 The US South: A deadly front during World War II The US Army recently gave a full military funeral to Albert King, a Black private stationed at Georgia’s Fort Benning who was killed by a white military policeman in 1941. With this act, the Army completed its acknowledgement of a racial murder it tried to cover up 83 years ago. What the Army or the nation has never fully recognized, however, is that during World War II, in and around Army facilities in the US South (where 80% of Black soldiers trained), an internal war zone raged, one with its own share of casualties, primarily African American GIs. Ironically, the Army’s effort to enforce the laudable goal of nondiscrimination during wartime helped to stoke racial conflict and violence on this home front battlefield. During World War II, the Army built a biracial army, but one where all units remained strictly segregated by race. At the same time, the military tried to enforce the mandate enshrined in the 1940 Selective Service and Training Act, which officially disavowed racial discrimination. Segregation and nondiscrimination, however, were incompatible goals, especially in the South, where racial segregation was inherently discriminatory. The Army’s effort to promote nondiscrimination within its own sphere did challenge existing southern racial practices and drew strident criticism from southern white leaders. In 1940, the Army desegregated its Officer Training School at Fort Benning; Black and white trainees lived and learned together before being assigned to their segregated units. Many army camps did not segregate sick or wounded soldiers by race in what was often a single base hospital. In 1942, the Army ordered a ban on the use of offensive language when referring to Black soldiers, a directive unevenly implemented, often dependent on the attitudes of individual commanders. In the summer of 1944, in large part in response to the racial upheaval ongoing in and around military facilities in the South and elsewhere, the Army made its boldest move to embrace nondiscrimination. It declared all recreation facilities and transportation under its control desegregated, although this order was also not always fully implemented by the officers charged with carrying out the directive. The Army took all these steps and others largely for reasons of efficiency and military necessity. For Black soldiers, these actions gave them some sense that they were part of a unified effort to defeat America’s enemies abroad and emboldened them to assert their rights as American citizens at home. During the war, that home was the local communities that surrounded Army camps. While the Army could try to ensure nondiscrimination on base, off base the Army had no authority to enforce the principle of nondiscrimination. But the Army could not keep its Black soldiers locked on base; every soldier needed time away from their training and their military officers. And outside the camp perimeter, the harsh realities of southern racial segregation remained untouched by the upheaval of war. As a result, many of the Black casualties of World War II’s “southern battlefield” occurred in the communities located near Army training grounds. In addition to Albert King, African American soldiers killed in the frequent wartime skirmishes in these locales include Henry Williams, a private from Birmingham, Alabama, stationed at Brookley Army Air Field and shot by a white bus driver in Mobile; Raymond Carr, a MP from Louisiana’s Camp Beauregard (and a Louisiana native), shot in the back by a Louisiana state trooper after the lawman told Carr to abandon his post in Alexandria, Louisiana; and William Walker, a private from Chicago, killed by local lawmen while fighting with a white MP just outside the fence of Camp Van Dorn, near the village of Centreville in southwest Mississippi. There were other Black casualties—including some deaths for which we will probably never know all the details, a common occurrence during wartime—as well as hundreds wounded in various beatings and assaults that occurred in the US South’s “war zone.” Both Albert King and the MP who murdered him in 1941, Robert Lummus, were Georgia natives. Lummus had been at Fort Benning since the spring of 1940, when it was still a white outpost. After the draft began in the fall of 1940, the facility was soon transformed, as thousands of Black soldiers from all over the country arrived at what became one of the country’s largest training facilities. As the US Army began its experiment in promoting nondiscrimination, white soldiers like Lummus remained unmoved. He and others must have believed that Black soldiers at the facility would continue to abide by the South’s existing racial hierarchy. If not, the traditional use of violence to keep Black men in their “place” was a tried-and-true option, even if it meant opening another front at home in the global war of the 1940s. During World War II, the US Army, through its nondiscrimination efforts, gave African American soldiers a glimpse of America’s racial future. And indeed, the US military would later be the first national institution to abandon racial segregation. The Army’s actions, however, had limits, both within the areas