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How does a country repair its harm to a vulnerable minority targeted during times of national fear because of race? How did the United States redress its then popular yet unconstitutional WWII incarceration of 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans in desolate barbed wire prisons without charges, hearings, or bona fide evidence of military necessity? In response to a Congressional inquiry, political lobbying, and lawsuits, the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 directed the President to apologize and authorized over one billion dollars in reparations. Congress also created a fund to educate the public about the government’s false assertion of “national security” to restrict civil liberties. Some considered redress a tremendous victory — rewriting history and personal healing. Others questioned reparations for one U.S. group but not others. Japanese American Redress served as a catalyst for reparations movements worldwide. This paper examines its genesis, legal implementation, and apparent effects. It also explores wide-ranging political mobilization and social meanings of redress and “unfinished business”. Reparations cannot be measured by laws alone. Diverse communities must engage contested questions of history, justice, and belonging. Reparations claims face often unforeseen benefits and limitations. The paper concludes with these “lessons learned” to date.

The post-world war II German-Israeli reparations program is the largest, most comprehensive reparations program ever implemented. Traditionally, reparations were supported by the vanquished and were designed to compensate the victor for the damages caused during the war. The Wiedergutmachung (literally “making the good again”) program as it is called in Germany, or Shilumim (the payments) as Israelis usually prefer to refer to it, innovates in many areas and goes beyond this interstate framework. Jewish leaders participated in the Luxembourg negotiations that led to the signature of the 1952 treaty, and community networks played a crucial role in the distribution of the money to the victims. Civil society groups played an instrumental role in the United States as plans for reparations were being discussed during the war. Neither the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) nor Israel existed during the war. Reparations have been paid to the state of Israel and were paid to Jewish Holocaust survivors regardless of their nationality. The FRG benefited politically and economically from this treaty. It was able to enter the international arena and establish diplomatic relations with Israel, whose economy greatly benefited from the money it received.

In 2001, 56 years after the cessation of hostilities in World War II, Germany’s federal government and a group of large German companies entered into a new reparations agreement aimed at compensating people who had been forced to work for the Third Reich against their will. This paper examines the confluence of historical circumstances that led to such a belated attempt at righting the injustice, and the political factors behind the extremely “rough” criteria that were used to allocate funds to claimants. It also examines the distribution effort itself — still not quite completed by mid-2005 — and finds that the various NGOs and governments involved in the reparations work were surprisingly successful in tracing claimants and making payments to them, given the amount of time that had elapsed.

Wraps up the analysis of labor market developments in the U.S. through the 1940s showing how and why employers abdicated their segmentalist autonomy and submitted temporarily to state‐imposed solidarism, including intersectoral wage compression similar to what Sweden's normal peace time system brought about. During the prewar and interwar periods, the same employers actively sought another kind of intersectoral control, especially over wages in the building and construction trades, because high wages in this sector disrupted major manufacturers’ otherwise workable system of labor market governance just as they did in Sweden. Unlike in Sweden, however, major American manufacturers were unable to find allies for a cross‐class alliance against the building trade unions, and thus political relations between capital and labor remained far more hostile than in Sweden despite the Swedish labor movement's explicitly anticapitalist ideology.

This chapter presents data that provide strong evidence that U.S. combat casualties are not distributed uniformly across society. Beginning with the Korean War, some communities, particularly those like Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, have borne a disproportionate share of America's wartime sacrifice. The size of the differences in casualty rates between rich and poor communities may not be as great as some of the rhetoric from the Left suggests. While socioeconomically disadvantaged communities do bear disproportionately large shares of the casualty burden, some wealthy and highly educated communities have also suffered significant numbers of casualties. However, contra the protestations of some on the Right, the casualty gap is real, and, perhaps equally significantly, the data suggest that this gap may have widened over time.

The chapter debates the role of the US armed services as transmission agents for American models of modernity, conscious and otherwise, and their reception as such in a variety of European contexts from 1943 onwards. The evidence suggests that the Americans brought to the war a variety of distinctive features, of which the most obvious were their opulence and technological grandeur, coupled with a fine sense of detachment regarding the meaning of the conflict for the war torn lands and peoples of western Europe. For their part these peoples projected on the Americans a series of hopes, fears and prejudices, so that when the two sides finally met on the ground before (in the British case) or at the moment of liberation, a great range of experiences emerged, by no means always corresponding to what was expected. Young women bore the brunt of the encounter more than anyone, and were often changed by what they lived through. But the Americans too were forced to adapt as they moved forward from liberation to occupation and back again, and then to nation-building in the cases of Austria and Germany. These were great tasks that they were not prepared for, least of all in a context of radical alientation from their erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union.

