scholarly journals British Catholicism and the British Army in the First World War

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Snape

The history of British Catholic involvement in the First World War is a curiously neglected subject, particularly in view of the massive and ongoing popular and academic interest in the First World War, an interest which has led to the publication of several studies of the impact of the war on Britain’s Protestant churches and has even seen a recent work on religion in contemporary France appear in an English translation. Moreover, and bearing in mind the partisan nature of much denominational history, the subject has been ignored by Catholic historians despite the fact that the war has often been regarded by non-Catholics as a ‘good’ war for British Catholicism, an outcome reflected in a widening diffusion of Catholic influences on British religious life and also in a significant number of conversions to the Catholic Church. However, if some standard histories of Catholicism in England are to be believed, the popular Catholic experience of these years amount to no more than an irrelevance next to the redrawing of diocesan boundaries and the codification of canon law.

2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Luc Vandeweyer

Het wordt in de historiografie van de Vlaamse beweging aanvaard dat Hendrik Conscience door de Brusselse progressieve vereniging ‘De Veldbloem’ in 1872 werd gevraagd om te kandideren voor de parlementaire verkiezingen. Conscience zou dat geweigerd hebben. Dit is uiteraard geen onbetekenend feit in de biografie van de man die ‘zijn volk leerde lezen’.Dit gegeven is terug te voeren op de geschriften van Antoon Jacob (°1889) van na de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Jacob werd beschouwd als een autoriteit inzake Conscience. Maar waar is het bewijs? Hij verwees daarbij naar “uitvoerige correspondentie” maar die is niet te vinden. Het ADVN slaagde erin om de archivalische nalatenschap van de in 1947 gestorven Jacob te verwerven. Daarin bleken heel wat brieven van en aan Conscience te zitten. De briefwisseling met ‘De Veldbloem’ was onderwerp van deze bijdrage. Daarin is geen spoor te vinden van de poging om Conscience op het politieke strijdtoneel te brengen in Brussel. Daarbij moet de vraag gesteld worden hoe Jacob deze archiefstukken verzamelde en wat ermee is gebeurd tijdens zijn turbulente leven en talrijke omzwervingen. Het is best mogelijk dat er een en ander is verloren gegaan. Toch is deze nalatenschap een belangrijke aanwinst voor de studie van de geschiedenis van de Vlaamse beweging en die van Conscience in het bijzonder. ________ The Brussels association ‘De Veldbloem’ seeks contact with Hendrik Conscience. Two recently discovered letters It is an accepted fact in the historiography of the Flemish Movement that the Brussels progressive Association ‘De Veldbloem’ [=the Wildflower] asked Hendrik Conscience in 1872 to be their candidate for the parliamentary elections. It is said that Hendrik Conscience refused the request. This is of course a very significant fact in the biography of the man ‘who taught his people to read.’ This information may be inferred from the writings of Antoon Jacob (°1889) from the period after the First World War. Jacob was regarded as an authority on Conscience. But where is the evidence of this? In his claim, he referred to ‘extensive correspondence’, but that correspondence is not extant. The ADVN managed to acquire the archival legacy of Jacob who died in 1947. It turned out that it included quite a number of letters to and from Conscience. The exchange of letters with ‘De Veldbloem’ was the subject of this contribution. It contains no trace of the attempt to bring Conscience into the political arena in Brussels. It raises the question how Jacob collected these archival documents and what happened to them during his turbulent life and his many peregrinations.  It is certainly possible that some documents have been lost. However, this legacy is still an important acquisition for the study of the history of the Flemish Movement and of Conscience in particular.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Raffaele Gaeta ◽  
Antonio Fornaciari ◽  
Valentina Giuffra

The Spanish flu pandemic spread in 1918-19 and infected about 500 million people, killing 50 to 100 million of them. People were suffering from severe poverty and malnutrition, especially in Europe, due to the First World War, and this contributed to the diffusion of the disease. In Italy, Spanish flu appeared in April 1918 with several cases of pulmonary congestion and bronchopneumonia; at the end of the epidemic, about 450.000 people died, causing one of the highest mortality rates in Europe. From the archive documents and the autoptic registers of the Hospital of Pisa, we can express some considerations on the impact of the pandemic on the population of the city and obtain some information about the deceased. In the original necroscopic registers, 43 autopsies were reported with the diagnosis of grippe (i.e. Spanish flu), of which the most occurred from September to December 1918. Most of the dead were young individuals, more than half were soldiers, and all of them showed confluent hemorrhagic lung bronchopneumonia, which was the typical feature of the pandemic flu. We believe that the study of the autopsy registers represents an incomparable instrument for the History of Medicine and a useful resource to understand the origin and the evolution of the diseases.


