Adapted from a post by the College of Humanities.

American soil was largely spared the devastation of World War II, but the U.S. homeland nonetheless provided a backdrop for important history that has not fully received the attention that it deserves.

A major public history project, funded by the National Park Service and led by University of Utah history professor Matt Basso, promises to fill in some of the blanks by documenting efforts by minority communities to boost wartime morale, provide direct support to the military and keep the homeland safe. History lives and breathes in places across the United States, bringing depth and nuance to unexpected corners of our everyday lives, and few know that as well as  Basso, an associate professor of history and gender studies, who is wrapping up the nearly five-year project that will provide new resources for understanding the World War II home front.

“It’s a particular honor to work on this part of the project because these places hold so much meaning for our fellow Americans,” Basso said.

Basso led a team of 12 graduate and five undergraduate students who received stipends to undertake research in support of this major public history project. The project explores little-known stories of how the war played out at home, state by state and focusing on sites across the U.S. and through five national-level thematic analyses: Environmental History, Native American and Indigenous History, LGBTQ History, Disability History and Latino History.

Highlighting forgotten contributions

The team’s findings shed fresh light on forgotten contributions to the war effort by traditionally marginalized groups, including Latinos. Young Puerto Rican women, for example, flooded the ranks of the Women’s Army Corps, affectionately known as WACs, providing critical military support both at home and overseas. (See the National Archives photo, shot in 1944, to the right.)

“Discovering these histories has been really exciting for students,” Basso said, “because while they all know the Rosie the Riveter story, very few people think about everything else that was happening on the home front while the soldiers were overseas.”  

While banned from military service at the time, gay men did wind up in combat wearing U.S. Army uniforms. Before shipping to war, some also wound up singing and dancing in drag, which was a common and acceptable form of public entertainment before it became a flashpoint in the nation’s culture wars. Active-duty soldiers, for example, were regularly cast in Irving Berlin’s hit Broadway musical “This is the Army,” including the three men pictured in the banner photograph. (You can watch the play’s 1943 film adaption on YouTube.)

“Drag was hugely popular both in civilian and military spaces, all sorts of USOs around the home front, and certainly overseas and military base theaters had drag shows put on by soldiers, and they didn’t necessarily equate to those soldiers being gay,” Basso said. “Many of them were. This was a safe space, which we know through really remarkable research by a whole set of scholars. Many soldiers were gay and World War II was incredibly important to the creation of LGBTQ identity and community, that’s the most important takeaway. The need for soldiers and for workers in war production centers fostered the mobility that allowed folks in small towns and sometimes in bigger towns who thought they were alone in feeling attracted and wanting to be in love with others of their same gender could find each other.”

A rich historical landscape at home in wartime

While the words “National Park Service” conjure visions of stunning red rock formations and sweeping vistas over pristine landscapes, the Service, in addition to its 431 park units, oversees the registries of more than 2,600 National Historic Landmarks and at least another 95,000 entries on the National Register of Historic Places. The Park Service’s historical units include Appomattox Court House in Virginia where the Civil War effectively ended in 1865 with Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s surrender, Martin Luther King, Jr., National Park in Georgia which includes the home where the Civil Rights icon was born, and Utah’s Golden Spike National Historic Park where the transcontinental railroad was completed with the final nail hammered home at Promontory Point.   

Basso and his team contributed to this rich historical landscape, writing World War II home front histories of every state in support of a Congressional mandate to name one WWII Heritage City in each state. (Ogden is Utah’s heritage city.)

Students churned out a large volume of material in a short amount of time, as each state’s history was approximately 4,000 words. These state histories are also reflected in the five chapters and the “study list” of important World War II home front sites that comprise the forthcoming NPS National Historic Landmark Theme Study, “World War II and the American Home Front, Volume 2,” that Basso authored.

The work draws on expansive scholarship to paint a new picture of the war’s home front and will serve as a free resource for the American public as well as Park Service employees and community historians.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this project, according to Greg Smoak, a University of Utah history professor.

“I’m a huge advocate of publicly engaged scholarship. And this project especially,” Smoak said. “It’s a really important project that will shape public interpretations of history nationwide for years to come and may lead to the creation of one or more National Historic Landmarks.”

The work remains in progress. Basso and several students are collaborating with other public historians to evaluate sites identified in the theme study for the National Historic Landmarks program. The process of site evaluation and designation is rigorous and time-intensive; the team must make a comparative historic argument for a location’s national significance and its historic integrity, secure the agreement of the property owners, and ultimately document everything in dossiers often exceeding 100 pages. 

John Flynn, a PhD candidate in history who has been involved in the project for three years, reflects on how this experience has enhanced his education at the College of Humanities: 

“This project gave me valuable experience in both working with a team on a multi-year project with numerous deliverables and also working with the federal government,” said John Flynn, a PhD candidate in history. “There were challenges, but under the direction of our PI [principal investigator], Prof. Matt Basso, we were allowed to think and work creatively.”

The team is currently assessing three significant sites in the history of the WWII home front, starting with the Alaska home of Elizabeth Peratrovich, a Native Alaskan (Tlingit) woman who fought for Indigenous civil rights and to end housing and education discrimination.

The second proposed site is the San Francisco home of Dr. Margaret “Mom” Chung, the nation’s first female Chinese-American physician and a patriotic supporter of the U.S. armed forces during WWII, which won her nickname from U.S. servicemen.  The final site is one or more of the locations in Los Angeles affiliated with the Zoot Suit Riots that broke out in 1943 when groups of young Latino and Black men wearing the eponymous baggy suits fought back against members of the U.S. military who attacked them in the streets.  

“Publicly engaged scholarship is so valuable on a couple of different levels,” said Smoak, who has led numerous public history projects. “On one level, it teaches students that the scholarly work we do here has a public application, a value. On a more basic level, working on a project like this gives them hands-on experience building a skill set that’s marketable. … It not only broadens [students’] horizons but also prepares them for a range of careers outside the narrow sliver that is academia.”

The theme study written by Basso will be published in late 2024 or early 2025. The research is also accessible to the public through a series of open webinars and recordings in conjunction with the National Council on Public History.