The dead and their public. Memory campaigns, issue networks and the role of the archaeologist in the excavation of mass graves

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Layla Renshaw

AbstractThis contribution will consider how the practice of archaeology ‘brings a public into being’. Drawing on examples of the excavation of mass graves from the Spanish Civil War and the First World War, particularly those cases resulting from activism on the part of memory campaign groups, this paper considers how the act of excavation can serve as a catalyst for members of the public to coalesce and deliberate the complex and far-reaching questions associated with the post-mortem treatment and commemoration of the dead. The necessity to fulfil the aims of particular constituencies, such as the relatives of the dead, or the need to maintain a position of impartiality, may militate against the archaeologist's full intellectual engagement with these questions, resulting in the archaeologist's role being defined primarily by their technical or practical contribution. The concept of the issue network is explored as a way to understand the formation of memory campaigns and the archaeologist's relationship with the public. The idea of the network underlines the potential for the archaeologist to make an intellectual contribution that develops and democratizes the debate surrounding an excavation, even if their position is contested, and so bring a wider public into being.

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 125-143
Author(s):  
Kamil Mroczka

The position and the role of the province governor in the system of public deciding in the period of the Second Polish Republic in the years 1919–1928 in the context of creating structures of the territorial administration The aim of the article is to analyze the position and role of the voivode in the public decision-making process of the Second Polish Republic, in the context of creating administrative structures. This is an important issue due to the spectacular and impressive rate of development of the political model of the territorial admini­stration in Poland after the First World War.


Vulcan ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Siotto

The press was well accustomed to utilizing illustrations and photographs at the start of the First World War. This widespread use of images helped the people at home to better understand a war that differed enormously from previous conflicts. Images became a powerful instrument of propaganda, but also retained their usual function in entertaining and educating the reader. In this regard, technology offered new challenges and opportunities to the press in that the novelties of warfare had to be described to the public at home and images offered immediacy and clarity, and at the same time the new weapons’ marvel, even if terrifying, caught the attention and curiosity of the reader and “sold” magazines. The ample use of illustrations and photographs depicting technology in the magazines suggests how important the role of the press was in influencing both how the public understood the events on the frontline and how difficult it was for them to comprehend the new technological warfare.


Author(s):  
Vittorio Frigerio

The French anarchist press positions itself from the beginning as the purveyor of honest and objective information, as opposed to the mainstream bourgeois newspapers, close to political power, who tailor their news to the needs of propaganda. This article offers an analysis of the role of the press as a vehicle for fake news from the point of view of anarchist writers and journalists, starting with Proudhon’s own newspapers (1848-1850), but focusing most of all on the polemics around the “bourrage de crânes" (brainwashing of the public) during the First World War. This through the writings of two of the most active writers of the individualist branch of the anarchist movement, Manuel Devaldès and Gérard de Lacaze-Duthiers, and their critique of language and the use of tropes, clichés and slogans for propaganda purposes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-139
Author(s):  
Sandra Trudgen Dawson

AbstractThis article explores the complexity surrounding the politics and emotions of internationalism and humanitarian work in interwar Britain by using as a lens the public and official responses to assisting “refugee children.” Analysis of British responses to refugee emergencies after the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities suggests that attitudes shifted dramatically between the arrival of Basque child refugees in May 1937 and the Kindertransports in late 1938. Charities and refugee committees, many of them faith-based, had to negotiate the spaces between nation, ideology, and emotion to successfully raise funds for refugees. All appeals were to “save” children, and yet the responses and the amounts raised were vastly different. Campaigns to support almost four thousand Basque children proved politically polarizing and bureaucratic. In contrast, the immediate and widespread response to fund-raising to bring ten thousand children to Britain in 1938 suggests that a significant change in attitudes and fund-raising practices had taken place in a short time. Unlike the political divisions that hampered support for the Basque children, Britons from all walks of life appeared by 1938 to embrace the emotional and financial cost of internationalism in a way they had not only a year before.


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.


Author(s):  
Giandomenico Piluso

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.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Tea Sindbæk Andersen ◽  
Ismar Dedović

Abstract This article investigates the role of 1918, the end of the First World War, and the establishment of the Yugoslav state in public memories of post-communist Croatia and Serbia. Analysing history schoolbooks within the context of major works of history and public discussion, the authors trace the developments of public memory of the end of the war and 1918. Drawing on the concepts of public memory and historical narrative, the authors focus on the ways in which history textbooks create historical narratives and on the types of lessons from the past that can be extracted from these narratives. While Serbia and Croatia have rather different patterns of First World War memory, the authors argue that both states have abandoned the Yugoslav communist narrative and now publicly commemorate 1918 as a loss of national statehood. This is somehow paradoxical, since the establishment of the South Slav State in 1918 was supposedly an outcome of the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination. In Serbia, the story of loss is packed in a fatalistic narrative of heroism and victimhood, while in Croatia the story of loss is embedded in a tale of necessary evils, which nevertheless had a positive outcome in a sovereign Croatian state.


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.


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