Occupy Economics

This collection of essays explores a seminal event in Argentina's national imaginary—the Conquest of the Desert—whose meanings have been increasingly challenged in recent years by Mapuche activists and their allies. Consisting of an introduction and nine chapters written by scholars based in Argentina, Canada, and the United States, the volume disentangles “issues of nation, violence, memory, colonialism, and indigeneity” linked to a violent military campaign—and its aftermaths—waged by Argentine president Julio Roca against Indigenous inhabitants in northern Patagonia between 1878 and 1885 (p. 2). The authors succeed in presenting novel forms of evidence and sharing conceptual insights that challenge nation-building narratives told and retold by military officials, political elites, nationalist historians, and opportunistic entrepreneurs for nearly 150 years (and counting).In addition to writing a clear and concise introduction, volume editor Carolyne R. Larson contributes a chapter that recounts the “official story” of Argentina's military campaign. Acknowledging the ethical ambiguity of retelling the Conquest of the Desert via the copious documentation created by military and state agents, Larson provides both a foil for the chapters that follow and a critical analysis of the narratives produced about the organized violence. She concludes that no sooner had the soldiers' repeating rifles cooled than the military, the state, and the Spanish-language press declared the “Indian Problem” resolved (p. 39).A major strength of this volume is the authors' collective engagement with the organizing concepts, chronologies, and geographies used to understand the Conquest of the Desert. For example, Julio Vezub and Mark Healey, whose chapter draws on the correspondence of Mapuche and Tehuelche longkos to argue that Indigenous leaders were more effective in coordinating among themselves and “negotiating terms of subordination” than most scholars acknowledge, view the violence as an asymmetrical war that Mapuche actors described using words like kona (soldiers) and weichafe (warriors) (p. 44). In contrast, Walter Delrio and Pilar Pérez develop a layered argument in favor of a conceptual framework of genocide over competing frameworks of war or assimilation. They contend that genocide is vital for avoiding reductionism because the concept enables readers to ponder a “multiple, complex process” involving state, nation, and territory that generates a series of questions about Mapuche/Indigenous futures as well as debates over discrete, past events (p. 141). The tension between these two chapters is productive, demonstrating the need for historians to move beyond demonstrations of Indigenous agency to nuanced considerations of the conceptual language used to frame people's actions and discourses.This creative tension around framing runs throughout the remaining chapters, which both expand the meanings and temporal boundaries of conquest beyond the military campaigns and present Mapuche perspectives on the violence (conquest) and sense of places (the desert). Ricardo D. Salvatore's chapter reveals not only the tragically familiar process of stealing artifacts and mortal remains of Indigenous people for museum display but also Francisco P. Moreno's decision to force captive Indigenous leaders to live and work in the Museum of La Plata. Salvatore interprets Moreno's action as part of a “Scientific Conquest” that entombed people only recently defeated in an antiquity from which there was no return. Jennie I. Daniels's examination of well-known Hispanophone Argentine literature traces shifting representations of the desert and concludes that it symbolized a liminal space between “national and foreign, citizen and Other” (p. 168). David M. K. Sheinin's chapter offers a chilling account of the Argentine military government's 1979 centennial celebration of the Conquest of the Desert and its symbolic connections to the military's brutal campaign against purported leftists. Sheinin also describes the military's simultaneous efforts to provide social services to “First Peoples,” an initiative that is perhaps less surprising than the author suggests given the Brazilian military government's establishment of the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) in 1967.The final two chapters provide early twenty-first-century Mapuche views on history and territory. Ana Ramos draws on ethnographic data to share Mapuche memories transmitted via nütram, performative stories of often-violent pasts that link Mapuche people across generations and geographies. Sarah D. Warren analyzes three different maps of Mapuche territory—called Wallmapu—that link Mapuche communities on both sides of the Andes, challenging spatial orderings that privilege the nation-state boundaries of Argentina and Chile. The contributions of these two chapters (not adequately conveyed here) would be even greater with additional chapters contextualizing the Mapuche political resurgence in this century.The insights in this excellent volume might be extended in two ways: by taking inspiration from the suggestive chapter by Rob Christensen on the role of environmental processes, including climate and disease, in determining the outcome of the military campaigns; and by breaking free of the long shadow of the nation-state to integrate Mapuche stories from what is today Chile. Materialist histories of both Mapuche and colonizers, cast in a transnational/imperial framework, would serve to reconceptualize not only the conquest but also the desert: the battle for history is unlikely to be won by Indigenous people whose pasts (and futures?) remain confined to nation-states.

