Defining and Defending Valid Citizenship During War: Jewish Immigrant Businesses in World War I Britain

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
STEPHANIE SEKETA
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Business Networks ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
World War ◽  
Business Decisions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Behavior ◽  
Political Associations ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Corporate Actions

Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, many British companies relied on transnational business networks and global associations. However, the tensions produced by World War I created an environment in which consumers, journalists, and politicians actively promoted economic protectionism and consumer nationalism through various Buy British movements. Entrepreneurs under scrutiny took a variety of approaches to manage this hostile environment and avoid the financial, political, and cultural ramifications of suddenly having their and their family members’ valid citizenship questioned and outright attacked in the public sphere. During the war, neutral, passive, or absent patriotism drew suspicion. Any suspicions about loyalty could spark an avalanche of attacks, with each one being exponentially more difficult to defend as fear built in people’s minds. Citizenship was more than a legal matter; it was a layered set of dynamic activities and enterprises in which corporate actions became tied to expression of loyalty. People were judged by their cultural behavior, political associations, legal citizenship, and business decisions. I argue that some firms reacted by defining themselves, their products, and their services as “British,” erasing their “foreignness” as a defense against attacks on their citizenship and loyalty.

A Countermovement on the Verge of Defeat

2020 ◽  
pp. 134-152
Author(s):  
Teri Finneman
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Social Movement Theory ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter examines how the mainstream local and regional press covered the antisuffrage perspective in the critical year of 1917 as it became increasingly evident that the suffrage movement had momentum to secure a federal amendment. The goal here is to increase understanding of press portrayals of a countermovement and thus to add to literature on social movement theory. Its findings reveal that most coverage situated the suffrage debate in the context of World War I. Antisuffragists relied on negative discourse that criticized the patriotism of the suffragists and argued that women did not want the added burden of voting. In contrast, suffragists avoided emotional reactions and instead based their arguments on facts and on the benefits of women being in the public sphere. This study contributes to prior research on countermovements and the implications of taking a negative and narrow approach when attempting to undermine a social movement

ARTISTS AS AVATARS

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
PETER CHAMETZKY
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mental Distress ◽  
World War ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Nazi Era

Are artists crazy? Are creators more likely to be mad, or madder, than the rest of us? Does mental distress deepen artistic vision? Correlate to genius? Is the drive to fashion a personal pictorial or plastic universe pathological? Bettina Gockel's hefty Tübingen Habilitationsschrift, “The Pathologizing of the Artist: Artist Legends in Modernity,” documents the significant amount of mental energy expended exploring these and related questions from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s. Matthew Biro's The Dada Cyborg argues that the Dadaists’ montages, assemblages, and raucous agitational activities in the public sphere of World War I-era Berlin indicate modernity's disruption of stable subject positions and suggest instead hybrid, “cyborgian” identities. These included challenges to normative notions of sanity, but also to those of gender, ethnicity, race, and national and political allegiance. James van Dyke's study of the Weimar- and Nazi-era career of painter Franz Radziwill, a World War I veteran and self-taught reactionary modernist realist, provides a detailed case study of an artist whom one might, in retrospect, suspect of a degree of grandiosity and careerism bordering on the pathological, but who was driven by a complex of motivations as political as they were personal.

The Public Philosophy: Interest-Group Liberalism

1967 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Lowi
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Part ◽  
The United States ◽  
Private Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Philosophy ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Public Sphere

Until astonishingly recent times American national government played a marginal role in the life of the nation. Even as late as the eve of World War I, the State Department could support itself on consular fees. In most years revenues from tariffs supplied adequate financing, plus a surplus, from all other responsibilities. In 1800, there was less than one-half a federal bureaucrat per 1,000 citizens. On the eve of the Civil War there were only 1.5 federal bureaucrats per 1,000 citizens, and by 1900 that ratio had climbed to 2.7. This compares with 7 per 1,000 in 1940 and 13 per 1,000 in 1962—exclusive of military personnel.The relatively small size of the public sphere was maintained in great part by the constitutional wall of separation between government and private life. The wall was occasionally scaled in both directions, but concern for the proper relation of private life and public order was always a serious and effective issue. Americans always talked pragmatism, in government as in all other things; but doctrine always deeply penetrated public dialogue. Power, even in the United States, needed justification.Throughout the decades between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression, almost every debate over a public policy became involved in the larger debate over the nature and consequences of larger and smaller spheres of government. This period was just as much a “constitutional period” as that of 1789–1820. Each period is distinguished by its effort to define (or redefine) and employ a “public philosophy.”

scholarly journals World War I commemoration and student historical consciousness: A study of high-school students' views

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Innes ◽  
Heather Sharp
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
World War I ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
World War ◽  
School Students ◽  
The Public ◽  
Strong Focus ◽  
The Public Sphere

