scholarly journals Remembrance, Retrospection, and the Women’s Land Army in World War I Britain

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 162-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie J. White

This paper explores the methodological challenges posed by interviews with former members of the Women’s Land Army held in Britain’s Imperial War Museum. These interviews were conducted approximately 60 years after the First World War as part of the Women’s War Work Collection that was created in an effort to capture the role of women in the wars of the twentieth century. These documents are certainly of value to the historian, although the decades that passed between event and recollection highlight the problematic relationship between history and memory. The author argues that due to this temporal gap and the continuation of lived experience that shaped both identity and memory in the intervening years, the interviews lose their evidentiary primacy and must be approached as secondary sources, albeit ones grounded in personal experience. This challenge is exacerbated by problems with the interview process itself that guided how the Land Girls’ narratives were reconstructed by the interviewees. This paper works toward a re-evaluation of the usefulness of these oral interviews.

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-83
Author(s):  
Seyyed Alireza Golshani ◽  
Mohammad Ebrahim Zohalinezhad ◽  
Mohammad Hossein Taghrir ◽  
Sedigheh Ghasempoor ◽  
Alireza Salehi

The Spanish Flu was one of the disasters in the history of Iran, especially Southern Iran, which led to the death of a significant number of people in Iran. It started on October 29, 1917, and lasted till 1920 – a disaster that we can claim changed the history. In one of the First World War battlefields in southern Iran in 1918, there was nothing left until the end of World War I and when the battle between Iranian warriors (especially people of Dashtestan and Tangestan in Bushehr, Arabs, and people of Bakhtiari in Khuzestan and people of Kazerun and Qashqai in Fars) and British forces had reached its peak. As each second encouraged the triumph for the Iranians, a flu outbreak among Iranian warriors led to many deaths and, as a result, military withdrawal. The flu outbreak in Kazerun, Firoozabad, Farshband, Abadeh, and even in Shiraz changed the end of the war. In this article, we attempt to discuss the role of the Spanish flu outbreak at the end of one of the forefronts of World War I.


1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 110-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
John W. Coogan ◽  
Peter F. Coogan

The role of the British cabinet in the Anglo-French military conversations prior to the First World War has been and remains controversial. The acrimonious debate within the government during November 1911 seems linked inextricably to the flood of angry memoirs that followed August 1914 and to the continuing historical debate over the actions and motivations of the various ministers involved. Two generations of researchers now have examined an enormous body of evidence, yet the leading modern scholars continue to publish accounts that differ on the most basic questions. Historians have proved no more able than the ministers themselves were to reconcile the contradictory statements of honorable men. The persistence of these differences in historical literature demonstrates both the continuing confusion over the cabinet's role in the military conversations and the need for a renewed effort to resolve this confusion.The starting point for any discussion of the staff talks must be the recognition that the meaning of the term changed significantly over the nine years before the outbreak of World War I. The contacts began with a series of informal discussions between senior British and French officers during 1905. The first systematic conversations took place early in January 1906 under the authority of Lord Esher, a permanent member of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), and Sir George Clarke, the CID secretary. Later in that month a small group of ministers, including Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, sanctioned formal, ongoing exchanges between the two general staffs.


2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 212-224
Author(s):  
Jean M. Cannon

Established in 1919, the Hoover Institution Library & Archives at Stanford University is perhaps the world's largest repository of materials related to war, revolution, and peace movements across the globe, with especially rich collections related to the First World War. This article explains the origin and mission of the library, which was created by Herbert and Lou Henry Hoover following their World War I–era work in humanitarian aid, food relief, and diplomacy. Outlining significant holdings related to the war—including not just official records but rare ephemera such as posters, lace, and propaganda—this article explains the Hoovers’ vision of building a vast and varied repository of material that would establish the library as a hub of research on war and revolution. By acquiring significant historical material, the founders and curators sought to encourage future generations of scholars to theorize and employ solutions for building peace worldwide. The article also discusses the library's holdings related to Stanford students who served as ambulance drivers, pilots, soldiers, and nurses during the war—collections that provide valuable insight into the lived experience of the war and document Stanford's contributions to interventionist/anti-interventionist discussions before America's entry into the war in 1917 and, later, to the Allied war effort.


2017 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 51-80
Author(s):  
Nataša Cigoj Krstulović

The article deals with the organisational, repertoire and reception aspects of Ljubljana’s concert life during World War I. The relationship between the artistic and propagandistic functions of music is reflected in the share of first performances, as well as in the impact that new occasional compositions had on the audiences. In the last wartime concert season of 1917/18, during the time of fateful political changes both the nationality of visiting artists and the repertoire also symptomatically reveal a stronger cultural-propaganda role of music.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-609
Author(s):  
John Martin

This paper explores the reasons why artificial or mineral sources of nitrogen, which were more readily available in Britain than in other European countries, were only slowly adopted by farmers in the decades prior to and during the First World War. It considers why nitrogen in the form of sulphate of ammonia, a by-product of coal-gas (town-gas) manufacture, was increasingly exported from Britain for use by German farmers. At the same time Britain was attempting to monopolise foreign supplies of Chilean nitrate, which was not only a valuable source of fertiliser for agriculture but also an essential ingredient of munitions production. The article also investigates the reasons why sulphate of ammonia was not more widely used to raise agricultural production during the First World War, at a time when food shortages posed a major threat to public morale and commitment to the war effort.