En este artículo encontramos un mapeo general de diversas concepciones y nociones fundamentales para pensar el amplio espectro de la historia, la historicidad, el tiempo histórico entre otros elementos esenciales para nuestra contemporaneidad. La política actual, eclipsada por luchas y batallas conceptuales y su abstracción, requiere un análisis atento de los movimientos históricos del presente. Tomar la memoria y la historia a través de una lente política, entonces, nos obliga a disputar la construcción del orden social instalado en un determinado tiempo social. El objetivo de este trabajo es, en primer lugar, discutir cómo es posible concebir la memoria y la emergencia de la novedad, particularmente profundizando en las ideas de Horkheimer y Arendt -ya que también en su obra, a través de la noción de «natalidad», la memoria se convierte menos en un acto de preservación y más en un ejercicio de juicio, distinción y acción, lo que nos permite conectar con el tema de las luchas políticas por la memoria. Esto nos permitirá situar el estado de la memoria en términos de Europa. Posteriormente, nos proponemos contrastar esta perspectiva y aterrizarla en América Latina, donde muchos países han sido víctimas de violaciones sistemáticas de los derechos humanos. Estos dos escenarios son considerados con el propósito de contrastar algunos conflictos y perspectivas particulares que son relevantes para los dilemas globales.

After their attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were successful in all their endeavors to control as much of the western Pacific area and Southeast Asia as possible. They met little effective resistance as they acquired U.S. islands from Wake to the Philippines. British forces at Singapore also put up little resistance to the Japanese invasion there, and the British were threatened by Japanese forces approaching India via Burma. For 6 months, the Japanese were unstoppable, but they met their first check in early May 1942 at the Coral Sea, northeast of Australia. There an attempt to bypass Australian forces and land on the southern coast of New Guinea was turned back by a U.S. fleet in the first naval battle in history in which ships never engaged, only aircraft against ships. Although tactically a draw, the battle proved a strategic defeat for Japan. It stopped the juggernaut.

A new look at the greatest naval battle in history.

Books on Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss abound, as countless scholars have labored to uncover the facts behind Chambers’s shocking accusation before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in the summer of 1948—that Alger Hiss, a former rising star in the State Department, had been a Communist and engaged in espionage. In this highly original work, Susan Jacoby turns her attention to the Hiss case, including his trial and imprisonment for perjury, as a mirror of shifting American political views and passions. Unfettered by political ax-grinding, the author examines conflicting responses, from scholars and the media on both the left and the right, and the ways in which they have changed from 1948 to our present post–Cold War era. With a brisk, engaging style, Jacoby positions the case in the politics of the post–World War II era and then explores the ways in which generations of liberals and conservatives have put Chambers and Hiss to their own ideological uses. An iconic event of the McCarthy era, the case of Alger Hiss fascinates political intellectuals not only because of its historical significance but because of its timeless relevance to equally fierce debates today about the difficult balance between national security and respect for civil liberties.

The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of the Russo-German war and one of the costliest battles in history. In nearly 6 months of fighting, from the end of August 1942 to the beginning of February 1943, at least 1.2 million soldiers lost their lives, countless more were wounded, and over 91,000 Germans were taken prisoner, most of whom never returned home. Hitler’s plans for the conquest of the Soviet Union disintegrated in the smoking ruins of Stalin’s city on the Volga. After the war, this great and improbable victory became a victim of cold war politics. As far as the West was concerned, it might never have happened. The invasion of Normandy in June 1944 became the centerpiece of the Anglo-American mythologization of the war in Europe, whether on- or off-screen.1

The Parthian state emerged around 250 b.c. and lasted for nearly 500 years, becoming one of the longest empires in ancient history. At its height, the kingdom of Parthia controlled territory from the Caspian Sea and southern Caucasus in the north, Bactria in the east, the Persian Gulf in the south and Mesopotamia in the west. Its rulers actively exchanged diplomatic and trade missions with the Chinese, Roman Empire and Central Asian states, and during the age of the Parthian Empire the ancient Great Silk Road reached its peak. The Parthians entered the annals of western history for some of the most remarkable military battles in history: They defeated the renowned legions of the Roman general Crassus in 53 b.c. and inflicted heavy losses upon Mark Antony (83–30 b.c.) in 36 b.c., ultimately leading to his downfall and death along with his lover, the legendary Cleopatra.

