Sexual Justice in the American Civil War

Charles Ritter, History, College of Notre Dame of Maryland

Research Grant, 2005

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The Sexual Justice in the American Civil War Project is the first comprehensive study of the response of the Union military to allegations of sexual assault against women and girls by soldiers and civilians during the American Civil War (1861–1865). In the summer of 1998, we began investigating how the Union military prosecuted crimes of sexual assault. Using Union court-martial records housed in the papers of the United States Judge Advocate General (Record Group 153, National Archives and Records Administration) in Washington, DC, we transcribed the complete testimony of more than two hundred trials, creating the first digital archive of this valuable historical material. We also transcribed the military service records and other relevant documents concerning each alleged assailant and recorded demographic data about each plaintiff. We have also written and presented six conference papers and made several presentations at local colleges. We have written an encyclopedia article on rape in the Civil War, an essay in a collection concerning the impact of Union occupation on southern women, Occupied Women (2012), and a chapter in Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones (2011).

We received funding from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation on two occasions. In 2005 we received a grant for expenses related to the purchase of microfilm and to field research we undertook to contextualize our research. Our approach to contextualization was three-pronged. First, we developed a historical context for the military cases by examining the ways in which civilian courts in Tennessee and Philadelphia treated accusations of rape and sexual assault in the antebellum period. Second, we intended to develop a broader procedural context by exploring the Union Provost Marshal General’s records in the National Archives. We did not undertake this research until 2006, supported by a second grant from the Foundation. Third, we collected data from ninety-three additional courts-martial cases that we identified at the National Archives. These cases represent clear instances of gender crimes although they are not necessarily sexual crimes. Teasing out the differences between these two types of offenses is an important facet of our developing definition of mid-nineteenth-century rape and sexual assault.

Teasing out the differences between these two types of offenses is an important facet of our developing definition of mid-nineteenth-century rape and sexual assault.

The two grants from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation were indispensable in conducting this research, particularly the field research and, closer to home, our ability to hire student assistants to work with us at the National Archives. The hands-on research experience these grants afforded our students was an added, and not insignificant, benefit of the funding.

An Unexpected Peace: Understanding Resilient Order and Violence in Multi-Gang Environments

Viridiana Rios, Department of Political Science, Purdue University

Mario Arriagada, Open Society Foundations, New York

Research Grant, 2014, 2015

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Rival criminal organizations sometimes coexist peacefully in the same territory. Mexican drug cartels, known worldwide for their violent battles for turf (Molzahn et al. 2012), are not the exception. Until the nineties, criminal organizations would peacefully share border entries to the U.S. according to certain rules of territorial pricing (Blancornelas 2004, Mauleon 2010). In more recent years, while there is evidence that gangs have violently fought for turf in 348 Mexican municipalities, we also know that they peacefully coexisted in 99 others (Coscia and Rios 2012).

We studied why rival criminal organizations sometimes coexist peacefully and sometimes not.

We also found evidence that peace is more common where marijuana is produced and not eradicated by the government or where the federal government has the same party identification as local governments.

For this study, we brought together social science and journalism to create a natural, experimental setting to study why criminals restrain their violent confrontations in some places and not in others. First, we identified a random sample of places where multiple criminal gangs were operating simultaneously and where inter-gang violence remained contained. Second, we gathered an extensive dataset of the main economic, social, and geographical characteristics of non-violent cases and matched it with a balanced control sample of violent cases. Finally, we traveled to every municipality in our sample to conduct investigative journalism and semi-structured interviews.

Our results show that Mexican criminal organizations coexist peacefully when they are located farther away from the U.S. border and outside the main routes of illegal trafficking. In Yucatán, for example, we found that violence had migrated from one municipality to another exactly at the time that a new highway was constructed.

We also found evidence that peace is more common where marijuana is produced and not eradicated by the government or where the federal government has the same party identification as local governments. We interpret this as evidence that enforcement operations in economically (or politically) valuable territories for criminal operations are a trigger for violence. Other international cases of peace among criminal organizations follow similar patterns.

Bibliography

1. Dell, M. (2015). Trafficking networks and the Mexican drug war. The American Economic Review, 105(6), 1738-1779.

2. Calderón, G., Robles, G., Díaz-Cayeros, A., & Magaloni, B. (2015). The beheading of criminal organizations and the dynamics of violence in Mexico. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59(8), 1455-1485.

