Marching across occupied France in 1944, American GI Leroy Stewart had neither death nor glory on his mind: he was worried about his underwear. "I ran into a new problem when we walked," Stewart wrote, "the shorts and I didn't get along. They would crawl up on me all the time." Complaints of physical discomfort like Stewart's-or worse-pervade infantrymen's memories of the European theater, whether the soldiers were British, American, German, or French. Wet, freezing misery with no end in sight-this was life for millions of enlisted men. Crawling underwear may have been a small price to pay for the liberation of millions of people, but in the utter wretchedness of the moment, it was quite natural for soldiers like Stewart to lose sight of that end. Sheer Misery trains a humane and unsparing eye on the corporeal experiences of the soldiers who fought in Belgium, France, and Italy during the last two years of the war. In the horrendously unhygienic and often lethal conditions of the front line, their bodies broke down, stubbornly declaring their needs for warmth, rest, and good nutrition. Feet became too swollen to march, fingers too frozen to pull triggers; stomachs cramped, and diarrhea stained underwear and pants. Turning away from the accounts of high-level military strategy that dominate many WWII histories, acclaimed historian Mary Louise Roberts instead relies on diaries and letters to bring to life visceral sense memories like the moans of the "screaming meemies," the acrid smell of cordite, and the shockingly mundane sight of rotting corpses. As Roberts writes, "For soldiers who fought, the war was above all about their bodies. It was as bodies that they had been recruited, trained, and deployed. Their job was to injure and kill bodies but also be injured and killed." Told in inimitable style by one of our most distinctive historians of the Second World War, Sheer Misery gives readers both an unprecedented look at the ground-level world of the common soldier and a deeply felt rendering of the experience of being a body in war.

"Like big black umbrellas, they rain down on the fields across the way, and then disappear behind the black line of the hedges." Silent parachutes dotting the night sky--that's how one woman in Normandy in June of 1944 learned that the D-Day invasion was under way. Though they yearned for liberation, the French in Normandy nonetheless had to steel themselves for war, knowing that their homes and land and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack. Already battered by years of Nazi occupation, they knew they had one more trial to undergo even as freedom beckoned.
With "D-Day through French Eyes," Mary Louise Roberts turns the usual stories of D-Day around, taking readers across the Channel to view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her history from an impressive range of gripping first-person accounts of the invasion as seen by French citizens throughout the region. A farm family notices that cabbage is missing from their garden--then discovers that the guilty culprits are American paratroopers hiding in the cowshed. Fishermen rescue pilots from the wreck of their B-17, only to struggle to find clothes big enough to disguise them as civilians. A young man learns how to estimate the altitude of bombers and to determine whether a bomb was whistling overhead or silently headed straight for them. In small towns across Normandy, civilians hid wounded paratroopers, often at the risk of their own lives. When the allied infantry arrived, they guided soldiers to hidden paths and little-known bridges, giving them crucial advantages over the German occupiers. Through story after story, Roberts builds up an unprecedented picture of the face of battle as seen by grateful, if worried, civilians.
As she did in her acclaimed account of GIs in postwar France, "What Soldiers Do," Roberts here reinvigorates and reinvents a story we thought we knew. The result is a fresh perspective on the heroism, sacrifice, and achievement of D-Day.

A gripping account of what it was like to be in the midst of the Norman Invasion on D-Day and immediately afterward. Silent parachutes dotting the night sky-that's how one woman in Normandy in June 1944 learned that the D-Day invasion was underway. Though they yearned for liberation, the people of Normandy steeled themselves for further warfare, knowing that their homes, land, and fellow citizens would have to bear the brunt of the attack. In D-Day through French Eyes, Mary Louise Roberts resets our view of the usual stories of that momentous operation, taking readers across the Channel to view the invasion anew. Roberts builds her history from an impressive range of gripping first-person accounts from French citizens, reinvigorating a story we thought we knew. The result is a fresh perspective on the heroism, sacrifice, and achievement of D-Day.