This chapter considers the impact of World War II on the Kachin region. It examines evidence for the motivations of Kachin volunteers during the war in the Kachin Levies and other organisations. It examines the demographics of this conflict and its impact on the development of politicised Kachin youth groups. It discusses their role in developing political strategy for Kachin State in the Union of Burma at the Panglong Conference and Frontier Areas Committee of Enquiry in 1947. The chapter also looks at the developments in this region in a broader regional context to understand how related communities in Burma, India, and China interacted with each other and with their respective national governments during the early post-World War II years.

Through a series of empirical analyses of individual-level survey data from the National Election Study and the Social Capital Benchmark Survey, as well as analysis of aggregate electoral turnout data at the county level, this chapter examines the immediate and lasting effects of the considerable variance in communities' wartime experience in Vietnam, Korea, and World War II, on their residents' patterns of political engagement and participation. The analysis reveals very different dynamics in the wake of the three conflicts. Across the data sets, statistical models find that respondents from communities that suffered higher casualty rates in Vietnam and Korea reported lower levels of trust in government, interest in politics, and electoral and nonelectoral political participation than respondents with identical demographic characteristics from cities and towns that sustained lower casualty rates in these conflicts. By contrast, respondents from communities that endured the heaviest burdens in World War II were just as politically engaged as their peers, if not more so. However, while the conflicts in Vietnam and Korea may have fundamentally reshaped citizens' relationship with the federal government, citizens did not let their resentment toward government policies affect all of their participatory activities. More nuanced data from the Social Capital Benchmark Survey reveal that Vietnam casualty rates had no discernible impact on nonpolitical forms of civic engagement such as charitable giving, volunteering, and organizational activity.

Clausewitz's On War aroused controversy from its first publication in 1832-4, and the validity of its interpretation of war's nature was challenged in the wake of both world wars and in the Cold War. Those who condemn Clausewitz today as the exponent of an outdated form of inter-state war therefore form part of a familiar tradition. They are however guilty of reading Clausewitz's text selectively. Because he used dialectics as a means to understanding war, he himself provided counters to many of his best known propositions.

Scholars have provided scant analysis of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personal faith, regular use of religious rhetoric, relationship with religious constituencies and leaders, the impact of his religious convictions on his policies as president, or the role of religion in his four presidential campaigns. The Democrat, however, repeatedly emphasized the importance of the Bible, prayer, and Christian morality. In numerous speeches and letters, he urged Americans to work for spiritual renewal, promote social justice, and strive to achieve a more abundant material and spiritual life. He frequently asserted that God directed history, labeled himself God’s agent, and insisted that the United States would prosper only if its citizens sought divine guidance and followed biblical principles. His courage, confidence, and calm in dealing with the Great Depression and World War II sprang from his temperament, life experiences, and faith. Interested much more in the moral, character-building, and social justice emphases of Christianity than its theological or devotional aspects, Roosevelt’s faith was sincere but not intellectually sophisticated. Like his approach to politics, his faith focused more on action than contemplation, more on results than on principles. More than any other 20th-century president, Roosevelt managed to maintain cordial relations with Protestants (especially ones concerned about social justice), Catholics, and Jews. In September 1935, Roosevelt sent a letter to more than 120,000 “representative clergymen” to ask them for “counsel and advice”, particularly about the impact of his administration’s new social security legislation and public works program. His faith played a significant role in shaping the New Deal and his approach to international relations.

This chapter moves the story from the New Deal to the U.S. Army. As the state's main wartime hub for psychological research, the Army Research Branch, headed by University of Chicago sociologist Samuel A. Stouffer, presented evidence to military commanders that better-educated soldiers were more efficient, exhibited higher morale, and were less likely to desert or suffer a psychoneurotic breakdown than their educationally deprived peers. Military and educational policymakers were galvanized by this finding and joined forces to create the Army Information and Education Division—the education clearinghouse for the common soldier. With the steady support of General George C. Marshall, the chief of staff of the army, who believed wholeheartedly in the transformative power of education, millions of G.I.s made use of the educational services provided to them.

