‘A Wave on to Our Shores’: The Exile and Resettlement of Refugees from the Western Front, 1914–1918

2007 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-444 ◽  
Author(s):  
PIERRE PURSEIGLE
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Social Mobilisation ◽  
First World

AbstractIn the wake of the German invasion of Belgium and France in August 1914, four million persons went into exile. While such a displacement of population testified to a dramatic change in the character of war in western Europe, historiography and collective memory alike have so far concurred in marginalising the experience of refugees during the First World War. This article examines their unprecedented encounter with host communities in France and Great Britain. It demonstrates that the refugees' plight reveals the strengths as well as the tensions inherent in the process of social mobilisation that was inseparable from the First World War.

The First World War and the Myth of the Young Man's War in Western Europe

2018 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 148-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda M. Brian
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Moral High Ground ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

During and after the First World War, authors in several of the main belligerent nations presented the war as a young man's war. The young man's war proved to be a powerful trope, and a myth emerged about the typical trench soldier as handsome, white, and eighteen. In this article, I examine literature about the Great War across several nations – primarily Germany, Great Britain, and France – to demonstrate how and why youth became embedded in the collective memory and representation of the war. I argue, in part, that notions of youth in the early twentieth century allowed participating nations to emphasise innocence and tragedy, claiming the moral high ground in the process. As a result, it is now difficult to accurately depict the First World War soldiers as fathers as well as sons, husbands as well as fiancés, men with careers as well as boys fresh from school. The generation of 1914 must be conceived more broadly, which would disallow easy teleologies to later tragic events in the 1930s.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Keyword(s):  
Collective Memory ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Scholarly Research ◽  
Western Front ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Historical Issues ◽  
First World

In the collective memory, the concept of the First World War is pervaded by the trauma of the modern technologized war on the western front, whereas the events and battles on the eastern front of 1914–1915, other than the battle of Tannenberg, have shifted into the background. Thus, the phrase “all quiet on the eastern front” offers a succinct description of the lack of scholarly research on the first two years of the war on the German eastern front. This volume aims to correct that deficiency, presenting essays by professional historians from eight countries discussing the eastern theater of war in terms of operations, mindset, and cultural-historical issues.

scholarly journals Recasting Bourgeois Britain?

1986 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-247 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Nottingham
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
First World War ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Post War ◽  
First World ◽  
Reduced Intensity

In Recasting Bourgeois Europe, his study of the responses of the major States of Western Europe to the conditions created by the First World War, Charles Maier makes only, according to his standards, passing reference to Great Britain. Initially this must appear quite reasonable, for if one compares the post-war situation of Britain with that of most of Continental Europe it must seem that Britain escaped, or at least experienced with a greatly reduced intensity, the disorder which beset other nations. It might therefore be assumed that the efforts of the British political elite to adjust to the post-war world are less worthy of attention than those of their Continental counterparts.

THE BRITISH MANDATE AND THE UPRISING OF 1920 IN IRAQ

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (73) (1) ◽  
pp. 140-153
Author(s):  
S. S. Shchevelev
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Initial Period ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
British Mandate ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

The article examines the initial period of the mandate administration of Iraq by Great Britain, the anti-British uprising of 1920. The chronological framework covers the period from May 1916 to October 1921 and includes an analysis of events in the Middle East from May 1916, when the secret agreement on the division of the territories of the Ottoman Empire after the end of World War I (the Sykes-Picot agreement) was concluded before the proclamation of Faisal as king of Iraq and from the formation of the country՚s government. This period is a key one in the Iraqi-British relations at the turn of the 10-20s of the ХХ century. The author focuses on the Anglo-French negotiations during the First World War, on the eve and during the Paris Peace Conference on the division of the territory of the Ottoman Empire and the ownership of the territories in the Arab zone. During these negotiations, it was decided to transfer the mandates for Syria (with Lebanon) to the France, and Palestine and Mesopotamia (Iraq) to Great Britain. The British in Iraq immediately faced strong opposition from both Sunnis and Shiites, resulting in an anti-English uprising in 1920. The author describes the causes, course and consequences of this uprising.

The East Wind

2018 ◽  
pp. 179-192
Author(s):  
Andrew Glazzard
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Western Front ◽  
East Wind ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Holmes’s words to Watson at the end of ‘His Last Bow’ (1917) express an idea of warfare that sits uneasily with our contemporary perception of the First World War. Today we are accustomed to associate that war with the horrors of the Western Front: the battles of the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917) loom large in our cultural memory as paradigms of unnecessary bloodshed and strategic incompetence. But this was not how Conan Doyle saw it – and he saw the Western Front at first hand, while both his brother, Brigadier-General Innes ‘Duff’ Doyle, and his son Kingsley were in the thick of the action. At the invitation of the War Office, Doyle toured the British, Italian and French Fronts in 1916, and the Australian Front in 1918, using his authority as Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey to don an improvised khaki uniform ‘which was something between that of a Colonel and Brigadier, with silver roses instead of stars or crowns upon the shoulder-states’.1

Romance Studies 2: Hispanic Literatures

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas R. Hart
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
William James ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Hispanic Studies ◽  
First World

This chapter examines the history and developments in the study of medieval Hispanic literatures in Great Britain during the twentieth century. It explains that the importance of Hispanic studies in British universities increased greatly after the end of the First World War and that by 1925 there were four professorships in Spanish studies. The first chair of Spanish studies in Cambridge was J.B. Trend. Other notable British hispanists include William James Entwistle and Gerald Brenan.

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