World War II
In 1941, just before America's entry into the Second World War, Field was asked to be the "Anthropologist to the President" by president Roosevelt and to be a member of the Special Intelligence Unit of the White House to direct a top-secret “M” ("M" for migration) project. The President believed that refugee migration and re-settlement in areas where they would be given asylum and be able to thrive would be one of the biggest issues of the post-war era. He wanted Field to look at under-populated areas in North Africa and the Middle East as possible sites for their resettlement. Over 600 studies were produced. Complete sets are held in several libraries including the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library at Hyde Park, NY and the University of Miami.
Read more about this topic: Henry Field (anthropologist)
Famous quotes containing the words world war, world and/or war:
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization; and for us European earth-dwellers, the adventure played out in the heart of the New World signifies in the first place that it was not our world and that we bear responsibility for the crime of its destruction.”
—Claude Lévi-Strauss (b. 1908)
“He was ... a degenerate gambler. That is, a man who gambled simply to gamble and must lose. As a hero who goes to war must die. Show me a gambler and I’ll show you a loser, show me a hero and I’ll show you a corpse.”
—Mario Puzo (b. 1920)