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-250
Author(s):  
Sjang L. ten Hagen

ArgumentThis article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein’s theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural diversity and reflectiveness of global conditions (the principal example being the First World War), proves well-suited to expose transnational flows and patterns in the global history of relativity. The attempts of Belgian physicist Théophile de Donder to contribute to relativity physics during the 1910s and 1920s illustrate the role of the war in shaping the transnational networks through which relativity circulated. The local attitudes of conservative Belgian Catholic scientists and philosophers, who denied that relativity was philosophically significant, exemplify a global pattern: while critics of relativity feared to become marginalized by the scientific, political, and cultural revolutions that Einstein and his theory were taken to represent, supporters sympathized with these revolutions.


1986 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-337
Author(s):  
Jacob H. Dorn

Historians have produced a rich and sophisticated literature on urban reform in the progressive era before the First World War. It includes numerous studies of individual cities, biographies of urban leaders, and analyses of particular movements and organizations. This literature illuminates important variations among reformers and their achievements, the relationships between urban growth and reform, and the functional role of the old-style political machines against which progressives battled. Similarly, there are many examinations of progressive-era reformers' ideas about and attitudes toward the burgeoning industrial cities that had come into being with disquieting rapidity during their own lifetimes. Some of these works go well beyond the controversial conclusions of Morton and Lucia White in The Intellectual Versus the City (1964) to find more complex—and sometimes more positive—assessments of the new urban civilization.


2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1253-1271
Author(s):  
TALBOT C. IMLAY

Anticipating total war: the German and American experiences, 1871–1914. By Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+506. ISBN 0-521-62294-8. £55.00.German strategy and the path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870–1916. By Robert T. Foley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0-521-84193-3. £45.00.Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xiii+368. ISBN 0-375-41156-9. £26.95.The origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+552. ISBN 0-521-81735-8. £35.00.Geheime Diplomatie und öffentliche Meinung: Die Parlamente in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritanien und die erste Marokkokrise, 1904–1906. By Martin Mayer. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Pp. 382. ISBN 3-7700-5242-0. £44.80.Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+344. ISBN 0-521-79101-4. £48.00.The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus. By Annika Mombauer. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Pp. ix+256. ISBN 0-582-41872-0. £15.99.Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871–1914. By Terence Zuber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+340. ISBN 0-19-925016-2. £52.50.As Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig remark in the introduction to their edited collection of essays on the origins of the First World War, thousands of books (and countless articles) have been written on the subject, a veritable flood that began with the outbreak of the conflict in 1914 and continues to this day. This enduring interest is understandable: the First World War was, in George Kennan’s still apt phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the beginning of the short twentieth century, the war amounted to an earthquake whose seismic shocks and after-shocks resonated decades afterwards both inside and outside of the belligerent countries. The Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of fascist and Nazi movements, the accelerated emergence of the United States as a leading great power, the economic depression of the 1930s – these and other developments all have their roots in the tempest of war during 1914–18. Given the momentous nature of the conflict, it is little wonder that scholars continue to investigate – and to argue about – its origins. At the same time, as Hamilton and Herwig suggest, the sheer number of existing studies places the onus on scholars themselves to justify their decision to add to this historiographical mountain. This being so, in assessing the need for a new work on the origins of the war, one might usefully ask whether it fulfills one of several functions.


2021 ◽  
Vol 69 (08) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Джамиля Яшар гызы Рустамова ◽  

The article is dedicated to the matter of Turkish prisoners on the Nargin Island in the Caspian Sea during the First World War. According to approximate computations, there were about 50-60 thousand people of Turkish captives in Russia. Some of them were sent to Baku because of the close location to the Caucasus Front and from there they were sent to the Nargin Island in the Caspian Sea. As time showed it was not the right choise. The Island had no decent conditions for living and turned the life of prisoners into the hell camp. Hastily built barracks contravene meet elementary standards, were poorly heated and by the end of the war they were not heated at all, water supply was unsatisfactory, sometimes water was not brought to the prisoner's several days. Bread was given in 100 grams per person per day, and then this rate redused by half. Knowing the plight of the prisoners, many citizens of Baku as well as the Baku Muslim Charitable Society and other charitable societies provided moral and material support to prisoners, they often went to the camp, brought food, clothes, medicines Key words: World War I, prisoners of war, Nargin Island, refugees, incarceration conditions, starvation, charity


Author(s):  
Kirill V. Vertyaev ◽  

The article develops the stadial formation thesis of the proto-statehood among the Iraqi Kurds. The concept of national identity of the Iraqi Kurds remains the subject of a complex and long-lasting discussion. The main obstacle for the emergence of the Kurdish integral nationalism is still the fact that the Kurds speak different dialects of Kurdish language, and still maintain political and inter-clan conflicts over the distribution of power (not to mention the futility of any attempts to define political boundaries of Iraqi Kurdistan). Ironically, Great Britain faced practically the same contradictions during its occupation of Mesopotamia at the end of the WWI (following the Mudros armistice in October 1918), when British attempts to create an independent Kurdish state failed for a number of reasons, which are discussed in the article. In our opinion, this period was responsible for the formation of proto-statehood in Kurdish area (Kingdom of Kurdistan, for example, obtained classic characteristics of a chiefdom, but at the same time had a vivid anti-colonial, anti-imperialist orientation). The phenomenology of the British government’s political relations with such ‘quasi-states’ presents the subject for this article’s analysis.


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