Author: michaelperlak
The Legacy of Nanking: Differing Accounts of Brutality
The Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum is a present-day tourist destination in southern Tokyo. This Art Deco style building was completed in 1933 and was originally the home of Prince Yasuhiko Asaka, who commissioned its construction after developing a taste for that particular architectural style during his travels with his wife in France and the …
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Postcolonial Displacements: Dominoes in History
Drora Harehuveni, Haganah Dispatch Driver, 1948. The Haganah (Hebrew for “defense”) was the precursor to the state of Israel’s armed forces. It was a private Zionist military organization founded in 1920 and active until 1948, comprised of Jewish men and women (Britannica). Its purpose was to defend Jewish settlers in the British Mandate for Palestine, …
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Displaced Persons and the Need for Labor
As established, Displaced Persons were a major political object during the Postwar era. Not all DPs returned to their native country– many stayed in whatever country they found themselves in for an extended time, whether that be the U.K., France, Germany, or elsewhere. Some did not want to return to their native country, some had …
Rebuilding the Human Identity
As discussed in a previous post, the end of World War II and the resulting crisis of displaced persons in Europe culminated in the United Nations working out what qualified a state to claim people as its citizens and repatriate them. During the negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union on the matter, …
The Atomic Bomb’s Legacy
In 1945, World War II ended with Japan’s surrender to the United States, as announced over the radio by Emperor Hirohito to his country on August 15th of that year. The events of the preceding week, on the 6th and 9th of August, forced Japan’s hand. After making the calculation that it was in the …
Veterans Return Home, but to a Different Home than they Left
“Мы из Берлина!” – “We are from Berlin!” This is a photograph of Soviet soldiers in Belarus in 1945 on their trip home from Germany. It being 1945, the year World War II ended, it at first seems unsuspicious that Soviet soldiers would be on their way back to the Soviet Union. However, as professor …
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Displaced Persons and the Lead-up to the Cold War
Even after the shockingly high casualties of World War II finally stopped rising in 1945, a series of new crises emerged in Europe that guaranteed peace time was not going to be without further violence and inhumanity. In Tara Zahra’s ‘A Human Treasure’ and Gerard Daniel Cohen’s In War’s Wake, the flawed attempt made by the victorious …
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Introduction
Hello and welcome to my Postwar Blog. My name is Michael, and I am a junior majoring in history and minoring in political science at Virginia Tech. My favorite kind of history is American history but I also like early 20th century Asian and European history and the history of technology. I’m also currently learning …
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