3. Holland, B. E., & Rios, V. (2017). Informally Governing Information: How Criminal Rivalry Leads to Violence against the Press in Mexico. Journal of Conflict Resolution , 61(5), 1095-1119.

4. Lessing, B. (2015). Logics of violence in criminal war. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59(8), 1486-1516.

5. Ríos, V. (2015). How government coordination controlled organized crime: The case of Mexico’s cocaine markets. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59(8), 1433-1454.

6. Shirk, D., & Wallman, J. (2015). Understanding Mexico’s drug violence. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 59(8), 1348-1376.

King George’s Generals: How the British Army Lost America, 1774-1781

William Anthony Hay, History, Mississippi State University

Research Grant, 2013

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My research project examines how successive British commanders understood the problem they faced during the American Revolution, the ways in which they responded, and why they ultimately failed. The five commanders on whom I focus—Thomas Gage, William Howe, John Burgoyne, Sir Henry Clinton, and Lord Cornwallis—each brought to the task wide experience and a strong record. Their careers reflected the growth of military professionalism in the British army from the mid-18th century, and they scored important successes against the Continental Army of the United States. Far from being incompetent or hidebound aristocrats unable to overcome antiquated assumptions, British commanders demonstrated impressive skill. As Andrew O’Shaughnessy has pointed out, the war’s outcome remained uncertain to the very end. The failure by the British commanders I study lay in their inability to translate operational success into political outcomes by dismantling the revolutionary government they fought. Survival meant success for the fledgling United States.

This research gave me a deeper understanding of how British insiders saw events in America as the war continued along with the civilian side of developing policy and strategy.

Along with its substantial contribution to historical scholarship on the American Revolution and the 18th century British Atlantic world, my project has contemporary relevance. Britain’s position in the American Revolution significantly resembles that of the United States today. Its army had significant experience with irregular warfare from the Seven Years’ War and Jacobite Rebellions, along with conventional operations against comparable opponents. But a small, professional army of long-serving regular soldiers proved a very fragile instrument of war. Possessing the most powerful navy of the age, Britain struggled to turn advantages in weapons, training, and capabilities into strategic success in America. With forces operating across the Atlantic at the end of an extended logistics chain, British policymakers had to balance the American crisis with global commitments and politics at home. Despite changes in technology and differences in context, these points capture problems the United States faces with overseas expeditionary warfare. They also point to the difficulty of coordinating policy and strategy to guide military operations effectively.

Research supported by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation enabled me to work extensively with British manuscript sources unavailable in the United States. Besides letters and reports by the main figures in my study, I saw a range of material, including private letters and diaries. This research gave me a deeper understanding of how British insiders saw events in America as the war continued along with the civilian side of developing policy and strategy. It pointed me toward the role that sea power, including water transport and navigation on lakes and rivers, played for both sides. Howe’s partnership with his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, who commanded naval forces, became an important part of my chapter on his tenure. Overall, the research gave me a fuller perspective of the British side that set each of my protagonists in context and showed the pressures they faced from superiors at home. Two of five chapters are drafted, along with a thematic introduction. Writing expanded the scope of my project, drawing it back into the 1760s to explain the conflict’s origins. I anticipate drafting the remaining chapters this year. Material from my research supported a chapter entitled “An End to Empire? British Strategy in the American Revolution and Making Peace” in Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American Revolution (Oklahoma: June 2018).

Bibliography

1. An End to Empire? British Strategy in the American Revolution and Making Peace in Justifying Revolution: Law, Virtue, and Violence in the American Revolution (Oklahoma: June 2018).

Private Gun Ownership in Modern China, 1912–1949

Lei Duan, History, Syracuse University

Dissertation Fellowship, 2015

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This dissertation examines private gun ownership and its sociocultural and political implications in modern China from 1860 to 1949, a period characterized by foreign invasion, constant military conflicts, and political decentralization. During this period, foreign guns, along with their Chinese imitations, flooded society. In response to the social disorder, many Chinese civilians turned to this new class of weaponry for self-defense. While historians have understood the gun in China in terms of military modernization, this dissertation sets the privately owned gun in its social and political context, and studies why Chinese civilians chose to arm themselves with guns and how governments of different periods responded to their armed civilians.