What set the successful armies of Sparta, Macedon, and Rome apart from those they defeated? In this major new history of battle from the age of Homer through the decline of the Roman empire, J. E. Lendon surveys a millennium of warfare to discover how militaries change—and don’t change—and how an army’s greatness depends on its use of the past. Noting this was an age that witnessed few technological advances, J. E. Lendon shows us that the most successful armies were those that made the most effective use of cultural tradition. Ancient combat moved forward by looking backward for inspiration—the Greeks, to Homer; the Romans, to the Greeks and to their own heroic past. The best ancient armies recruited soldiers from societies with strong competitive traditions; and the best ancient leaders, from Alexander to Julius Caesar, called upon those traditions to encourage ferocious competition at every rank. Ranging from the Battle of Champions between Sparta and Argos in 550 B.C. through Julian’s invasion of Persia in A.D. 363, Soldiers and Ghosts brings to life the most decisive military contests of ancient Greece and Rome. Lendon places these battles, and the methods by which they were fought, in a sweeping narrative of ancient military history. On every battlefield, living soldiers fought alongside the ghosts of tradition—ghosts that would inspire greatness for almost a millennium before ultimately coming to stifle it.

The history of battle was largely ignored during the years of Annaliste supremacy in France (roughly the 1930s to the 1980s). Battles were consigned to the barely-tolerated domain of ‘histoire événementielle’, their narratives at most examples of the conventions employed in the construction of outmoded nationalist narratives. Georges Duby, in his 1973 book on Bouvines, embarked on what he later called a ‘military ethnography’ of warfare and this had a major influence. Duby argued that that battle ‘only exists through what is said about it because, strictly speaking, it is constructed by those who spread its renown’. The serious study of battle history (after all, one of the most popular forms of history) has been increasingly consigned to the isolated and ignored purlieus of some universities, unless transmuted by the post-modernist rejection of ‘positivism’. Anyone who has tried to reconstruct the events of a battle will be aware of this problem, though this has not impeded generations of writers who have tried to do so. It is obvious that historians usually know the outcomes of battle; they can even in some cases estimate the reasons for victory (though this is much more problematic). What actually happened on the field in fact often puts an impossible strain on the contradictory sources. Even the topography of the battlefield is often difficult to reconcile with contemporary narratives. There is a fundamental gap between ‘what actually happens’ in a battle and the processes available for narrating it and, naturally, the further back we go those processes are so much the more formalised, if not stereotyped. Armies in the mass were probably the largest agglomerations of human beings in any one place before the nineteenth century. Their internal dynamics are therefore subject to all the usual vagaries of historical contradictions. Modern historians have approached the subject from two angles: first, the broadening out of the reconstructed narrative of battle to take account of the experiences of the rank-and-file; then, by placing battle in a context of military and social organisation. This naturally becomes more feasible as we enter the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with the depth of material available, for instance, on the First World War. We can understand more clearly that the narrative framework for classifying and describing battles already exists before the event and such encounters were narrated within that framework, which was not fixed but evolved.

Soldiers & Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity by J.E. Lendon (review)

As the Napoleonic Wars ended, deceptively simple forms of commemorative militaria attuned Romantic writers to the overrepresentation of officers in victory culture. This article asserts that the ideological biases of battlefield maps prompted William Wordsworth's radical critique of naval commemoration in “Benjamin the Waggoner.” Although the campaigns of the army created travel destinations for battlefield tourism, the naval battlefield occupies a strange space in Romantic commemoration. Lacking a “place” for tourists to stand, naval commemoration induced geographic simulations from victory arboretums to dinner plates adorned with tactical maps. Inspired by the assumed objectivity of simulations such as these, Wordsworth's poem mocks the discharged sailor's reenactment of the Battle of the Nile for its revisionist geography. By overinvesting Nelson in the battle's history, Wordsworth's poem reveals the limits of patriotic nostalgia and its tendency to elide the memory of departed seamen and the families that mourned their memory.

