Traditional accounts of the Allied grand strategic debates during World War II stress the divergence between the American and British approaches to waging war against the Axis. In these interpretations, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs were the primary shapers of grand strategy and policy. However, this chapter argues these studies have focused too much on certain figures and have relatively marginalized others who played crucial roles in shaping these debates. One of those comparatively overlooked figures was Henry Stimson, who was a vital player on the American side in influencing the politics of US strategy and pushing it toward launching a cross-Channel invasion of France. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were often internally divided over how to win the war and struggled to influence policy accordingly. The lack of focused political coordination between the War Department and the JCS made it difficult to convince Roosevelt to open a second front in Western Europe, which opened the door to following the British Mediterranean strategy for defeating Germany, starting with the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was astonishingly prolific, writing sermons, letters, dialogues, a monastic rule, treatises on a variety of subjects, and works of scriptural exegesis, with Genesis and the Psalms being his special interests. Among his best-known works is the Confessions, which is sui generis in ancient literature: an autobiography laced with plaintive prayer, philosophical speculation, and raw self-examination. It relates a journey both spiritual and geographical, one that follows a path of lust and ambition toward conversion and baptism and from the North African countryside where Augustine was born to Carthage, Rome, and Milan, great cities of the western Roman Empire. Written in a gorgeous, protean Latin into which are woven myriad references to classical and biblical texts, the Confessions is a literary masterwork.

In what follows, Tertullian offers his argument to Christians – those who participate in his “discipline” (disciplina) – about why they should not attend any of the public entertainment on offer in a typical late Roman city like his, Carthage. The “shows” he writes about include races at the track, theatrical productions, and gladiatorial contests, and he uses polemic, reason, and the imagination to convince his reader that all of them are hopelessly tied to idolatry.

Augustine was plunged into the Donatist controversy upon becoming bishop of Hippo in 395. In the wake of the Diocletianic persecutions in the early fourth century, the Donatists had split from the group whom Augustine called and considered “catholics” (i.e., “worldwide Christians”), creating a schism in the North African church that lasted for well over a century. The very nature of the church was in dispute: Donatists believed that the church must retain its purity and holiness, separating itself from sinners, whereas catholics maintained that the church could tolerate the presence of sinners as long as consent was not given to their sin. Donatists believed that catholics were implicated in the sin of those who lapsed in the Diocletianic persecutions by handing over the scriptures to imperial authorities; they believed that only by retaining its purity in this way could the church guard against catholic contagion. Furthermore, they regarded any sacrament administered by a cleric in a state of sin as invalid, and accordingly former catholics entering their communion had to be baptized (for the first time, in their view).

Among his many duties as bishop of Hippo in North Africa, Augustine (354–430) oversaw the reception of converts into the church. When newcomers to Christianity were ready to prepare for baptism, they were designated as catechumens. The catechumenate was a period of training, often lasting several years, in which newcomers learned how to live as Christians. At the beginning of each Lent, those catechumens who wished to be baptized at the upcoming Easter would submit their names and thereby formally become “petitioners” (competentes). During Lent the petitioners engaged in a number of ascetical and ritual practices designed to complete their initiation into the Christian way of life. These included fasting, undergoing periodic exorcisms, and receiving special instruction from the bishop by listening to sermons that covered a broad range of Christian doctrine and practice. Two weeks before Easter, petitioners participated in a ceremony known as the traditio symboli, the “handing over” of the creed. At this ceremony the bishop formally recited the creed, with the expectation that afterward the petitioners would memorize it. There was a similar ceremony that “handed over” the Lord’s prayer (traditio orationis). At the Easter Vigil, the petitioners would “hand back” the creed (redditio symboli) and the Lord’s prayer (redditio orationis) by reciting them before the congregation and fully participate in the Eucharistic liturgy for the first time, in the course of which they received the sacraments of initiation: baptism, chrismation, and Eucharist. During the Easter octave – the eight days from Easter Sunday to the following Sunday, counting inclusively – the newly baptized, whom Augustine called “newborns,” would attend sermons that unpacked the meaning of the sacraments they had just experienced and received at the Easter Vigil.

What little we know about the Latin author Commodian comes directly from his own poems – the Instructions and the Apologetic Poem (also known as the Poem about Two Peoples). Gennadius (On Illustrious Men 15) mentions him but relies on Commodian’s poems just as we do. Commodian was most likely writing in North Africa, probably Carthage, in the third quarter of the third century. He has a deep affinity for and familiarity with Cyprian, and was likely a direct contemporary, though it appears he himself never held ecclesial office. Commodian seems to have been a layperson whose own journey from “frequenting the [pagan] temples” (1, 1.5) to becoming a “Law-inspired” – that is, “scripture-inspired” – Christian (1, 1.6) prompted him to make his own efforts to influence his various communities in Carthage. It seems likely that he identified as ethnically Syrian (hence the final poem’s title, where the author of the Instructions identifies himself as “the man from Gaza”), and that, prior to his time in Carthage, he spent substantial formative years in Aquileia.

