Description
Book SynopsisThe book, Objects of War, illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement.? Utah Public Radio
Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. And yet the profession tends to be suspicious of things; words are its stock-in-trade. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered.
Objects of War illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and p
Trade Review
In a feat rarely accomplished in an edited volume of such breadth, the chapters in Objects of War are in conversation with one another throughout the book. Together, the chapters make a compelling case to move beyond the battlefield and examine the objects so easily tossed aside by war.
* Los Angeles Review of Books *
Editors Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra have put together a collection of articles in Objects of War that each contain detailed analysis of material possessions and their significance during conflicts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Overall, this collection of essays is highly recommended for the scholarly audience. The editors have brought together a collection that show how objects are affected by people and vice-versa, when revolutions and large-scale armed conflicts displace populations.
* Army University Press *
The book, Objects of War, illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement.
* Utah Public Radio *
Table of ContentsIntroduction.: The Things They Carried: War, Mobility,and Material Culture.
Part I. States of Things:: The Making of ModernNation-States and Empires
1. The Honor of the Trophy:: A Prussian Bronze in theNapoleonic Era
2. Colliding Empires:: French Display of Roman Antiquities Expropriated from Postconquest Algeria, 1830–1870
3. Pretty Things, Ugly Histories:: Decorating with PersecutedPeople's Property in Central Bohemia, 1938–1958
Part II. People and Things:: Individual Use of Things in Wartime
4. "Peeled" Bodies, Pillaged Homes:: Looting and MaterialCulture in the American Civil War Era
5. Embodied Violence:: A Red Army Soldier's Journey asTold by Objects
6. Small Escapes:: Gender, Class, and Material Culture inGreat War Internment Camps
7. The Bricolage of Death:: Jewish Possessions and the Fashioningof the Prisoner Elite in Auschwitz-Birkenau, 1942–1945
Part III. Afterlives:: From Things to Memories
8. Lisa's Things:: Matching Jewish-German and Indian-Muslim Traditions
9. Circuitous Journeys:: The Migration of Objects andthe Trusteeship of Memory
10. Paku Karen Skirt-Cloths (Not) at Home:: ForciblyMigrated Burmese Textiles in Refugee Camps and Museums
Epilogue
