Project MUSE®: Home Front Studies - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/841
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Home Front Studies.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2021) through current issueLatest Articles: Home Front StudiesTWOProject MUSE®Home Front Studies2768-55862768-5578Latest articles in Home Front Studies. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Editor’s Welcome
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977058
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One of the most fascinating features of home fronts is that they shed light on ancient philosophical debates involving the opposing forces of determinism and free will. Wartime is typically a liminal space in which the usual societal norms diminish even as new restrictions and imperatives emerge. Does the nature of that space determine our actions? Or do we respond to it with a sense of free will? The answers to these questions reveal much about the complex relationship between war and society, as well as how people navigate that terrain.This issue of Home Front Studies features several compelling studies of humans responding to the strictures of wartime, often in ways that test the boundaries of what is possible.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/841/image/coversmallEditor’s Welcome2025-12-10text/htmlen-USEditor’s Welcome2025-12-102025TWOProject MUSE®46472026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-10Volunteering for Auschwitz: The Cases of Maria Mandl and Maria Stromberger
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977059
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In October 1942 two unusual women from Austria arrived in Auschwitz. Maria Mandl, a career concentration camp guard, was posted as Oberaufseherin (head overseer) of the women’s camp at Birkenau. Maria Stromberger, who volunteered as an auxiliary SS nurse, became a member of the Auschwitz resistance. Mandl and Stromberger both chose to go to the camp. Mandl had volunteered for service as a concentration camp guard before the war, and her posting to Auschwitz was an upward step in her career progression. Stromberger volunteered out of a desire to bear witness as to what Auschwitz was “really like.”1Although each woman was unusual, in a wider sense they exemplified the extremes of the choices facing non-Jewish
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/841/image/coversmallVolunteering for Auschwitz: The Cases of Maria Mandl and Maria Stromberger2025-12-10text/htmlen-USVolunteering for Auschwitz: The Cases of Maria Mandl and Maria Stromberger2025-12-102025TWOProject MUSE®1015652026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-10World War II POW Radiograms: Shortwave Operators, State Interests, and Home Front Social Networks
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977060
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On the morning of November 16, 1942, Earl Fitzgerald sat at his shortwave radio in Lyden, Washington, trolling for broadcasts. On the 31 mm band, he found Radio Tokyo and heard voices of men claiming to be Allied prisoners of war sending messages to their families.1 Over the remaining years of World War II (WWII), those broadcasts prompted Fitzgerald to communicate with hundreds of families of POWs held by Japan, passing along what he had heard on shortwave and initiating correspondence that formed close bonds.These radiograms may be seen as virtual postal communications.2 For families of prisoners of war, the voices heard by shortwave were often the only evidence they had that their captive son or husband was
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/841/image/coversmallWorld War II POW Radiograms: Shortwave Operators, State Interests, and Home Front Social Networks2025-12-10text/htmlen-USWorld War II POW Radiograms: Shortwave Operators, State Interests, and Home Front Social Networks2025-12-102025TWOProject MUSE®860262026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-10Death at Camp Tonkawa: Prisoner Violence, Public Pressure, and American Military Justice
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977061
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In the early morning hours of July 10, 1945, a group of journalists and US Army soldiers gathered in a warehouse at the United States Disciplinary Barracks (USDB) at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to witness the execution of five inmates. Shortly after midnight, guards escorted the first condemned prisoner into the warehouse. Clad in the faded remnants of his tropical uniform, Hauptfeldwebel Walter Beyer stood apart from those previously executed at Fort Leavenworth. Once a proud member of the Deutsches Afrikakorps (DAK), Beyer was to become the first foreign prisoner of war (POW) lawfully executed by the US Army on American soil. Convicted alongside his fellow condemned by a general court-martial for the November 4
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/841/image/coversmallDeath at Camp Tonkawa: Prisoner Violence, Public Pressure, and American Military Justice2025-12-10text/htmlen-USDeath at Camp Tonkawa: Prisoner Violence, Public Pressure, and American Military Justice2025-12-102025TWOProject MUSE®822932026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-10Grounded: The Creation of Air Scouting in the United States
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977062
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It was national news around the country in January 1942. Despite the strain of wartime mobilization, the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), the largest youth organization in the country, was going to start a new branch: the Air Scouts. This new division would go along with the organization’s other divisions: Sea Scouts, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Rovering, and Exploring. “This modern branch of Scouting will have a wide appeal,” an editorial in the Akron Beacon Journal declared.1 The BSA started this new category of its program in an effort to not only be of service to the nation during the war but also increase its own importance. At first Air Scouting seemed to work, but despite the promise of this initiative, the new
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/841/image/coversmallGrounded: The Creation of Air Scouting in the United States2025-12-10text/htmlen-USGrounded: The Creation of Air Scouting in the United States2025-12-102025TWOProject MUSE®936322026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-10Funny Thing about the Civil War: The Humor of an American Tragedy by Thomas F. Curran (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977063
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Consider the humorous lines written by a private of the 38th Battalion, Virginia Light Artillery, organized in 1863:Compelling as Mark Twain’s notorious war prayer this is not. Yet the lines reflect a small detail noted by Thomas F. Curran in his book, Funny Thing about the Civil War: The Humor of an American Tragedy. While working through a familiar litany of postwar writers, Curran notes that something escaped much commentary: “lice, commonly referred to as graybacks” (89). Northern and Southern soldiers alike were pestered by them. Nevertheless, lice were so commonplace that they became amusing, as in stories of soldiers racing them across their plates at mealtimes and squaring them off in so-called lice fights.
