The dictatorial regime of Jorge Ubico silenced virtually all internal sociopolitical opposition in Guatemala during the interwar period (1931–44). To circumvent this restrictive political terrain, journalists Luz Valle and Gloria Menéndez Mina created literary journals ostensibly published with advice on home making and personal style which furtively cultivated an intellectual space that reflected transnational antifascist conversations. These journals served as incubators for antifascist, democratic ideals during a period of intense intellectual repression, ideals that revolutionary reformers translated directly into social and political democracy created by the October Revolution in 1944. Within a deeply patriarchal society, the journals’ gender analysis also expanded revolutionary vision of justice to include the political and social inclusion of women. Therefore, the extent to which the Guatemalan Revolution embraced antifascist ideals can be traced in part to the ideas published in Nosotras and Azul.

This chapter reveals how Caribbean Basin democracy and international antifascism came together during the 1944 Masacre Sampedrana. For over a decade, Honduran, Nicaraguan, and Dominican exiles protested against the respective dictatorships of Tiburcio Carías, Anastasio Somoza, and Rafael Trujillo. With World War II, exiles tapped into the international struggle against fascism to invigorate their local anti-dictatorial efforts. They blended the Four Freedoms, the Atlantic Charter, and other antifascist symbols with their longstanding democratic ideals while networking with likeminded allies. Their struggle culminated in July 1944 as teachers, workers, and students utilized antifascist symbols when women spearheaded protests against Carías’ dictatorship. After the regime violently responded, anti-dictatorial individuals and groups throughout the greater Caribbean continued to blend antifascism and Latin American democracy to denounce the horrific Masacre Sampedrana and direct regional and international attention on the Honduran dictatorship.

The training of two all-black infantry divisions at Fort Huachuca during World War II is unprecedented in American history. Although it provides an insight into the contradictions of the US Army’s racial policy, this experiment has never been described before. This microhistory explores the agency of soldiers in the face of segregation and of their being treated as if they were inferior by the army.

The chapter illustrates what it meant for Carolyn Beatrice Parker (1917–1966) to be a Black woman physicist in the US during the Jim Crow era. Her father, a physician, and her mother, a teacher, shepherded her into Fisk University, an historically Black college. As a physics major she studied infrared spectroscopy with the Black physicist Elmer Imes, graduating with a BS in 1938. She later attended the University of Michigan, obtaining an MA in physics in 1941. But like many Black women, she spent time before and after graduate school teaching in the K–12 system. In 1943, she became a research physicist at the Aircraft Radio Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, where she stayed for four years. Although she co-authored a governmental report about her work on signal attenuation in coaxial cables, her name only appeared in the acknowledgments of the ensuing academic publications, thus partly obscuring her contributions. In 1947, Fisk University welcomed Parker on the faculty, but she soon after enrolled in a nuclear physics PhD program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. After dropping out, she worked as a laboratory technician until she grew too ill and died a short time later.

This chapter examines the redefinition of “youth” that occurred during World War II as a result of young men’s conscription and the rise of the United States as the global superpower, as well as its consequences for young Americans. It specifically looks at the creation and implementation of federal educational programs for soldiers, such as the Army Specialized Training Program and the educational provisions of the 1944 G. I. Bill of Rights. The chapter also demonstrates how these programs built upon the framework that had been developed in earlier decades, which categorized youth according to their value for national security and established military service as a “democratic” educational opportunity.

This chapter provides readers with an overview of the book, as well as its major argument. It argues that, while historians have traditionally treated war and military issues as temporary issues that affected American society only during wartime and had little impact on society during peacetime, the issues were, in fact, fundamental to political and cultural changes in American society during the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter also outlines how the remainder of the book will support this argument by focusing on how the relationship formed during this time between national security, education, and the cultural conception of “youth” strongly influenced young people’s educational experiences and had significant social consequences that still exist today.

The history of postwar clothing can be understood only with prior reference to wartime conditions. The reorientation of civilian industries (including textiles and garment manufacture) towards military production, severance of prewar shipping routes and supply lines and redirection of millions of workers into uniform all contributed to a chronic shortage of garments and footwear available for civilian purchase. Civilian scarcity existed alongside, and largely because of, a surfeit of military apparel. Clothes rationing and campaigns to ‘make do and mend’ were introduced both in Britain and in Nazi Germany. Wartime planners in Britain and the newly formed United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), set up in 1943, anticipated that the end of hostilities would leave millions of people in areas hitherto occupied by Axis forces in dire need of fundamental human necessities. Along with shelter, food and medicine, humanity in extremis would need clothing and footwear. ‘Postwar’ efforts to recirculate secondhand garments, manufacture civilian apparel and repurpose military surplus all began before fighting ceased, forcing us to rethink conventional periodization of when, and how definitively, World War II ended. Victory’s texture was extremely uneven.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

Making Do unpicks the devastating impact of World War II by focusing on fabric. As the war ended, a ‘textile famine’ loomed. Carruthers argues that material stuff – garments and footwear, as well as blankets and bedding – was critical to how Britons refashioned relationships within Britain and with allies and former enemies. Clothing lay at the heart of an interlocking series of postwar entitlement struggles. Clothes rationing, introduced in 1941, lasted until 1949. With clothing and shoes chronically scarce, policymakers, military commanders and humanitarians had to adjudicate whose needs to prioritize as uniforms were discarded in Britain and abroad. Service personnel, prisoners of war, former inhabitants of Axis camps all required ‘civilianized’ clothing as they reconstructed postwar lives. Making Do foregrounds mobility as central to the history of postwar adjustment, as millions of people and garments changed places and shapes. Military surplus found myriad new uses with people continuing to ‘make do and mend’. Carruthers offers an intimate portrait of everyday life in postwar Britain – and in transient spaces inhabited by veterans, relief workers, displaced persons and ‘GI brides’ – as they attempted to reconstruct new relationships in an age of persistent austerity shadowed by catastrophe.

This chapter explores how selective service laws for World War II both built on and changed the relationship between youth, education, and national security that had been developed in the preceding decades. Through nationwide debates over what made the disproportionate draft of young men aged eighteen to twenty-five as American and democratic, adults reinterpreted the characteristics of “youth” that had been deemed serious problems in the 1930s. That is, the lack of advanced work experience now indicated immediate availability for military service, unstable lifestyle meant mobility, and mental malleability now signified adaptability to military discipline. The supporters of the youth draft also formalized the link between military duty and education, advocating for the formation of military-educational training for young soldiers with military value as a democratic and American method of conscripting youth.

On the face of it, total war would seem to be fundamentally and entirely at odds with the very notion of individual freedom. Yet the relationship between the two was more complicated than that. From the beginning of World War I, much propagandistic effort went into stressing the voluntariness of military or quasi-military service. At the same time, imposing discipline on complex societies triggered major tensions, unintended effects, and subversive behaviors, allowing for some unexpected gains in personal independence. In general, military conflicts exacerbated disputes about the very meaning of freedom – both while they were being fought and when they were being anticipated or commemorated. This chapter discusses three issues: the extent to which military mobilization and enemy occupation created room for female independence, the ways in which contemporaries understood conscription and soldiers coped with it, and the various means by which Europeans endeavored to free themselves from military conflict, from muddling through to principled resistance under Nazi occupation or during the Cold War.