The Australian Army served in numerous theatres and campaigns throughout World War II, earning distinction and at times facing significant challenges. After Australia declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Australians deployed and served in combined Allied armies in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and Asia.1 Conversely, the Australian Army made up the bulk of Allied ground forces in the South West Pacific Area (SWPA) during the Japanese push south in the months following the attack on Pearl Harbor. After the consolidation of their initial advances, the Japanese extended their area of control and established a perimeter line of defence from the Aleutians in the north to the Gilbert and Marshalls in the south. In 1942–43, Australian troops carried the bulk of responsibility in the fight against the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy in a gruelling battle for the island of New Guinea. Thus, by 1943, the Australian Army was the most experienced Allied force in the Pacific.

When Germany invaded Poland, German officials set up a research project into the possible military uses of uranium fission. A nuclear reactor, what the Germans called a “uranium machine,” needed a moderator to slow down neutrons. Water, heavy water, and pure carbon in the form of graphite were all considered, but water would need uranium in which the percentage of isotope 235 is increased, and it did not appear feasible for German industry to produce graphite with sufficient purity. Paul Harteck and his collaborator Wilhelm Groth first tried to separate the uranium isotopes with a separation tube. When this failed, the two physical chemists turned to centrifuges. Scientists in Berlin, Heidelberg, and Leipzig began experiments on the behavior of materials when bombarded with neutrons and on model nuclear reactors. At first the materials needed were scarce but Germany captured the Norsk Hydro in Norway, the largest heavy water producer in the world, and the defeat of Belgium brought with it tons of uranium compounds. From the start of the war through to the autumn of 1941, this research had low priority and made modest progress. At this stage of the war, powerful new weapons did not appear needed.

In order to determine what really happened when Werner Heisenberg and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker met with Niels Bohr in occupied Copenhagen in September 1941, this visit has to be placed in several contexts. By this time the German uranium research had demonstrated that atomic bombs were probably feasible, even if not for Germany during the war. The summer 1942 German offensive against the Soviet Union had not yet begun to falter, although Heisenberg was nevertheless privately very anxious about the war. The Germans alienated Bohr and his colleagues by their participation in cultural propaganda and nationalistic and militaristic comments about the war. A comparison with Heisenberg’s other lecture trips abroad shows that he acted the same way in other places. Heisenberg’s subsequent efforts in 1942 to gain support from Nazi officials by both describing the power of atomic bombs and the threat that the Americans might get them first also do not fit with an attempt at Copenhagen to forestall all nuclear weapons. Instead the best explanation for the visit is Heisenberg and Weizsäcker’s fear of American atomic bombs falling on Germany.

The five years or so after World War II saw a wave of novels dealing centrally with male homosexuality. They fall roughly into two groups. First, a group of novels about military life, including Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951), covered homosexuality as an important component of their gritty realism. Second, a group of novels set during or after the war, including Charles Jackson’s The Fall of Valor (1946), Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar (1948), and James Barr’s Quatrefoil (1950), featured gay protagonists and explicitly engaged the plight of the gay minority. The social mobilizations and disruptions of the war and its aftermath enabled new gay visibility and nascent pro-homosexual politics—but also the deepening stigmatization and surveillance of homosexuality. I argue that the novels named above, among others, attempt to work through the ambiguous social position of homosexual identity produced by the war. Oscillating between pathologization and affirmation, these novels typically prove unable to imagine the integration of gay men into society, even as they are energized by a discourse of liberal tolerance.

This chapter examines newspaper discourse in the Donetsk and Luhansk ‘People’s Republics’, analysing the content of twenty-six local newspapers between the start of the Euromaidan demonstrations in late 2013 and the end of 2017. The goal of this chapter is to uncover the themes and narratives in DNR and LNR print media, and examine how these narratives relate back to ideology and identity building. Three main narratives are identified: ‘business as usual’, ‘war and memory’, and ‘loss and guilt’. Newspapers in the Donbas ‘Republics’ continued to perform ‘typical’ activities as a source of information for local communities. However, a significant part of their content did address the development of collective identity, for example, through references to newly instated public holidays and a kinship with Russia and the Russian language. However, this ‘ingroup’ identity remained impoverished, projecting an identity discourse without a sui generis, unifying coherence. Instead, negative descriptions of the ‘outgroup’ (i.e., Ukraine/the ‘Kyiv regime’) received much more attention, with a view to demonising Ukraine and Ukrainians in the eyes of the local population.