2018 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 147-164 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kieran D. Taylor

The relief of Belgian refugees in Britain is an emerging area of study in the history of the First World War. About 250,000 Belgian refugees came to Great Britain, and at least 19,000 refugees came to Scotland, with the majority hosted in Glasgow. While relief efforts in Scotland were co-ordinated and led by the Glasgow Corporation, the Catholic Church also played a significant role in the day-to-day lives of refugees who lived in the city. This article examines the Archdiocese of Glasgow's assistance of Belgian refugees during the war. It considers first the Catholic Church's stance towards the War and the relief of Belgian refugees. The article then outlines the important role the Church played in providing accommodation, education and religious ministry to Belgian refugees in Glasgow. It does this by tracing the work of the clergy and by examining popular opinion in Catholic media. The article establishes that the Church and the Catholic community regarded the relief and reception of Belgian refugees as an act of religious solidarity.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
David Monger

Abstract Concerns about fake news and media manipulation are commonplace in contemporary society, and, throughout the twentieth century, historians regularly presented the First World War as an era of manipulated public messages. Yet, despite broad statements about the impact of press censorship in First World War Britain, publication of an official history of the ‘D’ notice system, and growing revision of historical understanding of the interaction between the state, the press, propaganda, and the public during the war, no thorough assessment of the content of the D notices issued by the Press Bureau to newspaper editors has been undertaken. This article provides a thorough analysis of the more than seven hundred notices issued during the war years. While drawing attention to several exceptions which exceeded plausible claims of a threat to security, it argues that most notices genuinely sought to protect potentially dangerous information and that casual assumptions about misleading state press management are not borne out by a close reading of the actual notices issued.


2012 ◽  
pp. 47-59
Author(s):  
Massimo Congiu

Fidesz and Jobbik are the most important Hungarian right wing parties. The first one leads actually a government which has such a majority in the Parliament that gives it the opportunity to rule the country without having to face an effective opposition. This situation allowed it to change the pre-existing Constitution with a conservative and nationalist Charter. The second one represents the most extreme aspirations of the Hungarian political right wing and its references are more proletarian and militant than the ones of the Fidesz. Jobbik has actually three eurodeputies and 47 deputies at the Hungarian Parliament. For a better comprehension of the Magyar nationalism it is very useful to consider such crucial moments of the contemporary history of the country as for instance the peace treaties that followed the end of the First World War and imposed to Hungary such severe territorial losses. The treaties have become the subject of a rhetoric which is based upon the historical injustice that Hungary suffered. This aspect is part of the Hungarian collective feeling and it is one of the main topics of the conservative circles and the radical right wing.


Ladinia ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 45 ◽  
pp. 49-94
Author(s):  
Reinhard Rampold

While the major events of the First World War were scientifically examined early on, the “everyday stories” associated with the war received little attention for decades. It is only in recent years that this aspect has been recognised as an inte-gral part of history and has also been the subject of academic research in Tyrol and Trentino. Luckily, an extensive collection of field postcards and field letters from Felix, Candidus and Albin Crepaz has been preserved. They were deployed as soldiers on Col di Lana and the Siefsattel in the immediate vicinity of their hometown Lasta, and experienced the impact of the war on their homeland and their relatives at first hand. The preserved documents – even though the letters of reply are missing – give a deep insight into the psychological and physical problems of an ordinary soldier, as well as the concern for his relatives and neighbours, and are thus an important evidence of the everyday history of Tyrol during the First World War.


HISTOREIN ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Antonis Liakos

The twentieth century has been described as a dark century of wars, holocausts, death and pain. This is true, but it is only a partial image of the century. This article discusses five major challenges and their relations to historiography: a) the disintegration of empires, decolonisation and the rise of new nations; b) the impact of world wars (genocides, revolutions, totalitarian regimes); c) the boom in technoscience and the digital era; d) the ascent of rights, the transformation of gender relations and mass literacy; and e) globalisation. These changes were experienced by three generations of historians. The first generation appeared before the First World War, the second from 1918 to 1970 and the third from 1970. The question we pose is: has the history of historiography responded to these challenges or does it also have its internal logic? And how has it responded?


2000 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
R. Soloviy

In the history of religious organizations of Western Ukraine in the 20-30th years of the XX century. The activity of such an early protestant denominational formation as the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church occupies a prominent position. Among UCRC researchers there are several approaches to the preconditions for the birth of the Ukrainian Calvinistic movement in Western Ukraine. In particular, O. Dombrovsky, studying the historical preconditions for the formation of the UREC in Western Ukraine, expressed the view that the formation of the Calvinist cell should be considered in the broad context of the Ukrainian national revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, a new assessment of the religious factor in public life proposed by the Ukrainian radical activists ( M. Drahomanov, I. Franko, M. Pavlik), and significant socio-political, national-cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the events of the First World War. Other researchers of Ukrainian Calvinism, who based their analysis on the confessional-polemical approach (I.Vlasovsky, M.Stepanovich), interpreted Protestantism in Ukraine as a product of Western cultural and religious influences, alien to Ukrainian spirituality and culture.


2020 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Magdalena Strąk

The work aims to show a peculiar perspective of looking at photographs taken on the eve of the broadly understood disaster, which is specified in a slightly different way in each of the literary texts (Stefan Chwin’s autobiographical novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu [The brief history of a certain joke], a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński Na wystawie „Fotografia chłopów polskich do 1944 r.” [At an exhibition “The Polish peasants in photographs to 1944”] and Wisława Szymborska’s Fotografia z 11 września [Photograph from September 11]) – as death in a concentration camp, a general concept of the First World War or a terrorist attack. Upcoming tragic events – of which the photographed people are not yet aware – become for the subsequent recipient an inseparable element of reality contained in the frame. For the later observers, privileged with time perspective, the characters captured in the photograph are already victims of the catastrophe, which in reality was not yet recorded by the camera. It is a work about coexistence of the past and future in the field of photography.


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