CONTENTS By CHAPTER: Text The City Home Garden Pamphlet: Victory Garden Leader's Handbook Text: Presidential Statements On Victory Gardens And Related Food Programs Pamphlet: Hunger Quits School [No. 25] Newspaper Clippings From 1942 Photographs From 1942 To 1944 Posters And Other Images Text: How Many Words is a Picture Worth? Text: Using Primary Sources
Obviously, there are many books written about World War II—but very few of them present 'competing voices'. Written for college-bound high-school students, first- and second-year undergraduates and general readers of military history, Competing Voices from World War II in Europe highlights the different perspectives and views of all belligerents in the military arena, as well as describing the impact of the war on daily life. The book begins in 1939 (with the invasion of Poland) and ends in 1945 (with Germany's surrender). However, an introductory chapter puts the war in perspective by examining key events preceding the invasion of Poland, and a concluding chapter looks at the controversy surrounding the Nuremberg Trials after the end of hostilities. Though well-known, the main events of the war often remain controversial, and minor events are still relatively unexplored. Though it is often assumed that Allied victory was inevitable, and that all the Allies worked together in a seamless fashion, this book provides evidence that contradicts these basic concepts. Presented with directly reported sources, together with all the contextual information, readers will be able to develop their own opinions about events such as the Munich Conference, the defeat of France, the debate over a second front, the D-Day events of 1944, the development of Soviet-American relations throughout the war and the origins of the Cold War.
Mandatory food rationing during World War II significantly challenged the image of the United States as a land of plenty and collapsed the boundaries between women's public and private lives by declaring home production and consumption to be political activities. Examining the food-related propaganda surrounding rationing, Eating for Victory decodes the dual message purveyed by the government and the media: while mandatory rationing was necessary to provide food for U.S. and Allied troops overseas, women on the home front were also "required" to provide their families with nutritious food. Amy Bentley reveals the role of the Wartime Homemaker as a pivotal component not only of World War II but also of the development of the United States into a superpower.
This 1919 book describes both the success of the war garden in helping to reduce food shortages during the World War I period and the necessity for maintaining these gardens during peacetime.
It’s become commonplace in contemporary culture for critics to proclaim the death of poetry. Poetry, they say, is no longer relevant to the modern world, mortally wounded by the emergence of new media technologies. In Poetry Unbound, Mike Chasar rebuts claims that poetry has become a marginal art form, exploring how it has played a vibrant and culturally significant role by adapting to and shaping new media technologies in complex, unexpected, and powerful ways. Beginning with the magic lantern and continuing through the dominance of the internet, Chasar follows poetry’s travels off the page into new media formats, including silent film, sound film, and television. Mass and nonprint media have not stolen poetry’s audience, he contends, but have instead given people even more ways to experience poetry. Examining the use of canonical as well as religious and popular verse forms in a variety of genres, Chasar also traces how poetry has helped negotiate and legitimize the cultural status of emergent media. Ranging from Citizen Kane to Leave It to Beaver to best-selling Instapoet Rupi Kaur, this book reveals poetry’s ability to find new audiences and meanings in media forms with which it has often been thought to be incompatible. Illuminating poetry’s surprising multimedia history, Poetry Unbound offers a new paradigm for understanding poetry’s still evolving place in American culture.
As the first botanical history of World War II, Plants Go to War examines military history from the perspective of plant science. From victory gardens to drugs, timber, rubber, and fibers, plants supplied materials with key roles in victory. Vegetables provided the wartime diet both in North America and Europe, where vitamin-rich carrots, cabbages, and potatoes nourished millions. Chicle and cacao provided the chewing gum and chocolate bars in military rations. In England and Germany, herbs replaced pharmaceutical drugs; feverbark was in demand to treat malaria, and penicillin culture used a growth medium made from corn. Rubber was needed for gas masks and barrage balloons, while cotton and hemp provided clothing, canvas, and rope. Timber was used to manufacture Mosquito bombers, and wood gasification and coal replaced petroleum in European vehicles. Lebensraum, the Nazi desire for agricultural land, drove Germans eastward; troops weaponized conifers with shell bursts that caused splintering. Ironically, the Nazis condemned non-native plants, but adopted useful Asian soybeans and Mediterranean herbs. Jungle warfare and camouflage required botanical knowledge, and survival manuals detailed edible plants on Pacific islands. Botanical gardens relocated valuable specimens to safe areas, and while remote locations provided opportunities for field botany, Trees surviving in Hiroshima and Nagasaki live as a symbol of rebirth after vast destruction.
In 1943, the backyard plots, community gardens, industrial easements, and schoolyards cultivated as victory gardens produced 42 percent of the fresh produce US Americans consumed in that year. As much as two-thirds of the population participated in making this wartime effort the most successful local food movement in the nation's history. Twenty-first-century popular memory cites victory gardens as a historic inspiration for sustainable, grassroots food activism, in contrast to contemporary corporate agribusiness and processed food industries. This dissertation undermines such narratives, centering on factory metaphors of industrial production used in promotional materials for the victory garden movement. I examine the role victory gardens played in midcentury foodways, how they affected industrial labor relations and public relations, and how they mediated relationships between citizens, the state, and nature through food. Ultimately, this dissertation explains what it meant to think of gardening as, in the words of one wartime pamphlet, "a manufacturing process in which you and Nature go into partnership." This understanding provides an important lesson: in the victory garden tensions between nature and culture, the organic and the technologic, the local and the national, the individual and the state, and more were resolved by viewing the vegetable plot as a factory. This self-provisioning movement was not an atavistic aberration from historical trends. Rather, the victory garden was a product of an increasingly industrial, technocratic, and corporatized nation-state. This perspective contextualizes the political-economic and cultural trajectories of postwar United States as well as provides insight into possibilities for reorganizing the nation's relationship with nature.