Thascius Caecilianus Cyprianus – better known to history as Cyprian – converted to Christianity around 246 after a successful secular career as a rhetorician. Soon he was ordained to the priesthood and in 248 or 249 was consecrated as the bishop of Carthage. Not long after this, in late 249, the persecution of Emperor Decius broke out and Cyprian fled Carthage out of a concern that his church not be deprived of its bishop, as had recently happened in Rome and elsewhere. When the persecution ended in 251, in its wake there arose in Carthage and Rome several theological and pastoral problems, particularly over the readmission into the church of those who had lapsed in the persecution. Cyprian adopted a measured policy of readmitting the lapsed after a period of suitable repentance, and this policy was adopted also by Cornelius, the new bishop of Rome. He lays out this approach in On the Lapsed (De lapsis), written in 251. But laxists in Carthage, who supported the lenient readmission of the lapsed, and rigorists in Rome, who denied that readmission was even permissible, opposed the official policy, leading to schisms in both places.

This chapter focuses on Poland and France to discuss examples of the emergence of Jewish armed resistance. It stresses different forms of resistance over time and the shift it took when Jewish activists became aware of mass murder. In the east, the creation of ghettos and the mass shootings and deportations of Jews to extermination camps led the Jewish underground and many individual Jews to engage in armed resistance. In the west, armed resistance emerged in response to mass roundups. Jewish resistance in both eastern and western contexts relied, in part, on longstanding personal networks within Jewish organizations and communities, which transcended linguistic, political, and intra-communal divides.

Tertullian (ca. 170–225) was a Christian writer whose work provides some of the scant evidence we have for North African Christianity of that era. Little is known about his life, and details from later Christian writers like Jerome and Eusebius are dubious at best. What we can say with certainty is that Tertullian became increasingly rigorist over the course of his life – with respect to ethics, doctrine, and communal boundaries. Indeed, his increasing rigorism aligned him with a broader movement of rigorists in the North African Christian community, the Church of the New Prophecy (traditionally known as Montanism). This Christian revivalist movement began in Phrygia during the mid-second century but migrated to various regions throughout the Mediterranean basin, including Carthage. The Church of the New Prophecy understood the history of salvation as one marked by increasingly intense moral rigor: the Old Testament patriarchs were allowed conduct (polygamy, for example) that was prohibited by Jesus and the apostles in the New Testament. Indeed, God’s revelation continued in the oracular statements of “new prophets” like Montanus, Priscilla, and Maximilla, statements that were understood as equally authoritative utterances of the Spirit.

In his autobiographical Confessions, Augustine (354–430) recounted his own circuitous path to Christianity. When he later became bishop of Hippo in North Africa, Augustine oversaw the reception of converts into the church. So Augustine was intimately aware of dynamics of conversion and the many forms it could take from both personal and pastoral experience. In Sermon 279, which was preached in Carthage on Sunday, June 23, 401, Augustine touches upon several facets of conversion to Christianity.

How the Fatimids, locally considered foreign easterners and heretical Shiʿa, negotiated sufficient acceptance in the Maghrib to withstand fierce opposition from Maliki Sunnis and Ibadi Kharijis, raises key issues concerning the formation of Islamic empires. Despite a plethora of enemies among the population, their rule endured and even prospered. What we know has grown substantially with new sources about the interaction of Ismaili authorities with the local ʿulamāʾ and the inner dynamics of their daʿwa and its allocation of restricted knowledge to members. Conversion of sections of the local elite and the demotion or expulsion of hostile elements helped. An internal document preserved by the daʿwa explains how its adherents were expected to prove their loyalty and the reward for doing so. The Ismailis existed both as one component in the new society and yet also remained apart as a community of Believers within the broader society of Muslims.

At the end of 1939, the newly established 18th Infantry Brigade consisted of four battalions: 2/9 Battalion, 2/20 Battalion, 2/11 Battalion and 2/12 Battalion. As part of the 9th Infantry Division, the brigade was scheduled to depart Australia in May 1940 to join the British campaigns in the Middle East. In honour of this impending deployment, the 18th Brigade participated in a parade through the streets of Sydney, minus one battalion because the 2/11 Battalion had been detached to leave early for action in the Middle East.1 With the impending reorganisation of Australian brigades from four to three battalions, the 2/11 Battalion would not return to the 18th Brigade for the duration of the war. The 2/11 Battalion would, however, join the 19th Brigade in North Africa to participate in more than a dozen battles and campaigns across North Africa, the Middle East and the SWPA.