The University of Vermont History Review, Volume XXVI 2015-2016
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The University of Vermont History Review Volume XXVI 2015-2016 0 i The UVM History Review is a yearly publication of the University of Vermont History Department. It seeks to publish scholarly essays and book reviews of a historical nature from current and past UVM students. EDITORIAL BOARD Senior Editor Adam Quinn Faculty Advisor Professor Francis Nicosia Fall 2015 Spring 2016 Erin Elizabeth Clauss Cullan Bendig Kieran O’Keefe Erin Elizabeth Clauss Elizabeth Van Horn Nate Gondelman Julia Walsh Sarah Holmes Ronald MacNeil Elizabeth Van Horn For ordering information please contact Kathy Carolin at The University of Vermont History Department 201 Wheeler House 133 South Prospect Street Burlington, Vermont 05405 Cover: UVM’s 1958 graduating class from The University of Vermont Alumni Magazine, vol. 39 no. 01 (July 1958). As described in the magazine: “…the graduating class lined up on the steps of Billings, having its official class picture taken by Mr. Louis L. McAllister, of Burlington. He has taken pictures of undergraduates and alumni for the past 48 years, and the number of UVM students and alumni who have appeared in the ground glass of his camera runs into the tens of thousands. Mr. McAllister, atop a 12-foot ladder, is using the panoramic camera he bought in 1915 – and it’s still going strong.” ii Contents: Letter from the Editor ........................................................................................................ iii Involuntary White Servitude and English Law ................................................................... 1 by Daniella Bassi With the Stroke of a Pen: Dorothy Thompson’s Call for Action, 1930-1945 ................... 20 by Kiara Day The Military Watershed of the Soviet-German War: The Battle of Kursk and the First Major Soviet Breakthrough ............................................................................................... 37 by Nate Gondelman The Psychological Life of Women in the Siege of Leningrad: Emotions, Motivation and Mental Disorders .............................................................................................................. 56 by Ronald MacNeil Profit, Ideology, and Guilt: A Brief History of IG Farben ............................................... 72 by John Marchinkoski Images of the Red Army Soldier in World War II: Mythologizing the Great Patriotic War ............................................................................ 84 by Brittany Miller The Crosses at Auschwitz: Identity Politics over Catholic Symbols in 1998 ................. 101 by Frances E. Solnick 2016 Phi Alpha Theta Inductees, UVM Chapter, Alpha Alpha Psi ............................... 112 History Department News ............................................................................................... 113 Author Biographies ......................................................................................................... 115 Editor Biographies .......................................................................................................... 116 ii Letter from the Editor Dear Readers, I am delighted to present to you the 2015-2016 University of Vermont History Review, which collects the very best historical work composed by the UVM undergraduate and graduate student body. Below you will find seven interesting and well-researched articles. The topics range from the psychology of women in the siege of Leningrad to the legal history of involuntary servitude in Britain. Notably, this issue features a substantial body of work focusing on World War II and Holocaust history. The diversity of approaches taken here to examine World War II and the Holocaust not only speaks to UVM’s strength in teaching the period, but also to the creative ways in which students continue to offer new perspectives on the war and its aftermath. I am very proud to have worked with such an excellent editorial staff this year. The editors of the History Review worked tirelessly in collaboration with the authors to ensure that each article was refined and revised until it was ready for publication. I could not have asked for a better or more dedicated group of people to work with throughout the year. The editors’ work lies behind the scenes throughout this volume, on every page and in every footnote, as they silently and thanklessly helped to make every article the best version of itself. As senior editor, I would like to thank each author and editor for their contributions to this year’s History Review. I would also like to give special thanks Professor Francis Nicosia, the faculty liaison for the History Review, as well as Kathleen Truax and Kathy Carolin for their assistance. move the word “image” to where it should Adam Quinn, May 23, 2016 iii 2 Involuntary White Servitude and English Law Daniella Bassi The birth of English Virginia in the early seventeenth century was like that of any infant in that it was quickly followed by hunger. In the case of colonial Virginia, the appetite was for labor rather than milk: there was a vast expanse of arable land to be divided up among wealthy venturers, cleared, and exploited in the form of tobacco plantations. The same was true of the choice Caribbean holdings—Barbados, Jamaica, and the Leeward Islands, among others—that the English Crown also acquired around this time, with the difference that sugar was to be the staple crop to which the land would be devoted. The inception of English North America, with its insatiable need for labor, coincided with a swell in the unemployed population of England1 due to the enclosure of common farmland (incentivized by an industrializing economy) and the residual effects of serfdom’s end.2 This large unemployed, destitute population was the source of most indentured servants of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This large unemployed population was a resource that, like the Virginia Colony, needed infrastructure to be laid down before it could be tapped. This infrastructure was found in the English Poor Laws of the late-fourteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries and in English, Irish, and Scottish convict transport legislation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both of which facilitated the purging of the poor from the British Isles and their exploitation as bonded laborers in the English colonies. This paper explores the classist undertones of English law from the end of feudalism to the early eighteenth century and will argue that many more indentured servants than numerical data will ever be able to account for may have come to the colonies against their will by virtue of its draconian provisions. Over the years, many scholars have directly and indirectly mitigated the involuntary nature of many servants’ indenture. The extent of their poverty has been questioned, and kidnapping has been dismissed as rare or effectively legitimized because 1 In this essay, any mention of “England” refers to the Kingdom of England, which included Wales, which was conquered by Edward I in 1283 and annexed under the Statute of Rhuddlan in 1284. Wales was fully incorporated into the Kingdom of England after the passage of the Laws in Wales Acts of 1536 and 1542, which reorganized Welsh lands and completed the imposition of the British legal system over them by ending the lingering use of Welsh laws. The effect of these rulings is important to this study, because from then on all English legislation applied to Wales as well. (Britannica Academic, s.v. “The Edwardian Settlement,” “Rebellion and Annexation,” and “Union with England” in “Wales,” accessed December 10, 2015, http://academic.eb.com/EBchecked/topic/634468/Wales.) 2 Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 43-46; Eugene Irving McCormac, White Servitude in Maryland, 1634-1820 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1904): 8-9; Simon P. Newman, A New World of Labor: The Development of Plantation Slavery in the British Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 71; and William P. Quigley, "Five Hundred Years of English Poor Laws, 1349- 1834: Regulating the Working and Nonworking Poor," Akron Law Review 30, no. 1 (1996): 83, https://www.uakron.edu/dotAsset/726694.pdf. 1 UVM History Review it involved more inveigling than physical force.3 In their attempt at thoroughness and transparency, scholars have emphasized the rewards that followed servitude when it was survived and the fact that servants had legal right to seek redress for a master’s abuses in court.4 They have also compared servitude to apprenticeship and labor in husbandry of the era, not simply to find a structural or systemic ancestor to servitude, but sometimes to emphasize the commonness of bondage and the overall lack of workers’ rights that characterized the era.5 The fact of the matter, however, is that the commonness of certain practices does not make them okay. The fact that someone is not at the very bottom of the socioeconomic spectrum does not sanction their suffering, and compensation never effaces a wrong.6 This paper questions the supposed willingness of white indentured servants, arguing instead that most either came against their will or were forced to consent to indenture by circumstances created by the anti-poor stance of English law and society. It will first examine the relationship of feudalism and the English Poor Laws to white indentured servitude in the seventeenth century, identifying the scenarios that these systems created