Bertram M. Gordon

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Professor Emeritus at Mills College

Focuses on one of the more extreme and activist political groups who supported collaboration with the Germans during their occupation of France in the Second World War.

Shows the development of Gumbo into a dish symbolic of New Orleans.

While researching my own study, Collaborationism in France during the Second World War, published in 1980, I noted what appeared to be a change in feelings among the French reading public regarding the Occupation years of 1940–44. With a new generation in the 1960s and 1970s, there seemed to be more engagement with a time that many previously had w...

Discusses the connections between war and tourism in the case of First World War battle sites.

A review of a book on hunger during the Second World War occupation in France

Official negotiation between representatives of states has a history that dates back to Antiquity. In modern times, diplomacy has expanded to include informal interactions between a broader cast of characters. Tourists, whether they like it or not, are inevitably representatives of their states. This round table discussion draws together six schola...

On 11 November 2011, 93 years after the armistice that ended World War I, President Nicolas Sarkozy officially helped open the Musée de la Grande Guerre in Meaux, near the bloody Marne River battle sites of 1914 and 1918, as well as near Disneyland Paris. The new museum included a reconstituted battlefield with a ‘no man's land’ plus three-dimensio...

The study of memory tourism to war sites should not exclude the study of tourism during wartime. Both are components of war tourism, imparting meaning to war for both victors and vanquished. Both reflect their eras, whether through the gazes of the curious individual or the political and economic configurations sustaining the tourism industry. Germ...

Despite the severe limitations of the Occupation, many in France continued to take vacations and tour. The Vichy government encouraged touring in rural France to discover the French “soul.” Chosen as provisional capital, Vichy itself was a spa resort with large hotels. A weekly magazine, Paris Programmes, covered theaters, cinemas, restaurants, con...

Competing Gaullist and Communist narratives of the Resistance, sites specific to anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, as well as those related to Marshal Pétain and Vichy offered varied itineraries for the war tourist. Places associated with trauma, such as Oradour-sur-Glane, a village destroyed and its inhabitants massacred by the Waffen-SS in 1944, w...

Two sites in the French defeat of 1940 that subsequently became tourism spots were the Maginot Line and the railway car where the 1918 armistice had been signed in the Compiégne forest. The Maginot Line became a site of touristic curiosity for the victorious Germans including Hitler. No longer strategically important after the war, many of the fort...

The emergence of the Normandy landing beaches as a major attraction marked a postwar tourism shift. Two museums in Normandy devoted to the landings In the 1950s grew to more than thirty by the early 21st century. Some praised the efforts at reconciliation whereas others worried that increased tourism might glorify or trivialize war. The liberation...

For German Occupation personnel France became a place to exercise the tourism imaginary that had developed over the preceding generations in Germany as elsewhere. The Deutsche Wegleiter, a bi-weekly guide, offered tourism tips for German soldiers. Hitler set the tone with his tour of Paris, where he was famously photographed standing before the Eif...

The coming of the railroad and trans-Atlantic steamships in the Belle Époque and of automobiles, movies, and inexpensive box cameras during the interwar years, all enhanced by the opera, theater, and gastronomy, facilitated the emergence of France as a leading tourism destination. During the interwar years, the Michelin Tire Company and Thomas Cook...

Although postwar France continued to be depicted as a land of wine, women, and song, representations of sites such as Strasbourg, now seen as a center of European reconciliation, changed. Many Allied personnel first saw France as soldiers, as had so many of the Germans between 1940 and 1944. The magazine For You was directed to English-speaking sol...

The connections between tourism and war are rarely studied despite the extensive literature on both fields. Occupied France during the Second World War hardly seemed propitious for tourism, yet it continued even if in many ways attenuated. German tourism in occupied France reflected severe power imbalances between victors and vanquished. French peo...

Second World War tourism in France includes two main components: tourism by the Germans and French during the war and memory tourism to war sites thereafter. Contrary to what is often assumed, tourism in France did not stop with the war. Thousands of German military personnel were given tours in occupied France and French civilians continued to tak...

Eugène-Victor Briffault (1799-1854) is described as a publicist and journalist, a “mythographer” of the art of the table, in a recent French edition of his Paris à table (Allen S. Weiss, Préface, 2003, p. 7). Briffault’s work may be best understood in the context of the philosophical discourse of his time, which included a brief turn toward the sen...