it controlled and certainly beyond. It simply could not change the hearts and minds of most whites, soldier or civilian, overnight. Feature image: Black soldiers pinning their brass bars on each others shoulders, Ft. Benning, GA 1942. Courtesy National Archives (531137). OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 The Alexander Mosaic: Greek history and Roman memories Perhaps the finest representation of battle to survive from antiquity, the Alexander Mosaic conveys all the confusion and violence of ancient warfare. It also exemplifies how elite patrons across diverse artistic cultures commission artworks that draw inspiration from and celebrate past and present events important to the community. Specificity of visual imagery (e.g., identifiable protagonists, carefully rendered details, and inscriptions) combined with commemorative intent differentiates historical subjects from scenes conceived generically or drawn from daily life. In celebrating events meaningful to those holding power, historical subjects are propagandistic in that they foster a supremely favorable conception of those responsible for their creation. Yet no matter how carefully makers try to control the message, artworks can acquire an autonomy that permits audiences to construct “memories” of those events never intended. Properly speaking, the Alexander Mosaic’s manufacture comprises Roman work, but most scholars believe it reflects a lost painting described by Pliny the Elder: “Philoxenos of Eretria painted a picture for King Cassander which must be considered second to none, which represented the battle of Alexander against Darius” (NH 35.110). This would date to ca. 330-310 BC, when memories of the battle were still fresh, and its propaganda value would be most effective. That painting may have been brought to Italy as plunder after the Roman conquest of Macedonia in 146 BC. The fact that the mosaic reproduces an earlier work for a later audience forces us to consider the discrepancies between historical narrative and artistic tradition. All of the surviving accounts of Alexander’s conquests were written against the background of Roman imperialism, and ancient readers necessarily interpreted what they read in the light of the social and political structures that characterized their age. Alexander “the Great” was a Roman creation: the title first appears in a Roman comedy by Plautus in the early second century BC. Because historical representations are distinctive and clearly recognizable to contemporary viewers, since its discovery in the House of the Faun at Pompeii in 1831, scholars have had to reckon with how the mosaic’s imagery functioned in two very different contexts: first as a fourth-century Greek painting and then as a first-century Roman mosaic. A painting celebrating a Macedonian victory meant something quite distinct when originally displayed in a Hellenistic palace than when it was possibly displayed as war booty in a Roman temple; and the mosaic copy in a Roman private house would carry still different significance. For a Roman audience, the commemorative specificity of the battle scene was probably less important than celebrating the qualities of Alexander’s personality that spoke to them: his ferocity in battle, his charisma, and his military genius. Alexander was as much a part of the cultural memory of Rome as Homeric epic was for Greece, providing a paradigm for their own military triumphs. Heinrich Fuhrmann first suggested that the Roman patron of the artwork had participated in the Macedonian Wars, and that this mosaic copy of a spoil of war functioned as both a sign of his admiration for the “greatest” general and perpetuated the memory of his own role in overthrowing the dynasty that Alexander founded. A Roman viewer might have imagined a broader reenactment of the paradigmatic conflict between East and West, a conflict he may have participated in or merely appreciated through the lens of Roman ideology. Given the Roman taste for the allusive, a history become anachronistic could have also been appropriated and meaningfully reused through a cognitive metaphor whereby in place of Alexander’s empire, Roman viewers could have understood their own (since Rome had conquered the territories formerly occupied by Macedonia). Roman sources repeatedly compare Roman campaigns on the eastern frontier with earlier Greek struggles. Given that Parthia, which had fought on the Persian side against Alexander, was now Rome’s enemy in the east and Alexander’s legacy was now Roman, a Roman viewer could have easily identified with the Greeks. Furthermore, the patron who commissioned the mosaic copy belonged to the new Roman ruling class, which appropriated older Greek artworks—the fruits of their conquest—to express social status. It was prominently featured in a luxury dwelling, of a type also of Greek origin, whose colonnaded courtyards and receptions rooms were sumptuously decorated with other paintings and sculptures meant to impress visitors. Its Roman owner may even have appreciated the Alexander Mosaic as a “work of art”: an image divorced from its original context by its new role in a Roman social performance. When artworks reconstruct a past in