This chapter pairs President Polk's entry into the Mexican War with President Roosevelt's movement toward World War II. Using the relational conception, it argues that while both Polk and Roosevelt behaved independently and made good use of the distinctive capacities of the executive branch, Roosevelt's behavior was more deeply relational in that it was more subject to legislative rebuff. Roosevelt's constitutional authority was also buttressed by a defensive security necessity. After World War II, repelling troops at the border was transparently revealed as an inadequate standard for judging whether a president was using the office's war powers “defensively.” Confronted with this transparent destabilization of the category of “defensive,” the United States embarked on a project of global institution building to reduce its vulnerabilities.

The final chapter traces the CCC's legacy into the post–World War II period. It does so by focusing on the controversy, during the mid-to-late 1940s, surrounding the Bureau of Reclamation's plan to construct a hydroelectric dam in Dinosaur National Monument's Echo Park, which straddles the Utah—Colorado border. While environmental historians have long viewed the defeat of the Echo Park dam as one of the founding moments of the American environmental movement, this chapter argues that this victory by environmentalists was predicated on the Corps and its conservation work during the New Deal period. For instance, during the 1930s the CCC developed Dinosaur National Monument for outdoor recreation, a process that later brought outdoor enthusiasts into the anti-dam camp. Criticism of Corps conservation work during the early 1940s, however, raised public concern about the destruction of wilderness and ecological balance in the region as well. When the federal government announced plans for the Echo Park dam during the late 1940s, these concerns resurfaced and guided environmentalist opposition. This chapter ends by discussing the declining power of the federal government within postwar conservation, and concludes, somewhat ironically, that the strong hand of the New Deal helped make what eventually became environmentalism a more democratic movement.

When anti-Semitism becomes untenable after the Holocaust is revealed toward the end of World War II, Faulkner himself revises The Sound and the Fury in an Appendix that strikingly demonizes his once beloved promiscuous heroine Caddy. He has her become involved with a German officer in Paris during World War II, and he does so in 1945 and 1946, just as the American public is reeling from the revelation of Nazi “death camps.” Thus, Faulkner's Appendix marks an end to the modernist promiscuity novel: with it, Faulkner distances himself from the casual anti-Semitism of his 1929 text and from a female sexual freedom he seemed to embrace or tolerate in Caddy. The outlook of the Appendix, with regard to women, dovetails with that of the military in the world wars. The Appendix is part of a growing backlash against the new woman of the post-World War I era; the promiscuous female is once again, as in the vamp story that became popular in the 1910s, a fiend.

World War II holds a celebrated position in the benign meta-narrative of American foreign relations. This narrative holds that the United States is a benevolent nation whose foreign policy is based not on pure self-interest but rather on the greater good of all humankind. Clearly this meta-narrative ignores, discounts or minimises the importance of a host of brutal episodes and self-interested policies that riddle American history. At least until the late 1960s, Hollywood films about World War II served the purpose of affirming the national perception that the war was the Good War. The moral certitude of the World War II era, and indeed the early Cold War, was thrown into disarray by America's first defeat in war: the Vietnam War. Between 1998 and 2001, four major-release films addressed various aspects of the American role in World War II. Saving Private Ryan (1998), The Thin Red Line, U-571 (2000) and Pearl Harbor (2001). This chapter explores the issues of gender and racism in World War II films.

After Tito's death, ethnic nationalism was simmering in all parts of Yugoslavia from Slovenia in the northwest to Kosovo in the southeast. The secular politics of the regime's establishment involved factional quarrels, and the activities of secular intellectual elites have been analyzed at length elsewhere. The religious scene, where important things occurred, has remained obscure, yet visible religious symbols and movements were no less telling harbingers of what was to happen in the 1990s; these are the subject of this chapter. The different sections cover: the clerical offensive and the communist regime's last stand (1979–87); the promise of peaceful transition (moderate religious policies and the belated democratization of the regime, 1988–90); ethnoreligious realignment and multiparty elections; worsening relations between the Catholic and Orthodox Churches, and the schisms between nation‐states in the Serbian Orthodox Church; the Churches and the official history of the genocide of Serbs by Croats in World War II; the establishment of a site of Serb martyrdom at Jasenovac in Croatia (completed in 1983) to commemorate the genocide of 1941, and the myths surrounding this; disputes over holy places; the collapse of interfaith dialog; untimely Serbian commemorations of World War II sufferings in 1990–1; and calls for partition and revenge by the Serbs.