This study argues that growing social violence and the state’s inability to respond to it led Chinese men and women to seek to obtain their own weapons. This demand was fueled by the gun’s powerful symbolism in public culture and social life, and by beliefs that guns were a source of social status and self-empowerment. Civilian ownership of guns contributed to persistent social violence, and also transformed power structures in local society and accelerated local militarization, impacting the balance between state and society. Both late Qing and Republican governments’ regulation and control over armed civilians was a dynamic and contingent process, hovering between two practices: the state’s resolute maintenance of its monopoly on the uses of guns, and its reliance on armed civilians in local defense.

This study chronicles both the state efforts to deal with armed civilians and the reactions from the bottom.

This study argues that the state’s dilemma over whether to control private guns or rely on them prevented the formation of an effective and consistent gun policy. In contrast, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) adopted a different policy towards private gun ownership, by making the mobilization of an armed populace part of its mass line policy. The CCP’s private gun policy played an important role in strengthening the CCP’s presence and authority in wartime China.

Drawing from a variety of sources such as government documents, legal cases, social survey reports, and popular writings, this study chronicles both the state efforts to deal with armed civilians and the reactions from the bottom. This dissertation engages with and complements wider research on modern Chinese history in examining violence, social life, and the dynamic state-society relationship.

Political Economy of Memory: The Making, Unmaking and Remaking of the Nigeria-Biafra War

Godwin Onuoha, Democracy, Governance and Service Delivery (DGSD) Programme, Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa

Research Grant, 2014

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This research examines the memories of wars, conflicts, and violence in postcolonial Africa. Its point of departure is the Nigeria-Biafra War (1967–1970). Referred to by multiple names, like “Nigeria-Biafra War,” “Biafran War,” “Nigerian Civil War,” “War of National Unity,” “War against Infidels,” the Nigeria-Biafra War was a global event, generally regarded as a defining moment in the postcolonial global order because it foreshadowed the array of devastating conflicts that would eventually threaten the survival of most postcolonial African states. The war was the first major conflict in postcolonial Africa, and in many ways, it represented the end of the “old wars” and the first of the “new wars.” Certainly, it was the first to approximate what we now call “black-on-black” genocide in postcolonial Africa; the first televised African war; the only conflict in postcolonial Africa that had both major super powers of the Cold War on the same side; and the war that launched the modern humanitarian-aid industry as we know it today.

Official memories conceal and disenfranchise other memories, but also perform the ideological task of projecting the state as the sole owner of war memories in post–civil war Nigeria.

Almost fifty years after the war, the individual and collective memories of the Nigeria-Biafra War still dominate national discourse in a manner that elicits passion, discord, and contestation in contemporary Nigeria. Drawing on a political economy approach, this research focused on the following. First, it offered new insights into memory studies by examining how memories are constructed, contested, resisted, appropriated, and structured in a postwar Nigerian context. Second, it explored how memories of wars, conflicts, and violence can underlie a group’s identity and sustain that identity and, ultimately, translate into a basis for future violence. Third, it explores the politics of “dominant” and “subordinate” memories of war and violence in a contested political space. The research was mainly qualitative and most of the fieldwork was done in the five southeastern states of Nigeria. Fieldwork comprised visiting key locations and cities in this region as landscapes of memory and where the activities of neo-Biafran movements took place.

The research provides a historical and contemporaneous analysis of memories of the Nigeria-Biafra War. It demonstrates the nuances in the making of Nigeria-Biafra War memories and why these memories continue to stymie and stunt Nigeria’s post–civil war nation-building project from becoming a more just and inclusive one. It unveiled the making of “official” memories by the state and the interrogation and contestation of these memories by opposing forces. Official memories conceal and disenfranchise other memories, but also perform the ideological task of projecting the state as the sole owner of war memories in post–civil war Nigeria. The research complicates this official narrative by exploring memory production in the Nigerian state as a continuously contested and conflicting project. This involves interrogating the ownership, production, and consumption of extant official war memories, understanding the different forces at play in inscribing and entrenching or subverting and challenging these memories, and the manifold ways in which diverse identities, classes, regions, and intellectual traditions simultaneously project memories of the war in post–civil war Nigeria.

Bibliography

1. 2016: "Shared Histories, Divided Memories: Mediating and Navigating the Tensions in Nigeria-Biafra War Discourses,"Africa Today, Vol. 63, No. 1: 2-21.

