Volume 87, Number 4 · October 2023

The Cantar de Mio Cid is rightly considered to be one of the most noteworthy literary texts of medieval Spain. Despite the vast number of studies published on a myriad of subjects relating to the Cantar, the topic of military deception and ruses, as it appears in the text, has not received enough attention, especially considering its peculiarity when compared to other contemporary chivalric texts. This article attempts to address this issue by comparing the Cantar’s depictions of El Cid’s employment of deception and ruses to vanquish his enemies with similar incidents from twelfth and thirteenth century chansons de geste while considering their potential influence on the production and characteristics of the Cantar. The similarities and discrepancies are addressed through the prism of medieval chivalric literature and the social and cultural influence of a frontier society in medieval Iberia.

By 1812, a sophisticated system had emerged in the greater Anglo Atlantic for processing and housing of prisoners of war. This affected American captives of the British in the first decades of the new United States republic. Through the interrogation of three narratives written by captive American mariners, this article explores the connections between the greater Atlantic, the development of British imperial systems, and the development of ideas relating to American identity during the early republic. It underscores the significance of captivity in the Atlantic World and the contested notions of proto-American nationalism and identity that underpinned imprisonment by the British as American prisoners complemented and contested the authority of the British Empire around the Atlantic.

James W. Smith’s experience as West Point’s first Black cadet is a microcosm of Reconstruction and the struggle to integrate West Point. It began with the best of intentions, but ultimately failed due to a destructive combination of racist antipathy and the apathy of those who could have intervened on his behalf. His extraordinary persistence and perseverance changed the environment at the Academy, forcing the West Point community to shift from active to passive resistance. Although he did not reap the rewards himself, Smith made graduation possible, if still not probable, for those African American cadets who followed.

During the First World War, British soldiers and civilians wrote a sizeable number of letters to one another. The military mail censorship system of the British Army remains a major obstacle to understanding the epistolary practices of soldiers. Historians and literary critics claim soldiers concealed the true nature of their wartime experiences from civilians at home, resulting in the emotional isolation of soldiers and a rift in understanding the war between soldiers and civilians. This study argues that the British epistolary history of the conflict ought to be understood for the “mundane” communication it spawned between soldiers and civilians in wartime and asserts that the mundanity found within these letter-writing exchanges was a deliberate choice made by people at war. In essence, soldiers were far more invested in negotiating fragments of their nonmilitary identities through wartime than in sharing the horrors, trauma, and disillusion of their military lives.

The “U.S. Army’s Special Organizations” were unusual, little-known units within the U.S. military during World War II designed to segregate and monitor potentially disloyal soldiers. The existence and composition of these units pointed at the nationalist and ethno-racial tensions afoot in the United States at the time, reflecting both wartime undemocratic hysteria and social changes, along with long-standing concerns about U.S. national identity. The continued suspicion and large-scale internment of Japanese-American servicemen stood in contrast to the smaller numbers of other servicemen of enemy alien origin similarly interned (German- and Italian-Americans). The internal social dynamics within these units mirrored the fraught relationship among the Axis partners and the socio-cultural issues between the Japanese, German, and Italian national communities.

In the early 1960s, as the Federation of Malaysia was being established, Britain joined Southeast Asian allies in an undeclared war in Borneo against Indonesia. This struggle was waged most visibly on the borders of Malaysian Borneo, notably in the state of Sarawak, but the British military was ever mindful of the internal threat from a growing communist network. This aspect of the 1962–1966 “Confrontation” has largely gone unstudied; historiography has focused on the external conflict. While the military was not central to the campaign against internal subversion, its assessment of the problem is central to a real understanding of the campaign as a whole.

In March 1915, an electrician sought the help of Russia’s most popular newspaper in an attempt to provide the Russian military with blueprints for his invention: an unmanned aerial reconnaissance and bombing craft. His letter to the staff of the paper recounts the all-too-usual and unfortunate obstacles posed by the bureaucracy of the Russian imperial state.