order to explain the present, their makers determine which events are remembered and rearrange them to conform to the required social narrative. Their display provides visible manifestations of collective memories. More than merely passive reflections, monuments with historical subjects reinforce those memories and confer them prestige. Divergent motivations were again in evidence after the Alexander Mosaic’s discovery when various European leaders such as the Prussian King Fredrick Wilhelm IV ordered copies of the copy: was the motivation for such modern commissions the desire for prestige achieved through association with a masterpiece from antiquity or with the political symbolism of its historical subject? Featured image: Alexander Mosaic (ca. 100 BCE), Naples, Museo archeologico nazionale. Berthold Werner via Wikimedia Commons. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Forgotten books and postwar Jewish identity In recent years, Americans have reckoned with a rise in antisemitism. Since the 2016 presidential election, antisemitism exploded online and entered the mainstream of American politics, with the 2018 shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue marking the deadliest attack on American Jews. But this is hardly the first season for grappling with domestic bigotry and racism. Eighty years ago, in the wake of World War II, Americans began addressing some of their own antisemitism and racism problems. They wondered how Americans could fight a war abroad against fascist enemies when they had so many of their own sins of bigotry to reckon with at home. Several popular books—fiction and non-fiction—addressed these issues during the 1940s but are mostly forgotten today. I discuss some of them in my new book, Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American. Laura Z. Hobson’s bestselling novel, Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) is the most famous of this group of popular 1940s anti-antisemitism novels; less than a year after publication, Agreement was made into an Academy Award-winning film starring Gregory Peck. But Hobson was not alone in thinking and writing fiction about American antisemitism. She was inspired by other successful women anti-antisemitism novelists. As Hobson wrote to her editor, Richard Simon, of the publishing house Simon and Schuster, “Maybe six other authors are right this minute finishing novels on the same subject—maybe not one will do much by itself, but perhaps all together those authors could become a kind of force for ending the complacency of uncomfortable or scared silence which defaults to the rantings of the bigots, who don’t practice that conspiracy of silence at all.” Several writers were, in fact, working on anti-antisemitism novels. Hobson’s writer-friend Margaret Halsey had published Some of My Best Friend Are Soldiers, a novel attacking racism and antisemitism. As Hobson wrote to Simon, she was also encouraged by the news of the Canadian novelist Gwethalyn Graham’s Earth and High Heaven (1944), a popular anti-antisemitism novel, being serialized in Collier’s magazine. And although Cleveland-based novelist Jo Sinclair (the pen name of Ruth Seid) was farther afield from Hobson’s New York literary circles, by 1946 it would be difficult for Hobson to miss the many New York Times references to Sinclair and her award-winning anti-antisemitism novel, Wasteland, published that year. Through different narrative strategies, these women writers made anti–antisemitism into a subject fitting for popular fiction. These novels also succeeded in making what had been considered a Jewish problem—something for Jewish communal leaders and defense organizations to worry over—into an American problem that required an American solution. But it was precisely this approach that made some reviewers critical of what Hobson and other anti-antisemitism novelists accomplished. They asked: where was the Jewishness in these novels? Why had novelists not provided readers with more of an understanding of the religious traditions, rituals, and joyous festivals at the heart of Jewish life? To some rabbis and Jewish writers who realized how little Americans understood about the distinctiveness of Judaism, it seemed to many like a wasted opportunity. Rabbis and other writers invested in Jewish religious life stepped in to fill the void. They seized the opportunity to present Judaism to a readership of Jews and non-Jews. In books with titles such as What Is a Jew? (1953); What the Jews Believe (1950); Basic Judaism (1947); Faith through Reason: A Modern Interpretation of Judaism (1946); and This is Judaism (1944), writers explained the basics of Judaism. In some ways, it is possible to see the anti-antisemitism genre as having paved the way to the “Introduction to Judaism” genre. These primers on Judaism were books and magazine articles that helped explain Jews and their religion to other Americans. In unexpected ways, increased concern over antisemitism led to greater understanding of what it meant to live a Jewish life. In the past 60 years, the anti-antisemitism novels of the 1940s and the Introduction to Judaism books of the 1940s and 1950s have faded in popularity. These books and