This second historical chapter provides some important episodes in ICRC history between about 1910 (the death of both Dunant and Moynier) and the end of the Cold War (which is when the rest of the book takes off). Thus the chapter introduces the ICRC through a selected review of its history, emphasizing: the development of international humanitarian law and the global Red Cross network, helping to apply that law and Red Cross Fundamental Principles through assistance and protection in the field, and related activities such as protection of political prisoners. All of this sets the stage for a close analysis of the ICRC since the end of the Cold War and particularly since about 2012. If one wants to know if the ICRC is now in demise, one needs a picture of what it was and did in the past.

Just over a century old, John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) remains a seminal document of the twentieth century. At the time, the book was a prescient analysis of political events to come. In the decades that followed, this still controversial text became an essential ingredient in the unfolding of history. In this essay, we review the arc of experience since 1919 from the perspective of Keynes’s influence and his changing understanding of economics, politics, and geopolitics. We identify how he, his ideas, and this text became key reference points during times of turbulence as actors sought to manage a range of shocks. Near the end of his life, Keynes would play a central role in planning the world economy’s reconstruction after World War II. We argue that the “global order” that evolved since then, marked by increasingly polarized societies, leaves the community of nations ill prepared to provide key global public goods or to counter critical collective threats.

This chapter considers the literary ramifications of Hollywood’s global presence during the brief epoch of World War II and its immediate aftermath. For the queer American poet and film critic Parker Tyler and the Anglo-Canadian novelist Malcolm Lowry, Hollywood functioned like the ordering myths employed by the high modernists. Tyler’s The Granite Butterfly (1945) and Lowry’s Under the Volcano (1947), works of grand self-consciously modernist ambition, took shape as the war radically altered everyday life. When defending the form of Under the Volcano to his publisher Jonathan Cape, Lowry insisted that the “book is written on numerous planes with provision made, it was my fond hope, for almost every kind of reader.” This belief resonates with film theorist Miriam Hansen’s vernacular modernism thesis, which hold that Hollywood films achieved dominance by meaning different things to different people. For Tyler and especially Lowry, the myth of Hollywood functions as a means of exploring an implicit theoretical problem – can a work of literature be both meaningful (i.e., authored) and open to any interpretation? – and it provides scholars one way to observe how modernism found its limits.

This chapter explores the post–World War II period in the United States, charting the postwar feminist essay in three directions: first, as a site of consciousness-raising during feminism’s second wave; second, as a space for feminist critiques of feminisms during the so-called third wave; and third, in its contemporary iteration in a revived consciousness-raising context: the #MeToo essay. The chapter draws together formally and contextually diverse texts into a longer conversation about how the essay can be read as a politicized and politicizing literary form. These texts include nonfiction subgenres often thought to be subordinate to the essay: an article, a collectively authored set of papers, a prose poem, a memoir, and a victim impact statement. The chapter argues that what makes these texts “feminist” and “essays” – despite significant formal differences – is their shared engagement with critical, documentary, and experiential literary modes and their stakes in connecting the individual to politically invested collectives, past and future. These five essays explicitly address gender and contingent forces of oppression that both bond and trouble emancipatory collectives.

In Chapter 7, I discuss the latest crisis of capitalism and Amartya Sen’s journey to rescue capitalism from the capitalists. I begin by discussing the increasing vulnerability of capitalist societies at the end of the twentieth century due to the deregulatory environment encouraged by the Chicago School. I use Karl Polanyi’s double-movement theory to explain the rise of the Chicago School and its assault on the “relationship capitalism” that had evolved in the postwar period. While the new “investor capitalism” was successful at unleashing the power of the market, it also increased the vulnerability of capitalist societies to opportunistic self-interest. This increased vulnerability was fully realized in the 2007–08 mortgage-backed security crisis that nearly collapsed the global financial system. After describing the near collapse of the global financial system, I discuss the implications of the collapse for the neoclassical theory out of Chicago. This leads to a discussion of Amartya Sen’s journey from India to the West to rescue capitalism from the capitalists. This discussion introduces the role of the East in the development of capitalism and its future promise. I conclude by discussing Sen’s critique of capitalism based on Adam Smith’s original moral foundation.

Wartime leaders need to carry their armies and sometimes their nations through trying ordeals. Accordingly, there are occasions that call for effective rhetoric. This section consists of fourteen speeches during wartime or in the face of impending war. The speakers include Shakespeares Henry V, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Duff Cooper, Winston Churchill, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and George W. Bush.