Dieser Essay beschäftigt sich mit den Intersektionen von Tourismus, Krieg und Erotik im besetzten Paris während des Zweiten Weltkriegs. Nur allzu oft wird Tourismus als ein Phänomen während Friedenszeiten betrachtet, jedoch können auch Kriege ihren eigenen Tourismus hervorbringen, so wie dies beispielsweise für die Aufenthalte der deutschen Soldate...

Cet essai se concentre sur les intersections qui existèrent entre le tourisme, la guerre et l’érotisme dans le Paris occupé durant la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Trop souvent, le tourisme est considéré comme une activité de temps de paix. La guerre, cependant, peut produire son propre tourisme, comme ce fut le cas de celui des soldats allemands dans l...

This essay focuses on the intersections of tourism, war, and erotics in occupied Paris during the Second World War. Too frequently, tourism is considered a only peacetime phenomenon. War, however, can produce its own tourism, as was true of German soldiers in occupied Paris during the Second World War. A specially designated unit of the Wehrmacht a...

Bertram Gordon’s ego-history discusses his research on the power of ideology in history, which was influenced by political radicalism during the 1960s in both France and America. After a doctoral dissertation on the Catholic Social movement in nineteenth-century Austria, Gordon turned his attention to Collaboration and the ‘collaborationists’ in Wo...

Stephen L. Harp, Au Naturel: Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth-Century France. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. 336 pp., 25 b/w photographs; 9780807155257, $45.00 (hbk). Stephen L. Harp's Naturism, Nudism, and Tourism in Twentieth- Century France is a thorough and sensitive study of the development of "natur...

Tourism represents more than a fruitful area for research, it is also an excellent topic of study for students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. This round table discussion explores the experience of teaching tourism history in Australia, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States. Panelists consider approaches, challenges,...

The growth of tourism during the past half century, projected by the United Nations World Tourism Organisation to reach 1.8 billion international tourist arrivals worldwide by 2030, has been accompanied by an increase in related academic study groups across many disciplines. This article catalogues the various organisations, focusing more on those...

Awareness of the many ways in which culinary history opens deeper understandings of social and cultural history, shown in the growing number of academic programs, courses, and writings on the subject, is also evidenced by the decision of French Historical Studies to devote a special issue to food. The five articles published here were selected from...

Gouverner une banque centrale: Du XVIIe siècle à nos jours [Governing a Central Bank: From the Seventeenth Century to Today]. Edited byFeiertagOlivier and MargairazMichel. Paris: Albin Michel, 2010. 345 pp. Figures, bibliography, notes, index. Paper, €28.00. ISBN: 978-2-226-20882-8. - Volume 86 Issue 4 - Bertram M. Gordon

El término «turismo de masas» fue popularizado entre las años 1950 y 1970, cuando el número de turistas internacionales se incrementó al doble cada siete años. El turismo es la expresión de valores estéticos; la gente viaja para ver lo bello, lo deseable, lo interesante. Como expresión práctica de la curiosidad, el turismo pudo haber estado más des...

Vichy appeared first as a Roman village, disappeared with the Empire, and was reborn as a medieval fortified town. Following the Middle Ages and the wars of religion, Vichy emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a spa centre. Urban modernisation during the Second Empire and Belle Époque, together with the promotion of hydrotherapy b...

noirLa France du marché (1940–1949) [The Black Market in France 1940–1949)]. By GrenardFabrice. Paris: Payot, 2008. 352 pp. Illustrations, appendix, bibliography, notes, index. Paper, €23.00. ISBN: 978-2-228-90284-7. - Volume 83 Issue 3 - Bertram M. Gordon

This article suggests an approach to the history of tourism in France through the study of statistics collected by various agencies there since the 1950s, which however offer differing definitions and methodologies, making comparison fraught. In the 1950s, the Health Ministry inquired about vacation homes, whereas more recently, various agencies co...

Gilles Bertrand, Le Grand Tour Revisité, Pour une archéologie du tourisme: Le Voyage des Français en Italie, milieu XVIIIe siècle – début XIXe siècle. Collection de l’École Française de Rome 398 (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2008). Gilles Bertrand’s revisit of the Grand Tour in Italy, a longer version of a postdoctoral thesis (habilitation) submi...

RESUMEN: La importancia del papel jugado por España en la derrota de la Alemania nazi muy a menudo ha sido infravalorada por los historiadores. Con su victoria sobre Francia, en junio de 1940, Alemania tuvo la oportunidad de extender su poder por España, Gibraltar, a través del Mediterráneo hacia el norte de África, por la costa occidental africana...

