Lansing held tenaciously to a positivist paradigm of international law as it had evolved by the early twentieth century. This article reconsiders the conflict between Wilson and Lansing not so much as a duel between individuals as a duel between conflicting conceptions of sovereignty and the purpose of international law in the new world order.

Drawing Borders in the Middle East after the Great War: Political Geography and ‘Subject Peoples’

Abstract “Subject Peoples” arrived in the language of peacemaking after the Great War primarily as a way to understand post-imperial peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. As applied to the peoples of the former Ottoman Empire, however, peoples were categorized and assigned political characteristics according to specific schools of national political geography. British, French and American political geographers demarcated the ways thinking about the peoples of the Middle East that resonated throughout the century that followed.

Mobilizing the nation and the civilians' war

The victory of the Marne and the “race to the sea” left France triumphant, but gravely weakened. In stark contrast to 1870, the armies of the Republic had thrown back the invader in the greatest feat of French arms since Napoleon. But all or in part, the departments of the Nord, the Pas-de-Calais, the Somme, the Aisne, the Ardennes, the Marne, the Meuse, and the Meurthe et Moselle, had fallen into enemy hands, and with them hundreds of thousands of French citizens. France had lost some of its most productive agricultural lands and its second most industrialized region. The occupied territories set the stage for the “totalization” of the war. For those living under German rule, deportations, forced labor, and martial law quickly blurred the line between soldiers and civilians. Northeastern France and Belgium became virtual German colonies, governed by repressive regimes directed toward economic extraction rather than production. In the rest of France, expelling the invaders and making the nation whole came to justify unprecedented and open-ended national mobilization. As the war totalized, the French confronted the shift from “the imaginary war,” dreamed of and feared before August 1914, to the real war, here and now. They had to face up to an extended confrontation and to the immense war effort that it engendered.