articles were very much of their moment. But they forged genres that proved lasting in American culture: anti-antisemitism remained a popular theme in late twentieth century film, with examples such as School Ties (1992) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989), and the Introduction to Judaism genre continued to flourish at this time, with popular examples written by Anita Diamant, Rabbis Irving Greenberg, Hayim Donin, and David Wolpe, as well as Sarah Hurwitz, Noah Feldman, and Rabbi Sharon Brous in more recent years. The ideas disseminated by these mid-twentieth century genres have also had a lasting impact on American culture. Americans continue to be outraged by antisemitic incidents in this country. There is still a huge discrepancy between the 1920s through early 1940s era, described in Postwar Stories, when antisemitism was much more accepted as part of the American Way—and the post-1940s reality, when antisemitism continued but lessened and was increasingly called out and interpreted as an affront to American values. As a result of the mid-twentieth century “religion moment” described in Postwar Stories, Americans continue to classify Jews as members of an American religion, despite the problems inherent in that categorization: we all know Jews who consider themselves proudly Jewish, but not religious. Today, we live in a culture that is very much a result of the ideas and attitudes these genres helped to inculcate. With increased antisemitism and questions about the meaning of Judaism during an era when Jewishness has become a more challenging identity, we may find Americans making their way back to these mid-twentieth century genres. Featured image credit: Dorothy McGuire, Gregory Peck & Sam Jaffe in a scene from the 1947 film Gentleman’s Agreement. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
 Do American family names make sense? Do names really mean anything, even when they seem to? Individuals in present day America called Smith, Jackson, Washington, or Redhead are not usually smiths, sons of Jack, residents in Washington, or red-haired. The disconnect between sense and usage in these particular names is mainly the result of hereditary surnaming back in England and Scotland, but this is not its only source. Names change their shapes, get borrowed into different cultures, and are sometimes re-interpreted to mean something other than what they originally meant. The frozen food company, Birds Eye, took its brand name from the founder’s surname, Clarence Frank Birdseye II of Montclair, New Jersey. His family had migrated from England to Connecticut in the seventeenth century, and the name’s meaning as a nickname looks obvious. But when it is traced back in English historical records, Birdseye turns out to be a habitational name, an altered form of the Lancashire gentry surname Bardsley, which migrated to Buckinghamshire, England, in the fifteenth century and was simplified there from the sixteenth century onward to Bardsey, Berdsey, Burdsey, and Birdseye. The underlying cause for the disconnect is that names, unlike words, don’t have to stay meaningful in order to do their job of identifying individuals or groups of people. In fact, most American family names make no sense at all today and it is fascinating to uncover their original meanings and what they tell us about the history of the people who bear them. Hereditary surnames are especially vulnerable to changes in pronunciation that obscure their original senses. Starbuck, for example, seems to be an altered form of Tarbuck, which is recorded in the thirteenth century as the surname of the family who were lords of Tarbock in Lancashire, England. In the 1630s, Edward Starbuck, a coloniser from Derbyshire, England, set up a whaling company on Nantucket Island. Herman Melville borrowed the surname for the chief mate of the whaling ship Pequod in his novel Moby Dick to give his incredible story an appearance of local veracity. It is this fictional character that the coffee chain is arbitrarily named for. Absence of sense enables names to migrate easily from person to person and into other languages, where they can be further mangled or re-interpreted, nowhere more prolifically than in the United States. American family names have a unique diversity, the living evidence of a country founded on colonization, forced transportation (especially of West Africans), and influxes of refugees and economic migrants from across the globe. The latest edition of the Dictionary of American Family Names explains over 80,000 of them and includes 35 introductory essays written by experts from countries across the world. Names as gateways into world history are full of surprises. Trump is a surname from Bavaria in Germany, where in medieval times the now obsolete word trumpe, “drum,” was adopted as a name for a drummer. (Donald Trump’s Scottish connection is on his mother’s side.) Biden probably derives from the place called Baydon in Wiltshire, England, and has been a family name in neighbouring Hampshire since the early fourteenth century. (Joe Biden’s Irish connection is on his mother’s side.) Mancini is from Italian mancino, a nickname for a left-handed person. Wang is chiefly