I assume that everyone who reads my blog is currently watching A) The Superbowl, B) Downton Abbey, or C) The Puppy Bowl. I, meanwhile, am trying desperately to finish the first draft of Chapter I of my thesis, while listening to an audio file of chapter 6 of Megillat Esther. It's high time that I've let you all know how the thesis is progressing, seeing as it's currently dominating my life, perhaps even more so than my job search, and certainly more than Ezra's Archives, KOACH, CJL house-managing, any of my academic classes, or any of my chevrutot.
To begin with, a quick refresher: my thesis is about food rationing, hunger, and provisioning in France in World War II. There were slightly 40 million people living in France during this period, and I'm researching how they survived, often in spite of the government rationing system. There are three chapters to my thesis. Chapter I addresses macroeconomic factors leading up to the war, discusses Germany's war aims vis-a-vis France as an agricultural state, reveals Vichy incompetence and its detrimental effects on French society, and the provisioning-related origins of Resistance and Resistance propaganda. Chapter II gives a detailed description of the rationing system that Vichy put in place, describes the black and grey markets that so cleverly and surely undermined it, describes how people of different classes fed themselves in times of dearth, and analyzes the social distinctions resulting from differences in food supply. Chapter III focuses on various disadvantaged populations in France at the time, mostly the Jews of Indre-et-Loire on whom I have done archival research, but also the romani, women, rural resistance groups, the mentally handicapped, the elderly, etc.
I've written all of Chapter II, and have edited it three or four times. I will soon be adding a few more data that I gleaned from books that I have been reading recently, but it's 90% there, I think. Chapter II is by all means the most crucial and innovative section of my thesis. There is still no single work on the problem of food and rationing (although several monographs devote one or more chapters to this element of social history life), and that is where I have room to make the greatest contribution to the field. I believe that I am uniting and analyzing data that has yet to be scrutinized in the way I am scrutinizing it, and hope that I can make serious, pertinent points about hunger conditions.
I'm currently writing Chapter I, which is the most statistics-heavy of my chapters. I expect to make at least a couple more graphs on chartgo.com before I am done with it. It is a fascinating chapter. I write history papers in a somewhat unusual way, and need to put down all of my citations on paper before I begin to stitch them all together, rearrange them, and translated direct quotations and statistics into meaningful statements in my own words.
Chapter III is where I hope to use some of my summer research. It's really the unusual chapter. It's probably going to be the preachiest of my chapters, seeing as a lot of people, especially poor people, suffered greatly from hunger in France in World War II. Many people may not be aware of it, but the approximately 20 million deaths due to hunger in World War II may even exceed the approximately 19.5 million combat deaths of World War II. Together, these two causes of death in World War II are approximately equal to the entire population of France at the time. Think about that for a moment. And then remember that that does not even begin to include the atrocities of the German death-factories, concentration camps, and ghettos.
Well, back to Chapter I, I guess. I'm currently behind schedule, and need to catch up.
~JD
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