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This book covers the full story of the Ustasha, a fascist movement in Croatia, from its historic roots to its downfall. The authors address key questions: In what international context did Ustasha terrorism grow and develop? How did this movement rise to power, and then exterminate hundreds of thousands of innocents? Who was Ante Pavelic, its leader? Was he a shrewd politician, able to exploit for his independent project Mussolini's imperial ambitions, Hitler's pan-German aims, and the anti-Bolshevism of the Holy See and the Western bloc? Or was he, consciously or not, a pawn in other hands, in a complex international scenario where Croatia was only arena among many? And after the movement's collapse, how were several of the most prominent Ustasha leaders able to evade capture by Tito’s victorious army? The book places the appearance of the Ustasha movement not only in the context of the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia but also in the wider perspective of the emergence of European fascism.

Illuminating a powerful yet underappreciated force in the American peace and women’s movements

On November 1, 1961, thousands of middle-class white women took to the streets throughout the United States to demonstrate against atomic weapons. They were brought together by the group Women Strike for Peace (WSP), which grew from modest beginnings at a Georgetown cocktail party to become one of the most effective peace organizations in American history. Under the stewardship of children’s book illustrator Dagmar Wilson, and with indispensable support from figures such as Bella Abzug, a lawyer who would later help found the National Women’s Political Caucus and serve as US Representative for New York, WSP branches spread to cities and towns across the country, and the group influenced major arms-control treaties and successful antiwar efforts of the Cold War period. Single-handedly, WSP dismantled the McCarthyite House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), catalysed public support for the 1963 Nuclear Weapons Test Ban Treaty, and brokered unprecedented exchanges between American and Vietnamese women during the American War in Vietnam. WSP accomplished their political wins , in part, through a public image that stressed the inherent moral authority and sanctity of motherhood.

In Not Just a Housewife, Jon Coburn explores the fascinating story of WSP to argue that the group’s historic significance was much more complex than the maternal activism for which it is often remembered. He traces activists’ evolution through the Cold War’s cultural upheavals, uncovering the significance of forgotten episodes, such as the extraordinary self-immolation of 82-year-old Detroit activist Alice Herz and WSP’s unheralded contributions to the 1977 National Women’s Conference. In so doing, Coburn recovers WSP’s revolutionary politics and militant protests and contends that the organization fused this radical activism with the seeming respectability of motherhood. Through unprecedented access to organizational archives and oral histories, Not Just a Housewife details how WSP’s unique fusion of radicalism and respectability significantly shaped Cold War-era women’s peace movement history, as well as the broader American culture.

How researchers understood the atomic bomb’s effects on the human psyche before the recognition of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
 
In 1945, researchers on a mission to Hiroshima with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey canvassed survivors of the nuclear attack. This marked the beginning of global efforts—by psychiatrists, psychologists, and other social scientists—to tackle the complex ways in which human minds were affected by the advent of the nuclear age. A trans-Pacific research network emerged that produced massive amounts of data about the dropping of the bomb and subsequent nuclear tests in and around the Pacific rim.
 
Ran Zwigenberg traces these efforts and the ways they were interpreted differently across communities of researchers and victims. He explores how the bomb’s psychological impact on survivors was understood before we had the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder. In fact, psychological and psychiatric research on Hiroshima and Nagasaki rarely referred to trauma or similar categories. Instead, institutional and political constraints—most notably the psychological sciences’ entanglement with Cold War science—led researchers to concentrate on short-term damage and somatic reactions or even, in some cases, on denial of victims’ suffering. As a result, very few doctors tried to ameliorate suffering.
 
But, Zwigenberg argues, it was not only that doctors “failed” to issue the right diagnosis; the victims’ experiences also did not necessarily conform to our contemporary expectations. As he shows, the category of trauma should not be used uncritically in a non-Western context. Consequently, this book sets out, first, to understand the historical, cultural, and scientific constraints in which researchers and victims were acting and, second, to explore how suffering was understood in different cultural contexts before PTSD was a category of analysis.

From submarines to the suburbs—the remaking of Pittsburgh during the Cold War

During the early Cold War, research facilities became ubiquitous features of suburbs across the United States. Pittsburgh’s eastern and southern suburbs hosted a constellation of such facilities that became the world’s leading center for the development of nuclear reactors for naval vessels and power plants. The segregated communities that surrounded these laboratories housed one of the largest concentrations of nuclear engineers and scientists on earth. In Nuclear Suburbs, Patrick Vitale uncovers how the suburbs shaped the everyday lives of these technology workers. 

Using oral histories, Vitale follows nuclear engineers and scientists throughout and beyond the Pittsburgh region to understand how the politics of technoscience and the Cold War were embedded in daily life. At the same time that research facilities moved to Pittsburgh’s suburbs, a coalition of business and political elites began an aggressive effort, called the Pittsburgh Renaissance, to renew the region. For Pittsburgh’s elite, laboratories and researchers became important symbols of the new Pittsburgh and its postindustrial economy. Nuclear Suburbs exposes how this coalition enrolled technology workers as allies in their remaking of the city.

Offering lessons for the present day, Nuclear Suburbs shows how race, class, gender, and the production of urban and suburban space are fundamental to technoscientific networks, and explains how the “renewal” of industrial regions into centers of the tech economy is rooted in violence and injustice.