Commemoration of World War I (WWI), and specifically the Gallipoli campaign, holds a significant place in the Australian public imagination. This is currently heightened with the WWI centenary commemorations (2014–18) occurring on a local, national and international scale. In the current political climate, there has been a resurgence of nationalism amid fear of terrorist attacks and uncertain political futures. Traditionally, history education has been considered, by some, a tool for the promotion of national identity, despite history education literature and many curriculum documents increasingly focused on fostering historical consciousness in students. The Gallipoli campaign, and subsequent Anzac mythology, has maintained a strong focus in Australia as a means of promotion, and often celebration, of Australian culture in public history, including personal and familial connections via ancestral participation in WWI. This article explores the types of historical education conducted in three high schools. As part of a regular history lesson, students were provided with five sources and a series of questions to answer about the Gallipoli campaign as a historical and commemorative event. Students' responses are analysed in this paper using Jörn Rüsen's typology of historical consciousness (Rüsen, 2004) to gain an understanding of how students think about the commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign. Specifically, this paper is interested in students' navigation of collective memory and nationalistic narratives evident in the public sphere and popular culture, and how these inform a sense of historical consciousness.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

Adjusting to Financial Instability in the Interwar Period

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giandomenico Piluso
Keyword(s):  
Private Sector ◽  
Adaptive Strategy ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
International Environment ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Monetary Authorities ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Special Committees ◽  
First World

The chapter provides a reconstruction and analysis of adjustment processes in the Italian financial system after the major cleavage of the First World War. It considers how pressures exerted by external factors entailed a progressive adaptive strategy to a changing international environment. Financial and monetary instability called for a more intensive regulation reallocating responsibilities and powers from the private sector to the public sphere. Accordingly, financial elites changed their contours and boundaries. As the demand for technical competences and bargaining abilities rose, Italian governments and central monetary authorities tended to co-opt competent representatives from the private sector onto special committees at home, at international conferences, or in bilateral negotiations. A telling tale of such processes is represented by changes within the composition of the Italian delegations at major international economic and financial conferences from the Brussels Conference in 1920 to the London Economic and Monetary Conference in 1933.

scholarly journals The heroes’ children: Rescuing the Great War’s orphans

2021 ◽  
pp. 161189442199268
Author(s):  
Friederike Kind-Kovács
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Child Victims ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
New Public ◽  
War Orphans ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Hungarian State

World War I and its aftermath produced a particularly vulnerable group of child victims: war orphans. This group included children whose fathers had fallen in battle, who had disappeared, or who had not (yet) returned home. Most of Europe’s war and postwar societies witnessed the massive presence of these child victims, and responded in various ways to rescue them and secure their future survival. This article offers an exploration of the ways in which the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and then later the post-imperial Hungarian state, became invested in providing care and relief to Hungarian war orphans. In contrast to other groups of child victims, whose parents were blamed for neglecting their parental duties, war orphans as the offspring of ‘war heroes’ profited from the public appreciation of their fathers’ sacrifice for the war effort and the Hungarian nation. The public discourse in the contemporary Hungarian media offers a glimpse into the emergence of a new public visibility of these child victims and of a new recognition of the societal obligation to care for them. Exploring World War I and its aftermath as a telling example of political transformation in the 20th century, the article showcases how war orphans were taken to personify essential notions of war- and postwar destruction, while also capturing visions of postwar recovery. It furthermore examines how welfare discourses and relief practices for Hungary’s war orphans were embedded in contemporary gender norms, notions of proper Christian morality and ethnic nationalism. On this basis, the article assesses the ways in which the case of Hungary’s war orphans not only mirrors the professionalization but also the fundamental transformation of child welfare in the aftermath of World War I.

scholarly journals Famous head injuries of the first aerial war: deaths of the “Knights of the Air”

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. E5
Author(s):  
Prateeka Koul ◽  
Christine Mau ◽  
Victor M. Sabourin ◽  
Chirag D. Gandhi ◽  
Charles J. Prestigiacomo
Keyword(s):  
Head Injury ◽  
World War I ◽  
Head Injuries ◽  
World War ◽  
Traumatic Head Injury ◽  
The Public ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Traumatic Head ◽  
The Media

World War I advanced the development of aviation from the concept of flight to the use of aircraft on the battlefield. Fighter planes advanced technologically as the war progressed. Fighter pilot aces Francesco Baracca and Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron) were two of the most famous pilots of this time period. These courageous fighter aces skillfully maneuvered their SPAD and Albatros planes, respectively, while battling enemies and scoring aerial victories that contributed to the course of the war. The media thrilled the public with their depictions of the heroic feats of fighter pilots such as Baracca and the Red Baron. Despite their aerial prowess, both pilots would eventually be shot down in combat. Although the accounts of their deaths are debated, it is undeniable that both were victims of traumatic head injury.

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