Introduction: The English Adopt Chocolate Cacao, Colonization, and Clubs Chocolate Penetrates English Culture Joseph Fry and Fraud in Chocolate Chocolate and the Struggle for Empire: Fighting the Americans and the French Beginnings of the Industrialization of Chocolate Production The Modern Era: Fry, Cadbury, and the Chocolate Bar Acknowledgments R...

Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine. By Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xiv+258. $25.00. The focus of Accounting for Taste: The Triumph of French Cuisine is the development of French cuisine and its connection to the developing French sense of national identity in the first half of the...

The last of four splendid series on Food in American History.

This tenth installment of Food in American History series considers the period 1976 through 2076 covering the period from the United States Bicentennial to the Tercentennial in 2076. Part 1 of this installment considers vegetable greens in a historical context. Part 2 of the installment will consider vegetables in the US space program and will conc...

Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen, ed., "Morts d'inanition" Famine et exclusions en France sous l'Occupation (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005), pp. 305. 20 Euros. Review by Bertram M. Gordon in American Historical Review, 111:5 (December 2006), pp. 1614-1615. "Morts d'inanition," a well-documented collection edited by Isabelle von Bueltz...

Book review of: Isabelle von Bueltzingsloewen, ed., "Morts d'inanition" Famine et exclusions en France sous l'Occupation. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005. Pp. 305. 20 Euros. In American Historical Review, 111:5 (December 2006), pp. 1614-1615.

This sixth installment of Food in American History series considers 1865 through 1910, covering America’s reconstruction and growth after the Civil War, with beef as the central food theme.

This sixth installment of Food in American History series considers 1865 through 1910, covering America’s reconstruction and growth after the Civil War, with beef as the central food theme. Part 1 follows the rise of the hamburger as an icon in American culture.

The Journal of Military History 67.2 (2003) 607-608 Sarah Fishman's The Battle for Children focuses on child crime and how the French defined juvenile delinquency and tried to deal with it during World War II, when France suffered German occupation and the imprisonment of more than a million and a half of its soldiers, taken during the 1940 militar...

The Blue Shirts, Portuguese Fascists and the New State. By António Costa Pinto (Boulder, Colorado, Social Science Monographs, 2000) 320 pp. $34.50. Reviewed by Bertram M. Gordon in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 33:1 (March 2002), pp. 126-127. António Costa Pinto's The Blue Shirts, Portuguese Fascists and the New State seeks to examine a...

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.1 (2002) 126-127 This book seeks to examine an interwar fascist movement less well-known than the Italian and German variants (xiii). Pinto also asks why a fascist party did not defeat liberalism in Portugal, as it did in Italy and Germany (46). He uses three kinds of primary sources: records of the political...

Introduction The Germans Arrive Economic Reconstruction Reconstruction's Failure and its Consequences THE POPULATION'S RESPONSE Resistance Strikes and Work Stoppages Pillaging Food Riots Black Market and Theft Conclusion Appendix A Appendix B Bibliography Index

Lynne Taylor, Between Resistance and Collaboration: Popular Protest in Northern France, 1940- 45, in American Historical Review, 106:3 (June 2001), 1057-1058. Lynne Taylor's Between Resistance and Collaboration focuses on popular action against the harsh conditions in the French departments of Nord and Pas-de-Calais, occupied by the German army du...

Philippe Burrin. France under the Germans: Collaboration and Compromise. New York: The New Press, 1996. ISBN 1-56584-439-4. Reviewed in History: Reviews of New Books, 28:1 (Fall 1999), p. 21. France under the Germans, is an English-language translation of La France à l'Heure Allemande, 1940-1944, the French title referring to the victorious German...

When the Germans occupied France in 1940, they organized group tours for tens of thousands of their personnel. Their itineraries and symbols reflected Nazi images of the Germans as appreciating French high culture but also conscious of their own ‘‘race and homeland’’. German touristic values impacted political and military decision-making with dram...

Book Review Bertram M. Gordon Rita Thalmann, La Mise au pas: Idéologie et stratégie sécuritaire dans la France occupée (Paris: Fayard, 1991) and Dominique Rossignol, Histoire de la propagande en France de 1940 à 1944: L’Utopie Pétain, (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991); in American Historical Review, 97:3 (June 1992), 863-864. The "V...