2. 2017: "Bringing 'Biafra' Back In: Narrative, Identity and the Politics of Non-Reconciliation in Nigeria,"National Identities, (Forthcoming DOI link: https://doi.org/10.1080/14608944.2017.1279133).

3. (Forthcoming): Memory, Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Post-Civil War South- eastern Nigeria, APN Working Papers Series, African Peacebuilding Network (APN), Social Science Research Council, New York.

Desistance from Right-Wing Extremism

Pete G. Simi, School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Nebraska

Research Grant, 2012

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The research grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation provided the funds to conduct intensive life history interviews with an initial sample of thirty-five former North America–based far-right extremists. Interviews for this project were completed between 2012 and 2014, although additional subjects have since been interviewed and the sample is now 102 former far-right extremists. The HFG project focused on examining the disengagement process from far-right extremism, although the design of the life history protocol also meant that unique data regarding childhood and adolescent experiences, the entry process into extremism, and different facets of the person’s involvement were also collected.

While far-right extremism has a long history in the United States and across the globe, the recent resurgence of far-right movements has spurred renewed interest in the topic. The attention directed toward the “alt-right,” the electoral success of populist candidates, and a surge of far-right violence underscore the need to understand the factors that help explain involvement as well as the factors that lead people to leave these movements and what can be done to help facilitate disengagement. The results from the life history interviews shed light on several of these issues and are now being used in partnership with Life After Hate to provide intervention services to assist individuals in the disengagement process.

First, the interview findings helped generate a multidimensional risk factor model for how individuals become involved in far-right extremism (Simi, Sporer, and Bubolz 2016). In short, we found that individuals reported experiencing a number of untreated trauma during childhood, such as physical and sexual abuse, parental abandonment, and family substance abuse. In line with decades of research, individuals also reported experiencing heightened levels of negative emotions such as depression and anger as a consequence of the trauma. In turn, individuals engaged in various forms of misconduct as part of a downward spiral. As such, involvement in extremism provided a mechanism for individuals to address these problems by offering generic solutions such as a surrogate family, protection, and shelter.

Our findings suggest that hate may have addictive qualities and, in some cases, result in potentially permanent consequences that make leaving more complicated than previously thought.

The interview data also produced important findings about the disengagement process suggesting the following: a lack of organizational trust and dissatisfaction with leadership (Windisch, Ligon, and Simi 2017); the importance of anger in the disengagement process (Simi, Windisch, Harris, and Ligon 2018), and the development of positive relationships with individuals from different racial and religious backgrounds (Bubolz and Simi 2015). We also found violence was an important factor in terms of promoting disengagement. In some cases, individuals involved in high levels of violence reported experiencing “burnout,” while other individuals reported experiencing moral apprehension from either direct involvement or vicarious involvement (e.g., watching the television coverage of the casualties from the Oklahoma City bombing).

To examine the long-term consequences of extremism, we discussed the overlap between identity residual and addiction processes in a recent article in the American Sociological Review (Simi, Blee, DeMichele, and Windisch 2017). Our findings suggest that hate may have addictive qualities and, in some cases, result in potentially permanent consequences that make leaving more complicated than previously thought.

Bibliography

1. Simi, Pete, Kathy Blee, Matthew DeMichele, and Steven Windisch. 2017. “Addicted to Hate?: Identity Residual among Former White Supremacists.” American Sociological Review 82, 6: 1167-87.

2. Simi, Pete, Karyn Sporer and Bryan Bubolz. 2016. “Narratives of Childhood Adversities and Adolescent Misconduct as Precursors to Violent Extremism: A Life-Course Criminological Approach.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency, 53, 4: 536-63.

Stress Reactivity to Provocation and Aggression in Early Adulthood: Do Early Victimization and Regulation Processes Matter?

Isabelle Ouellet-Morin, Criminology, Université de Montreal

Research Grant, 2013

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There is a relative consensus about the detrimental impact of childhood maltreatment on mental health and behavioral problems later in life, including aggression behavior. Prior research suggests that this association may, in part, be explained by neurophysiological stress mechanisms designed to support adaptation to changing environments. Moreover, very little is known on the reasons why individuals from the general population aggress others in comparison to those who do not (e.g., dating violence, bullying, public shootings, road rage, and violent encounters with strangers). To this end, we invited 160 participants to come to our laboratory, of which 60 had reported having been maltreated as children, whereas the remaining participants did not. A wide range of neurophysiological measures was measured in the context of a laboratory-based stress paradigm and in response to provocation, including the stress hormone cortisol, cardiac measures, testosterone and DNA methylation (i.e., modifications in the chemistry of the DNA that have the potential to alter genetic expression without changing the DNA sequence).