Reviewed by: A Bloodless Victory: The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memoryby Joseph F. Stoltz Thomas A. Chambers A Bloodless Victory: The Battle of New Orleans in History and Memory. By Joseph F. Stoltz III. Johns Hopkins Books on the War of 1812. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. xvi, 176. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-4214-2302-9.) The War of 1812 bicentennial recently passed with little notice from the American public and paltry official nationwide commemoration. Even the battle of New Orleans, which Joseph F. Stoltz III identifies as the most recognizable War of 1812 event, garnered relatively little attention in 2015 beyond a battle reenactment, academic symposiums, and a museum exhibit. This book seeks to recover past commemorations of the event with the overall thesis that "Each generation of Americans made the history of the Battle of New Orleans their own" (p. xiii). Print sources, institutional records, site histories, and popular culture demonstrate the changing meaning of the battle and its star, Andrew Jackson. Stoltz effectively traces the evolving memory of the battle. The chapters generally begin with a gracefully written vignette of a historical moment relevant to that chapter's time period. A synopsis of the chapter's content follows, and a concluding few paragraphs recap the chapter's content before a few transition sentences introduce the next chapter's theme. After a crisp recounting of the 1814–1815 Gulf of Mexico campaign and the January 8, 1815, battle, Stoltz delves into how various historical eras remembered the battle of New Orleans. In the immediate postwar period a flurry of print sources celebrated the battle as evidence of republican virtue and the ability of agrarian citizen-soldiers to repel a foreign invader. This ideology became personified in the commanding general, Andrew Jackson, and January 8 commemorations evolved into celebrations of Jackson and the Democratic Party. As the Civil War approached, the battle of New Orleans gained new relevance and was depicted as a distinctly southern victory, although many Democrats still invoked the battle and Jackson as symbols of national and party unity. When Union general Benjamin Butler added the inscription "The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved" to the pedestal of the equestrian Andrew Jackson statue in New Orleans, he literally rewrote the battle's history. In the decades that followed, fewer and fewer January 8 events were held, and the monument fell into disrepair. As the battle's centennial approached, women's heritage associations revived interest in a moment of national purpose and unity. The Daughters of 1812 helped preserve the Chalmette battlefield and erect a monument there, while the Ladies Hermitage Association cared for Andrew Jackson's plantation in Nashville, Tennessee. The varied successes of these two groups led the War Department to take over management of the battlefield site, while the Hermitage deemphasized the battle in favor of commemorating Jackson. The most innovative and intriguing chapters focus on twentieth-century remembrances, especially in popular culture, such as Cecil B. DeMille's film [End Page 979] The Buccaneer(1938, 1958) and Johnny Horton's 1959 song "The Battle of New Orleans." Here Stoltz keenly reveals the changing cultural uses of the battle and the nation's increased comfort with a more complex history of the battle. Also excellent are sections on the lack of African American participation in commemorations and the removal of the African American Fazendeville neighborhood to preserve the battlefield. By 2015 the battle served as a local economic development vehicle to boost heritage tourism. The book's writing and organization are consistent and effective. The subtitle of chapter 3, "The Battle of New Orleans in the Age of Jefferson," seems oddly mismatched in this chapter that discusses historical memory during the 1820s and 1830s. "The Age of Jackson" might have been more accurate. Greater attention to theoretical works on memory might have strengthened the argument, and manuscript sources of visitor responses to the battlefield are lacking. These are quibbles, though. Stoltz's book is a comprehensive study of the battle of New Orleans's presence in the American historical imagination and will serve as the definitive book on the topic. Thomas A. Chambers Niagara University Copyright © 2018...

