Identity Crisis: The Post-WWII Reconstruction of the City of London

In a single night in December 1940, German bombs reduced more than a third of Britain’s most historic square mile to blackened rubble, destroying countless architectural treasures and inexorably altering the City of London’s character. In this immense devastation postwar planners saw a unique opportunity to reinvent the Empire’s ancient cultural and financial hub as a soaring modern metropolis. Through examination of original planning proposals and public opinions expressed in the era’s journalism, this thesis attempts to explain why the City’s postwar architecture — initially lauded by the public for its striking modernity — soon became so unpopular that it initiated a cycle of redevelopment that continues to this day. Ultimately this thesis argues that dissatisfaction with the City’s postwar architecture mirrors Britain’s ongoing postwar identity crisis. With its loss of empire and position on the world stage, Britain is left with an economic center and nostalgia for the past.Histor

Destroying Hitler’s Berghof: The Bomber Command Raid of 25 April 1945

This paper examines the Royal Air Force raid on Adolf Hitler’s Berghof on the Obersalzberg in April 1945. Arthur Harris, the head of Bomber Command, wanted to emphasize the air power’s decisive role in the defeat of Nazism. However, Winston Churchill and Bernard Montgomery, among others, questioned the usefulness of destroying Berchtesgaden so late in the war. Unlike traditional explanations that focus on post–Dresden guilt, this article contends that British politicians grew increasingly concerned with the economic state of postwar Germany and the potential costs of the upcoming occupation. The continuation of area bombing at this late stage of the war reinforced the fears and consequences of “overkill.” Harris’s disconnect with postwar civil–military concerns negatively influenced the postwar image of Bomber Command

Foreign Aid and Economic Development in Postwar Lebanon

This paper shows that foreign aid in postwar Lebanon passed through two phases with distinct features that have had far reaching implications for postwar development. In the first phase lasting from 1992-97, foreign aid was mainly channelled towards providing resources for postwar reconstruction projects. The second phase from 1997 to the present witnessed a qualitative shift in foreign aid utilization from reconstruction needs towards financial stability and balance-of-payments equilibrium needs. This shift allowed the government to intervene in the foreign exchange market, maintained balance of payments surpluses during this period, reduced interest rates on public debt instruments and finally provided the necessary liquidity and 'confidence' for the government to continue borrowing funds from local commercial banks and foreign investors. More importantly this shift in foreign aid allowed the government to avoid financial and currency crises in 2002. However, the cost of such a qualitative shift was large in terms of fiscal management, diversion of funds from reconstruction, and the increased dependency of the Lebanese economy on foreign aid for stabilization purposes.foreign aid, postwar reconstruction, post-conflict, Lebanon

A Neoclassical Analysis of the Postwar Japanese Economy

Two key features of the postwar Japanese economy are the delay of catch up during the 50s followed by rapid economic growth during the 60s and early 70s and the consistent decline in labor supply during the rapid growth period. A standard neoclassical growth model can quantitatively account for the Japanese postwar growth patterns of capital, output, consumption and investment taking the destruction of capital stock during the war and postwar TFP growth as given. The decline in labor can be explained by strong income effects caused by subsistence consumption during the rapidly growing period.E13, O40

Resilience–Recovery Factors in Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Among Female and Male Vietnam Veterans: Hardiness, Postwar Social Support, and Additional Stressful Life Events

Structural equation modeling procedures were used to examine relationships among several war zone stressor dimensions, resilience-recovery factors, and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms in a national sample of 1,632 Vietnam veterans (26% women and 74% men). A 9-factor measurement model was specified on a mixed-gender subsample of the data and then replicated on separate subsamples of female and male veterans. For both genders, the structural models supported strong mediation effects for the intrapersonal resource characteristic of hardiness, postwar structural and functional social support, and additional negative life events in the postwar period. Support for moderator effects or buffering in terms of interactions between war zone stressor level and resiliencerecovery factors was minimal

The Post-War Novel in Crisis: Three Perspectives

Three major novelists of the period following the second world war, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and V.S. Naipaul, have pondered the question of why the post-war novel is unable to achieve the heights of its nineteenth-century predecessors. Each of these three writers has suggested remedies, to which they have aspired with varying degrees of success. And each of them offers, implicitly or explicitly, different reasons for the change. In this essay I will evaluate their arguments and attempt to account for some of the factors which give rise to the consciousness that they are different in some qualitative way from their predecessors. I will also discuss the effect such attitudes may have on their own work

Rubble Women: The Long-Term Effects of Postwar Reconstruction on Female Labor Market Outcomes

During World War II, more than one-half million tons of bombs were dropped in aerial raids on German cities, destroying about forty percent of the total housing stock nationwide. With a large fraction of the male population gone, the reconstruction process had mainly fallen on women in postwar Germany. This paper provides causal evidence on long-term legacies of postwar reconstruction and mandatory employment on women's labor market outcomes. We combine a unique dataset on city-level destruction in Germany caused by the Allied Air Forces bombing during WWII with individual survey data from the German Microcensus. Using difference-in-difference and instrumental-variable strategies, we find that postwar mandatory employment reduced female labor force participation and hours worked in the long-run. However, our results show that participating in postwar reconstruction efforts increased the female presence in medium-skill and female-dominated occupations. These results survive after accounting for labor supply side factors such as wealth and savings loss during WWII, war relief payments and change in the composition of population and labor demand side factors such as female share in industry, construction, service and public sectors.postwar reconstruction, female labor force participation, occupational choice

The Erotic and the Vulgar: Visual Culture and Organized Labor's Critique of U.S. Hegemony in Occupied Japan

This essay engages the colonial legacy of postwar Japan by arguing that the political cartoons produced as part of the postwar Japanese labor movement’s critique of U.S. cultural hegemony illustrate how gendered discourses underpinned, and sometimes undermined, the ideologies formally represented by visual artists and the organizations that funded them. A significant component of organized labor’s propaganda rested on a corpus of visual media that depicted women as icons of Japanese national culture. Japan’s most militant labor unions were propagating anti-imperialist discourses that invoked an engendered/endangered nation that accentuated the importance of union roles for men by subordinating, then eliminating, union roles for women

2. The Postwar Scene

Turning now from the immediate diplomatic aftermath of World War I, let us examine some major features of Western Civilization during what has been called the long weekend, the two decades between that war and World War II (1919-1939). We will note first the way in which the West generated within itself economic stresses, local and general, which prevented it from realizing the tremendous potential created by continuing technological advances. Then we will note how these economic changes were paralleled by changes in social organization and attitudes. We will see these new attitudes in conflict with each other and with survivals from earlier ages. This will be illustrated in greater detail in three sections in which the democracies and their chief competitors are studied. All the above topics will deal with aspects of the civil wars — military and otherwise — which are one of the features of Western Civilization. This stands out sharply in the next section on the shifting balance of military power in the West and the road to World War II. At this point we will note the increasing impact of the non-Western world. [excerpt

Trends in the Regional Structure of Manufacturing Industries in Japan

The rapid economic growth of Japan in the postwar period has brought about the over-concentration of activities in a few large cities, and local regions have been losing their economic vitality due to the regional differentials and the population loss. Regional development planning in Japan has sought to achieve a balanced growth of the nation through the development of industries in local regions. This paper aims to examine the regional structure of manufacturing industries in the postwar period and to identify its current problems. Three methods, namely the analysis of coefficient of variation, the rateshare analysis and the shift-share analysis are applied using employment data of manufacturing industries for the years 1955 to 1985. Findings show that while the employment of manufacturing industries has been markedly decentralized from metropolitan to local regions, the disparities in growth rates still exist among regions