Chinese, from a Romanized spelling of Mandarin and Cantonese words of many senses, including “king, royal” and “yellow, gold.” Some family names have been created in America itself, where individuals whose own culture had no tradition of surnaming found themselves legally required to have one. Migrants from Muslim countries and from parts of the Indian subcontinent have commonly opted for one of their own personal names. The Dictionary explains that the surname Abdullah, with over 8,000 bearers in the 2010 US census, is an Arabic personal name ‘Abdullāh, “servant of God.” Murthy, with 1,268 bearers in 2010, is from southwest India, where it is a personal name from the Sanskrit mūrti, “manifestation, image,” that of one of the gods, Rama or Krishna. Among Native Americans, a different solution was to use their personal name in an English translation. The Cheyenne Mo’ohnah’evaoo’etse, “Elk stands with his wife,” refers to the habit of elks standing shoulder to shoulder, and was Americanized as the surname Elkshoulder. The most common American surname actually in a Native American language is Begay, with 17,533 bearers in the 2010 census. It is an Anglicized spelling of the Navajo word biye’, “his son,” which was originally part of a longer personal name, coming after the father’s name. It was imposed on Navajos by white officials, who mistook it for a surname. Some Native Americans adopted the surname of a colonial administrator. Abeyta is a Hispanic surname mostly found among the Pueblos of New Mexico, where in the 1690s a Spaniard, Diego de Abeytia (or de Beitia), was involved in its recolonization. His surname referred to a place called Beitia in Biscay, Basque Country, in northern Spain. But most Native Americans assimilated to Anglo-American culture by doing what most of the freed slaves of West African heritage did—borrowing an existing, commonplace surname like Smith or Johnson. An alternative strategy favored by African Americans was to take the surname of an admired figure, such as Lincoln, Jefferson, Jackson, or Washington. The Dictionary reveals time and again that the Englishness of an American surname is not a safe guide to the ethnicity or heritage of its bearers. Immigrants, too, often adapted to their new country through the translation or assimilation of an existing non-English name into an English near-equivalent. Yet more sources of Smith are Dutch Smit, German and Jewish Schmidt, and Slavic Koval. Dutch Timmerman was sometimes translated into the English Carpenter, French Boulanger into Baker, and German Goldwasser into Goldwater. The Ashkenazic Jewish name Kaplan, from German Kaplan or Polish kapłan, “chaplain, curate,” was already a translation of Cohen, from Hebrew kohen, “priest,” before it was assimilated in the American composer’s family to Copland, an English habitational name from either of two northern English place-names. Assimilated name-forms have created countless similar examples of misleading appearances. Sharkey is usually Irish, a shortened, Anglicized form of the Gaelic Ó Searcaigh, “descendant of Searcach,” from a nickname meaning “beloved,” but it is also an American garbling of French Chartier “carter.” Family histories can resolve some of the uncertainties. Morton looks English or Scottish, a habitational name from one of the places so named, and it often is. George Morton of Nottinghamshire, England, was one of the Mayflower pilgrim fathers. But, as the Dictionary explains, the name has several other origins as an Americanization of Swedish, Finnish, French, and Jewish names. John Morton, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, had a Finnish grandfather called Martti Marttinen—“Martin Martin’s son”— who moved to Sweden, where his name was Scandinavianized as Mårten Mårtensson, pronounced Mortenson, and then to America, where his surname was shortened to Morton. Another way in which the Dictionary disambiguates the origins of a family name is to note the forenames associated with it in US telephone directories. Lee, with nearly 700,000 bearers in the 2010 census, is the standout instance of an English habitational name that was re-purposed to assimilate names from other languages. They include one each from Irish and Norwegian and six from Romanized forms of Chinese and other Southeast Asian languages in Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, and Myanmar. The surname is famous as that of a Shropshire family that migrated from England to Virginia in the early seventeenth century and whose descendants were prominent in the American Revolution and the Civil War. But some of its forenames in America—Young, Sang, Jae, Jong, Jung, Sung, Yong, Kyung, Seung, Dong, Kwang, Myung—alert us to other histories, of later migrations from Southeast Asia. Is it ever safe to take an American family name at face value? Often yes, even if all you can be sure of is that the name, whatever its original sense, belongs to a specific group of people. But, as you have seen from the names I’ve picked out for discussion, appearances can be very deceptive. Featured image by Joshua Hoehne via Unsplash. OUPblog - Academic insights for the thinking world. 
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