On the one hand, battle history is rather out of fashion; on the other hand, the one medieval battle that has received by far the most attention over the past few years is Agincourt, which has been the subject of three books since 2005. By 1415, that was almost equally true of the common man in England, especially among the prosperous yeoman class from which most of Henry?s archers were drawn. There are basically two reasonable ways of envisioning the English deployment at Agincourt. In addition to the men-at-arms and gros valets , the French army included a substantial number of archers and crossbowmen as well as other urban foot. The French vanguard and ?main division? were arrayed in tight, dense formations of about sixteen ranks each. The French effort to ride down the English archers failed miserably. Keywords: Agincourt; England; English archers; French army; French vanguard; gros valets ; medieval battle

Hearing Early Modern Battles:Soundscape Audio as a Way of Recreating the Past Dolly MacKinnon* (bio) This article provides a model of analysis for examining museum exhibitions that specifically incorporate soundscapes for early modern battle histories: one is a local museum at Radway, England, that commemorated the Civil War Battle of Edgehill (1642), and the other is the National Museum of Scotland's exhibition 'Bonnie Prince Charlie and the Jacobites' that includes the 1745 rising that culminated in the Battle of Culloden (1746). Using film music diegesis, the article analyses the ways in which emotions are generated, performed and produced through soundscapes created for early modern battlefields in museums, demonstrating how gendered representations of the past can be overturned and democratized by soundscapes. In England and Scotland, visitors regularly travel purposefully across the countryside to remote locations in search of sites of military conflict from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These early modern battlefields often, but not always, contain a solitary stone memorial, and visitors experience them within the natural soundscape of their rural settings.1 Only when a battle has become a mnemonic in the national history are multiple monuments to be found, erected, over time with the inscription on each monument using versions of that early modern past to proselytize a response to a pressing issue in the present.2 In addition, there can be silent interpretation boards with images, maps and text, dotted along a walking trail informing those visitors who can access these battlefield sites of the progression of the conflict through that landscape. These heritage battlefield sites are examples of Pierre Nora's 'lieux de mémoire' where the community, or sections of that community, purposefully mark out an event, by calendaring a date, a place and cultural setting, repeatedly, over time, through a process of commemoration [End Page 115] that actively prevents its omission from written histories, both local and national.3 This is a conscious and repetitive emotionally driven process intended to remember and preserve these battles for the future through transgenerational memory. This is an example of Monique Scheer's emotion as practice.4 Visitors to battlefield sites are part of the practices of this emotional community.5 Without this process of emotion and remembering, battlefield sites would be obliterated from the national historical narrative, or at best remain an element of significance only within local historical accounts and traditions. Therefore, battles that have become a mnemonic in the national history are remembered outside of the site of the battlefield and in a museum heritage setting. As Ludmilla Jordanova observes about recent World War I commemorations 'the celebration of historical events is a feature of our times; it is a feature that insistently claims the attention of large swathes of the population, whether they like it or not'.6 Yet it is only very recently that 'the acoustic' dimensions 'of military history' has attracted the attention of multi-disciplinary scholars in order to create 'surrogate sound' that lends 'authenticity to "silent" films' of WWI.7 Here sound and silence create spaces for remembrance and reflection. These modern battlefields are often referred to as silent places, for they silence, in both a physical and metaphorical sense, many who were involved in the conflict (combatants and non-combatants alike), as well as those who still visit these sites.8 WWI has dominated discussions about war's acoustic reality.9 Yet what of the premodern battlefields and their soundscapes? How are early modern battlefields recreated, reinterpreted, and represented for visitors in a twenty-first-century heritage museum setting? Addressing this absence, this article examines the ways in which soundscapes created for early modern battlefields in museums are generated by emotions working in tandem with film music and sound diegesis techniques. It examines two museum exhibitions that specifically incorporate early modern battles using purpose-made soundscapes: one is a local museum and the other is a national [End Page 116] museum.10 The local museum at Radway, Warwickshire, England, centres on the first major, indecisive, English Civil War Battle of Edgehill (1642) between Charles I and the English Parliament. It is an ongoing, free and unstaffed exhibition, which I visited on 11 April 2017 (figure 1...

This work provides a complete battle history of American corps cavalry in World War II. It asserts that these cavalry formations made an outsized contribution to the Allied victory in the European theatre in correlation to their actual size. These cavalry groups made the "90 Division gamble" actually work, allowing American corps and army commanders to mass combat power at the decisive point. Furthermore, this work also highlights the role of the reconnaissance and security battle at the operational level. It demonstrates how this long-overlooked part of military operations is an absolute essential in maneuver warfare. This “battle before the battle” fundamentally shapes the conditions for the main action, yet a thorough study of this fighting has long been ignored in the literature—a failing that this work remedies.