The Mongol Empire (1206-1368) under Chinggis Khan and his descendants was the largest continuous land empire in history, stretching across 5,000 miles of the Eurasian Steppe. During this period, referred to as the Pax Mongolica (lit. 'Mongol Peace'), the restoration of the Silk Road under a common administration allowed for the trading of goods between the Levant and Orient, and therefore the wider dissemination of technologies, cultures, and religions. This is juxtaposed with the great deal of brutality associated with the Mongol conquests, as evidenced by archaeological and textual records of mass killings during sieges, and modern scholarship regarding the Mongol Empire is tasked with balancing these perspectives. Witness to the Mongols is an upcoming sourcebook which compiles primary source material from all across the known world at the time, creating a complete picture of the life and legacy of Chinggis Khan, from his birth c.1185 to the fall of the last remnants of Chinggisid rule in 1502. Witness aims to compile, translate, and update scholarship for new audiences, both academic and at large, in order to communicate a more nuanced perception of Mongol imperial influence which, in my experience, otherwise propagates in Western education almost exclusively through the writings of Marco Polo. My specific contribution to this project concerns assisting in editing passages to ensure continuity between sources and revising introductory paragraphs and footnote annotations in preparation for publication. My particular fascination within the Mongol imperial sphere focuses on Mongol-Viet relations, especially in interpreting cultural dissonance regarding victory and failure of the Mongol invasions of Vietnam, as the successful defenses of Vietnam are widely celebrated to this day in folk tradition, though largely regarded in scholarship as Mongol victories for establishing a tributary relationship. As such, I am also tasked with investigating these threads for possible inclusion in Witness.

On the surface, career warrior Larry Alan Thorne seems a likely candidate to be an anti-hero. He fought in three unpopular wars, voluntarily joined the Waffen-SS twice, and was convicted of treason in his homeland, Finland. A carjacker and three-time prison escapee, Thorne, né Lauri Allan Törni, has become a celebrated folk hero and declared a legend by many. He was awarded Finland’s highest military honor, an Act of Congress was passed to grant him American citizenship, John Wayne portrayed a fictionalized version of him in the iconic 1968 film The Green Berets, and he is the only known Waffen-SS soldier buried in Arlington National Cemetery. My research explores the question, “How is public memory of Larry Thorne a case study of historical revision and rehabilitation?” My presentation analyzes numerous primary and secondary sources, including depictions of Thorne in movies, music and social media, as well as personal correspondence with experts including Michael Cleverley, author of the leading English language biography of Thorne, and Professor Oula Silvennoinen of the University of Helsinki, who co-wrote a Thorne biography in Finnish. This research project reveals the significance and nature of a decades-long historical revisionist campaign with regard to a figure with a dubious past, and how those efforts to shape the public story of Thorne involve, at times, potentially misleading narratives. The current personality cult of Larry Thorne is a case study of historical revision in public memory, and his story is still being written and rewritten.

This project uses the lens of female young adults in novels to examine the war’s lingering impact and the destabilization of socialist identity conceptions during the postwar period. It pays special attention to women’s identity as explored through their engagement with religious conceptualizations of gender and the family unit. These issues of identity are examined through the young female protagonists in the novels Picture in the Teacup (1986) by Dina Kalinovskaya, and Redemption (1984) by Friedrich Gorenstein. Both Kalinovskaya’s Serafima and Gorenstein’s Sashenka struggle to understand their roles in postwar society and their own senses of self, specifically due to the disorienting revival of Russian Orthodoxy and traditional gender norms during the war. They confront religious and socialist constructions of female identity during their constant movements between the child and the adult, the woman and the non-woman, and the perceived roles of the mother. Novels are a unique space to these societal restructurings as they combine the personal and public spheres; they are fictional pieces created for mass consumption but are also created by individual authors and informed by their positionalities and identities. The author holds a unique position in Soviet society as a moral authority, maintaining a particularly intimate relationship with the public and acting as the people’s own voice against governmental repression. This paper argues that the war exacerbates these preexisting rifts through the infusion and normalization of gross violence. This was especially damaging for young adults, who were forcibly suspended between childhood and adulthood as an undefined “other” while trying to establish their identities in wartime. It also notes that the war did not create these cultural conflicts as this would imply prewar societal stability, which would deny the mass trauma of the famine, forced collectivization, and 1937 Stalinist purges from the interwar period.