In a paper recently accepted in Development and Psychopathology, we reported that maltreated participants had higher cortisol responses to stress in comparison to controls, but this association was more complex than previously thought. Indeed, a shift from lower-to-higher cortisol responses was noted as the severity of maltreatment experiences increased, providing further empirical support for the idea that persistent dysregulation of the cortisol response to stress may arise in the context of past exposure to maltreatment.

These findings invite practitioners to consider coping strategies and stress regulation as potential targets for preventing or reducing mental health and behavioral difficulties.

Our research team has also brought light on findings suggesting a synergic effect between maltreatment and cortisol response to stress, whereby these early adverse experiences were associated with more depressive symptoms, aggression, and anger rumination in adulthood among participants with moderate-to-higher cortisol response to stress.

Conversely, childhood maltreatment was not associated with these negative outcomes for those who exhibited a lower pattern of reactivity. Also, being interested to generate knowledge that could be mobilized to support the well-being of individuals who were maltreated during childhood, we offered preliminary evidence suggesting that maltreatment was associated with a more frequent use of emotion-oriented coping strategies (e.g., become very frustrated when faced with difficult situations), although the opposite was found for task-oriented coping strategies (e.g., trying to change their behavior to solve the problem). Importantly, these strategies have generally been hypothesized to signal more and less mental health and behavioral difficulties, respectively. Altogether, these findings invite practitioners to consider coping strategies and stress regulation as potential targets for preventing or reducing mental health and behavioral difficulties, including aggression, among young male adults with a history of childhood maltreatment.

Bibliography

1. Ouellet-Morin I, Robitaille MP, Langevin S, Cantave C, Brendgen M, & Lupien S. (accepted). Enduring effect of childhood maltreatment on cortisol and heart rate responses to stress: The moderating role of severity of experiences. Development and Psychopathology.

“None of Us Dared Say Anything”: Mass Killing in a Bosnian Community During World War II and the Postwar Culture of Silence

Max Bergholz, Concordia University

Research Grant, 2013, 2014

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The seeds of this research project first crystalized in September 2006 while I was sifting through un-catalogued documents in the basement of the Archive of Bosnia-Herzegovina in Sarajevo. One day I discovered a handful of blue folders, which stopped me in my tracks. The papers inside—a confidential communist government investigation of “Sites of Mass Executions” during 1941-1945—mentioned repeatedly a largely unknown community: Kulen Vakuf, a small town and its environs in northwest Bosnia. There, during two days and nights in September 1941, the documents indicated that approximately 2,000 people—men, women, and children “of the Muslim population”—were killed by their neighbors, described as “insurgents” and “Serbs.” The folders offered only a glimpse of this multi-ethnic community’s sudden descent into intercommunal violence. But this snapshot provided a compelling micro lens through which to embark on a search for macro answers to questions of global significance: What causes intercommunal violence among neighbors in multi-ethnic communities? How does such violence then affect their identities and relations? My research project was part of the search for answers to these questions. 

During my fieldwork, I sought to reconstruct the history of this multi-ethnic community’s collapse into intercommunal killing during the summer of 1941 and the resulting transformation of its residents’ lives. Contrary to a widely held view that sees nationalism leading to violence, I discovered that the upheavals wrought by local killing created dramatically new perceptions of “ethnicity”—of oneself, supposed “brothers,” and those perceived as “others.” As a consequence, the violence forged new communities, new forms and configurations of power, and new practices of nationalism. The history of this community was marked by an unexpected burst of locally executed violence by the few, which functioned as a generative force in transforming the identities, relations, and lives of the many. As such, telling the story of this largely unknown Balkan community in 1941 provides a powerful means through which to rethink fundamental assumptions about the interrelationships among ethnicity, nationalism, and violence, both during World War II and more broadly.

Local-level analysis revealed how violence created new, under-researched dynamics of nationalism in which daily incidents triggered traumatic memories of violence that led to momentary eruptions of "sudden nationhood."

