Objects of War: The Material Culture of Conflict and Displacement
Leora Auslander and Tara Zahra
Abstract
Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. This book illuminates the ways in which people have used th ... More
Historians have become increasingly interested in material culture as both a category of analysis and as a teaching tool. What new insights can historians gain about the past by thinking about things? A central object (and consequence) of modern warfare is the radical destruction and transformation of the material world. And yet we know little about the role of material culture in the history of war and forced displacement: objects carried in flight; objects stolen on battlefields; objects expropriated, reappropriated, and remembered. This book illuminates the ways in which people have used things to grapple with the social, cultural, and psychological upheavals wrought by war and forced displacement. Chapters consider theft and pillaging as strategies of conquest; soldiers' relationships with their weapons; and the use of clothing and domestic goods by prisoners of war, extermination camp inmates, freed people, and refugees to make claims and to create a kind of normalcy. While studies of migration and material culture have proliferated in recent years, as have histories of the Napoleonic, colonial, World Wars, and postcolonial wars, few have focused on the movement of people and things in times of war across two centuries. This focus, in combination with a broad temporal canvas, serves historians and others well as they seek to push beyond the written word.
Keywords:
material culture,
modern warfare,
forced displacement,
theft,
pillaging,
conquest,
weapons,
prisoners of war,
extermination camp,
refugees
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2018 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781501720079 |
| Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: January 2019 |
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501720079.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Leora Auslander, editor
University of Chicago
Tara Zahra, editor
University of Chicago
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