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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.
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.
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.
"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.
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 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.
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.
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