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/841/image/coversmallFunny Thing about the Civil War: The Humor of an American Tragedy by Thomas F. Curran (review)2025-12-10text/htmlen-USFunny Thing about the Civil War: The Humor of an American Tragedy by Thomas F. Curran (review)2025-12-102025TWOProject MUSE®87862026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-10Paradise in Hell: Alcohol and Drugs in the Spanish Civil War by Jorge Marco (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977064
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Paradise in Hell, translated from Spanish by Gareth Stockey, is the latest in a succession of studies by Jorge Marco on the social and cultural aspects of the Spanish Civil War. Here he focuses on the role of alcohol and other psychotropic drugs in the conflict, both among the armed forces and the civilian population. In the absence of any rich veins of archival sources or coherent corpus of printed material, Marco has admirably scraped together disparate evidence to form a picture of drugs and alcohol in 1930s Spain. Thanks in part to the nature of the sources he did find, Paradise in Hell deals more with the ways in which both sides in the war made use, rhetorically, of the idea that people were consuming
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/841/image/coversmallParadise in Hell: Alcohol and Drugs in the Spanish Civil War by Jorge Marco (review)2025-12-10text/htmlen-USParadise in Hell: Alcohol and Drugs in the Spanish Civil War by Jorge Marco (review)2025-12-102025TWOProject MUSE®78772026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-10Blue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War by Kit Kowol (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977065
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For decades after the war itself, the story of World War II on the British home front remained the story of the People’s War. In political terms, this was the story of the forward march of the Labour Party, and of the social-democratic ideals of fair shares and a robust taxpayer-supported safety net that shaped the postwar welfare state largely built by the postwar Labour governments of 1945–51. Their backs against the wall, jolted by the Blitz just as they were recovering from the Depression, Britons turned populist. While Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden focused on military strategy and diplomacy, Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin focused not merely on maximizing wartime production on the home front but also on
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/841/image/coversmallBlue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War by Kit Kowol (review)2025-12-10text/htmlen-USBlue Jerusalem: British Conservatism, Winston Churchill, and the Second World War by Kit Kowol (review)2025-12-102025TWOProject MUSE®79012026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-10The Globe and Anchor Men: U.S. Marines and American Manhood in the Great War Era by Mark Ryland Folse (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/977066
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In The Globe and Anchor Men, Mark Ryland Folse examines how ideas about gender shaped the culture and identity of the US Marine Corps in the Great War era. Himself a former Marine, Folse suggests that gender analysis is the best lens through which to explore Marine culture and identity “because of how important and pervasive notions of manhood and manliness were to many Marines’ identity, ethos, and world view” (2). Indeed, Folse argues that Marines’ evolving conceptions of manliness and manhood constantly informed their recruitment efforts, their interpretations of service in war and peace, and, ultimately, what it meant to be a Marine.The book is split into three sections. The first explores how Marines made
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/841/image/coversmallThe Globe and Anchor Men: U.S. Marines and American Manhood in the Great War Era by Mark Ryland Folse (review)2025-12-10text/htmlen-USThe Globe and Anchor Men: U.S. Marines and American Manhood in the Great War Era by Mark Ryland Folse (review)2025-12-102025TWOProject MUSE®84582026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-12-10