In my research, I devoted sizable attention to analyzing the period of April-September 1941, during which time, unprecedented levels of locally executed violence occurred in my region of study. I sought to explain why some neighbors, who previously lived together in peace for long periods of time, engaged in violence on an ethnic axis and why this violence occurred in certain locations and at certain times, but not others. Yet, during my research, I uncovered archival documents and unpublished manuscripts that allowed me to push beyond solely analyzing causes of and variations in violence. They enabled me to illuminate how intercommunal violence can telescope multiple, simultaneous transformations in the meaning of ethnic categories and boundaries and, in so doing, can create new forms of local communities, particularly those whose members seek to escalate killing and, counter-intuitively, those who seek to restrain killing.

Triangulating among archival documents, memoirs, and oral history interviews, I followed the history of this local community into the decades after the cataclysmic events of 1941, to when communism was built, during which time, identities and social relations continued to be deeply influenced by the experience and memory of local violence. Here, local-level analysis revealed how violence created new, under-researched dynamics of nationalism, in which daily incidents triggered traumatic memories of violence that led to momentary eruptions of “sudden nationhood.” Taken together, my project suggests an overarching argument: Local, intercommunal violence is not merely destructive in a host of ways; rather, it can be an immensely generative force in the creation of social identities and configurations of power.

Bibliography

1. Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2016).

2. "Sudden Nationhood: The Microdynamics of Intercommunal Relations in Bosnia-Herzegovina after World War II." American Historical Review 118, no. 3 (June 2013): 679-707.

3. "As if nothing ever happened: Massacres, Missing Corpses, and Silence in a Bosnia Community." In Élisabett Anstett and Jean-Marc Dreyfus, eds., Destruction and Human Remains. Disposal and Concealment in Genocide and Mass Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 15-45.

Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization in Japan, Taiwan, and Korea 1895–1945

Sayaka Chatani, History, Columbia University

Dissertation Fellowship, 2013

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By the turn of the twentieth century, “rural youth” came to symbolize the spirit of hard work, masculinity, and patriotism. The village youth associations, the seinendan, carried that ideal and spread it all over the Japanese empire. This dissertation examines how the movement to create “rural youth” unfolded in different parts of the empire and how young farmers responded to this mobilization. By examining three rural areas in Miyagi (northern Japan), Xinzhu (Taiwan), and South Ch’ungch’Òng (Korea), I argue that the social tensions and local dynamics, such as the divisions between urban and rural, the educated and the uneducated, and the young and the old, determined the motivations and emotional drives behind youth participation in the mobilization.

To invert the analytical viewpoint from the state to youth themselves, I use the term “Rural Youth Industry.” This indicates the social sphere in which agrarian youth transformed themselves from perpetual farmers to success-oriented modern youth, shared an identity as “rural youth” by incorporating imperial and global youth activism, and developed a sense of moral superiority over the urban, the educated, and the old. The social dynamics of the “Rural Youth Industry” explain why many of these youth so internalized the ideology of Japanese nationalism that they volunteered for military service and fought for the empire.

The spread of the Rural Youth Industry most clearly exemplifies a central characteristic of the Japanese empire, which is summarized as its drive to pursue nation-building across its imperial domains, forming a "nation-empire."

This dissertation offers a new perspective to the study of modern empires in several respects. It provides a new way to dissect the colonial empire, challenging the methodological trap of emphasizing the present-day national boundaries of Japan, Taiwan, and Korea. It highlights rural modernity, often neglected in the urban-centric historiography of colonial modernity. It also brings together global, regional, and local histories. The seinendan were part of the global waves of imperialism, nation-state building, agrarianism, and the rise of youth. I argue that the spread of the “Rural Youth Industry” most clearly exemplifies a central characteristic of the Japanese empire, which is summarized as its drive to pursue nation-building across its imperial domains, forming a “nation-empire.” This dissertation examines the operations of the “nation-empire” at the grassroots level by comparing the social environments of mobilized agrarian youth. Situating the practices of the Japanese empire in these broader contexts as well as the specific local conditions of village societies, it illuminates the nature of mass mobilization and the shifting relationship between the state and society in the first half of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

1. "Between ‘Rural Youth’ and Empire: Social and Emotional Dynamics of Youth Mobilization in the Countryside of Colonial Taiwan under Japan’s Total War,” The American Historical Review 122, no.2 (April 2017): 371-398.