BiblioVault - Books about Twentieth Century

War and Disease

Biomedical Research on Malaria in the Twentieth Century

Leo B. Slater

Rutgers University Press, 2009

Malaria is one of the leading killers in the world today. Though drugs against malaria have a long history, attempts to develop novel therapeutics spanned the twentieth century and continue today. In this historical study, Leo B. Slater shows the roots and branches of an enormous drug development project during World War II. Fighting around the globe, American soldiers were at high risk for contracting malaria, yet quinine–a natural cure–became harder to acquire. A U.S. government-funded antimalarial program, initiated by the National Research Council, brought together diverse laboratories and specialists to provide the best drugs to the nation's military. This wartime research would deliver chloroquinine–long the drug of choice for prevention and treatment of malaria–and a host of other chemotherapeutic insights.

A massive undertaking, the antimalarial program was to biomedical research what the Manhattan Project was to the physical sciences.

A volume in the Critical Issues in Health and Medicine series, edited by Rima D. Apple and Janet Golden.

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A War of Nerves

Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century

Ben Shephard

Harvard University Press, 2001

A War of Nerves is a history of military psychiatry in the twentieth century—an authoritative, accessible account drawing on a vast range of diaries, interviews, medical papers, and official records, from doctors as well as ordinary soldiers. It reaches back to the moment when the technologies of modern warfare and the disciplines of psychological medicine first confronted each other on the Western Front, and traces their uneasy relationship through the eras of shell-shock, combat fatigue, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

At once absorbing historical narrative and intellectual detective story, A War of Nerves weaves together the literary, medical, and military lore to give us a fascinating history of war neuroses and their treatment, from the World Wars through Vietnam and up to the Gulf War. Ben Shephard answers recurring questions about the effects of war. Why do some men crack and others not? Are the limits of resistance determined by character, heredity, upbringing, ideology, or simple biochemistry?

Military psychiatry has long been shrouded in misconception, and haunted by the competing demands of battle and of recovery. Now, for the first time, we have a definitive history of this vital art and science, which illuminates the bumpy efforts to understand the ravages of war on the human mind, and points towards the true lessons to be learned from treating the aftermath of war.

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Women against Abortion

Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century

Karissa Haugeberg

University of Illinois Press, 2017

Women from remarkably diverse religious, social, and political backgrounds made up the rank-and-file of anti-abortion activism. Empowered by--yet in many cases scared of--the changes wrought by feminism, they founded grassroots groups, developed now-familiar strategies and tactics, and gave voice to the movement's moral and political dimensions. Drawing on oral histories and interviews with prominent figures, Karissa Haugeberg examines American women 's fight against abortion. Beginning in the 1960s, she looks at Marjory Mecklenburg's attempt to shift the attention of anti-abortion leaders from the rights of fetuses to the needs of pregnant women. Moving forward she traces the grassroots work of Catholic women, including Juli Loesch and Joan Andrews, and their encounters with the influx of evangelicals into the movement. She also looks at the activism of evangelical Protestant Shelley Shannon, a prominent pro-life extremist of the 1990s. Throughout, Haugeberg explores important questions such as the ways people fused religious conviction with partisan politics, activists' rationalizations for lethal violence, and how women claimed space within an unshakably patriarchal movement.

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World Deforestation in the Twentieth Century

John F. Richards and Richard P. Tucker

Duke University Press, 1988

The World in Which We Occur

John Dewey, Pragmatist Ecology, and American Ecological Writing in the Twentieth Century

Neil W. Browne

University of Alabama Press, 2007

Understanding our environment

American philosopher John Dewey considered all human endeavors to be continuous with the natural world. In his writings, particularly Art as Experience (1934), Dewey insists on the primacy of the environment in aesthetic experience. Dewey's conception of environment includes both the natural and the man-made. Neil Browne highlights this notion in order to define what he terms "pragmatist ecology," a practice rooted in the interface of the cultural and the natural, which he finds to be a significant feature of some of the most important ecological writing of the last century.

To fully understand human involvement in the natural world, Browne argues, disciplinary boundaries must be opened up. This is primarily important between the arts and science, with profound implications for the practice of democracy. The degradation of the physical environment and democratic decay, for Browne, are rooted in the same problem: our persistent belief that humans are somehow separate from their physical environment.

Browne probes the work of a number of major American writers through the lens of Dewey's philosophy. Among other texts, he examines John Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911); Sea of Cortez (1941) by John Steinbeck and Edward Ricketts; Rachel Carson's three books about the sea, Under the Sea-Wind (1941), The Sea Around Us (1951), and The Edge of the Sea (1955); John Haines's The Stars, the Snow, the Fire (1989); Tarry Lopez's Arctic Dreams (1986); and Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge (1991). Together, these texts—with their combinations of scientific observation and personal meditation—challenge the dichotomies to which we've become accustomed and affirm the values of a pragmatist ecology, one in which ecological and democratic
values go hand in hand.

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