How do you convince men to charge across heavily mined beaches into deadly machine-gun fire? Do you appeal to their bonds with their fellow soldiers, their patriotism, their desire to end tyranny and mass murder? Certainly--but if you're the US Army in 1944, you also try another tack: you dangle the lure of beautiful French women, waiting just on the other side of the wire, ready to reward their liberators in oh so many ways.
That's not the picture of the Greatest Generation that we've been given, but it's the one Mary Louise Roberts paints to devastating effect in "What Soldiers Do." Drawing on an incredible range of sources, including news reports, propaganda and training materials, official planning documents, wartime diaries, and memoirs, Roberts tells the fascinating and troubling story of how the US military command systematically spread--and then exploited--the myth of French women as sexually experienced and available. The resulting chaos--ranging from flagrant public sex with prostitutes to outright rape and rampant venereal disease--horrified the war-weary and demoralized French population. The sexual predation, and the blithe response of the American military leadership, also caused serious friction between the two nations just as they were attempting to settle questions of long-term control over the liberated territories and the restoration of French sovereignty.
While never denying the achievement of D-Day, or the bravery of the soldiers who took part, "What Soldiers Do" reminds us that history is always more useful--and more interesting--when it is most honest, and when it goes beyond the burnished beauty of nostalgia to grapple with the real lives and real mistakes of the people who lived it.

According to most histories of French archives and libraries, the nineteenth century was a period of slow but steady recovery from the trauma of the revolutionary era. In contrast, Moore argues that the organization of archives and libraries in nineteenth-century France was neither steady nor progressive. By following the development of the Ecole des Chartes, the state school for archivists and librarians, Moore shows that conceptions of "order" changed dramatically from one decade to the next. More important, she argues that these changing notions of "order" were directly connected to contemporary shifts in state politics. Since each new political regime had its own conceptions of both national history and public knowledge, each one worked to "restore order" in a different way.

In the raucous decade following World War I, newly blurred boundaries between male and female created fears among the French that theirs was becoming a civilization without sexes. This new gender confusion became a central metaphor for the War's impact on French culture and led to a marked increase in public debate concerning female identity and woman's proper role. Mary Louise Roberts examines how in these debates French society came to grips with the catastrophic horrors of the Great War.
In sources as diverse as parliamentary records, newspaper articles, novels, medical texts, writings on sexology, and vocational literature, Roberts discovers a central question: how to come to terms with rapid economic, social, and cultural change and articulate a new order of social relationships. She examines the role of French trauma concerning the War in legislative efforts to ban propaganda for abortion and contraception, and explains anxieties about the decline of maternity by a crisis in gender relations that linked soldiery, virility, and paternity.
Through these debates, Roberts locates the seeds of actual change. She shows how the willingness to entertain, or simply the need to condemn, nontraditional gender roles created an indecisiveness over female identity that ultimately subverted even the most conservative efforts to return to traditional gender roles and irrevocably altered the social organization of gender in postwar France.

In fin-de-siecle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home.
Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper" La Fronde"; the journalists Severine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of "La men--even" itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men-even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for "La Fronde" put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny.
Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, "Disruptive Acts" will be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.

In fin-de-siecle France, politics were in an uproar, and gender roles blurred as never before. Into this maelstrom stepped the "new women," a group of primarily urban, middle-class French women who became the objects of intense public scrutiny. Some remained single, some entered nontraditional marriages, and some took up the professions of medicine and law, journalism and teaching. All of them challenged traditional notions of womanhood by living unconventional lives and doing supposedly "masculine" work outside the home.
Mary Louise Roberts examines a constellation of famous new women active in journalism and the theater, including Marguerite Durand, founder of the women's newspaper" La Fronde"; the journalists Severine and Gyp; and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Roberts demonstrates how the tolerance for playacting in both these arenas allowed new women to stage acts that profoundly disrupted accepted gender roles. The existence of "La men--even" itself was such an act, because it demonstrated that women could write just as well about the same subjects as men--even about the volatile Dreyfus Affair. When female reporters for "La Fronde" put on disguises to get a scoop or wrote under a pseudonym, and when actresses played men on stage, they demonstrated that gender identities were not fixed or natural, but inherently unstable. Thanks to the adventures of new women like these, conventional domestic femininity was exposed as a choice, not a destiny.
Lively, sophisticated, and persuasive, "Disruptive Acts" will be a major work not just for historians, but also for scholars of cultural studies, gender studies, and the theater.