Beginning with the Cleveland Indians’ hard luck during World War II, this thrilling history follows the team through its historic role in racial integration and its legendary postwar comeback. Rich with player photographs and stories, this book is sure to excite American history buffs and baseball fans alike.
In early 1942, baseball team owners across the country scrambled to assemble makeshift rosters from the remaining ballplayers who had not left the sport for the armed forces. The Cleveland Indians suffered a tremendous loss when star pitcher Bob Feller became the first Major Leaguer to enlist, taking his twenty-plus wins per year with him. To make matters worse, the Indians’ new player-manager, Lou Boudreau, had no coaching or managing experience. The resulting team was mediocre, and players struggled to keep up morale.
Feller’s return in late 1945 sparked a spectacular comeback. A year later Bill Veeck bought the franchise and, over the next two years, signed the first American League players to break the color barrier: Larry Doby and Satchel Paige. The 1948 season ended with the Indians and Boston Red Sox tied, resulting in the American League’s first playoff game. Thanks in part to rookie Gene Bearden’s outstanding pitching, the Indians went on to beat the National League’s Boston Braves for their second World Series title.
The fascist Ustasha regime and its militias carried out a ruthless campaign of ethnic cleansing that killed an estimated half million Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, and ended only with the defeat of the Axis powers in World War II.
In Visions of Annihilation, Rory Yeomans analyzes the Ustasha movement’s use of culture to appeal to radical nationalist sentiments and legitimize its genocidal policies. He shows how the movement attempted to mobilize poets, novelists, filmmakers, visual artists, and intellectuals as purveyors of propaganda and visionaries of a utopian society. Meanwhile, newspapers, radio, and speeches called for the expulsion, persecution, or elimination of “alien” and “enemy” populations to purify the nation. He describes how the dual concepts of annihilation and national regeneration were disseminated to the wider population and how they were interpreted at the grassroots level.
Yeomans examines the Ustasha movement in the context of other fascist movements in Europe. He cites their similar appeals to idealistic youth, the economically disenfranchised, racial purists, social radicals, and Catholic clericalists. Yeomans further demonstrates how fascism created rituals and practices that mimicked traditional religious faiths and celebrated martyrdom.
Visions of Annihilation chronicles the foundations of the Ustasha movement, its key actors and ideologies, and reveals the unique cultural, historical, and political conditions present in interwar Croatia that led to the rise of fascism and contributed to the cataclysmic events that tore across the continent.
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