Englishness, Empire and Nostalgia: A Heterodox Religious Community's Appeal in the Inter-War Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Belief Networks ◽  
Healing Ministry ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Rich

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.

The Chief Rabbi, the London Beth Din and the Battle for Leadership in the ‘Provinces’

2019 ◽  
pp. 40-60
Author(s):  
Hannah Holtschneider
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Religious Authority ◽  
Religious Politics ◽  
World War ◽  
Religious Leadership ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Authority Structure

Chapter 2 examines the context in which the discussions about religious leadership and the authority of the Chief Rabbi took place in pre-World War I Britain. Centre stage is taken by the Conference of Anglo-Jewish Ministers which at their first two meetings in 1909 and 1911 suggested a radical overhaul of the authority structure of the United Hebrew Congregations of the British Empire, proposing the devolution of religious authority to regional batei din. The death of Hermann Adler in 1911 and the election of Joseph Hertz as his successor as Chief Rabbi in 1913 changed the course of events, and the scheme was dropped from discussions. However, the scheme remained prominent in Salis Daiches’s mind and he pursued it actively in Scotland from 1919 onwards. While his religious politics ran counter to that of Chief Rabbi Hertz, his voice had traction in the communities he served. Though futile in the end, the repeated articulation of a plan of decentralisation of rabbinic authority is a helpful barometer for the mood in Jewish congregations in the early twentieth century whose long-term members were massively outnumbered by recently immigrated co-religionists.

The “Sticky Sediment” of Daily Life: Radical Domesticity, Revolutionary Christianity, and the Problem of Wealth in Britain from the 1880s to the 1930s

2012 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Koven
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Justice ◽  
Ethical Imperative ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This essay examines an early twentieth-century Christian revolutionary habitus—a “technique of Christian living”—based on the conviction that everyday life was an essential site for reconciling the claims of individual and community, the material and the spiritual. The pacifist-feminist members of London’s first “people’s house,” Kingsley Hall, linked their vision of Jesus’s inclusive and unbounded love for humanity to their belief in the ethical imperative that all people take full moral responsibility for cleaning up their own dirt as part of their utopian program to bring social, economic, and political justice to the outcast in London, Britain, and its empire. In imagining what a reconstructed post-World War I Britain might become, Kingsley Hall’s cross-class band of workers used mundane practices to unmake and remake the late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropic legacy they inherited.

scholarly journals PLAYING ON UNCLE SAM'S TEAM: AMERICAN CHILDHOODS DURING WORLD WAR I

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
World War I ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
Constructions Of Childhood

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.

Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 309-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Twaddle
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
East Africa ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Residential Segregation ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Test Case ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Meetings ◽  
The World

East Africa is really what one may call a ‘test case’ for Great Britain. If Indians cannot be treated as equals in a vacant or almost vacant part of the world where they were the first in occupation—a part of the world which is on the equator—it seems that the so-called freedom of the British Empire is a sham and a delusion.The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.

An Imperfect Mahlerite

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-103
Author(s):  
Matthew Mugmon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Events ◽  
French Music ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
And Performance

As one of the chief representatives of French music in the early twentieth century, Nadia Boulanger is typically ignored in discussions of the reception of Gustav Mahler’s music, which—like most studies of reception—focus primarily on press accounts and public events. Moreover, Boulanger is usually considered in the context of a broader French aversion, in the first half of the twentieth century, to Mahler’s late-Romantic Austro-German idiom. But a range of documentary evidence concerning her attendance at the 1920 Mahler festival in Amsterdam, including previously unexamined correspondence as well as scores annotated in her hand, reveals that, motivated by a post-World War I spirit of internationalism, Boulanger contributed materially to the study and performance of Mahler. She encouraged audiences to consider his music’s emotional power and analyzed it in a way that drew attention to its orchestration and the horizontal aspects of its construction. She also introduced such figures as Aaron Copland to Mahler’s music, preparing him to approach it in a way that centered on the vocabulary of neo-classicism. Boulanger’s engagement with Mahler not only contributes to our picture of the composer’s reception, but also reveals the historiographical value of discourses that take place behind the scenes.

Alexander Von Mörk and Poldi Fuhrich: The Conception of Heroes in Cave Exploration in the Early Twentieth Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Mattes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Equipment ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Personality Cult ◽  
The Social ◽  
Iconic Status

The Austrians Alexander von Mörk (1887-1914) and Poldi Fuhrich (1898-1926) became two of the leading cave explorers in the early twentieth century. After qualifying as an academic painter, Alexander von Mörk fell as an officer in World War I. Poldi Fuhrich, who worked as a teacher, received international recognition during her lifetime as one of the very few female cave explorers. She died in a cave accident in Styria, Austria. Mörk and Fuhrich achieved iconic status as martyrs of cave science and became role models for speleologists. My research examines the parallels in the conception of these heroic figures and the ‘parameters’ of their memorial. How and to what end was their memory perpetuated and exploited by the following generation of explorers? Expedition diaries, protocols of caving clubs, and obituaries in newspapers are used as sources for analyses. The results show a strong correlation between the commemoration of the fallen soldiers of World War I and the conception of heroic figures in speleology. While the personality cult of Fuhrich declined in the mid-thirties due to the social exclusion of women from the scientific study of caves, Mörk was increasingly celebrated as a mythical and self-sacrificing founder and enthusiastic German nationalist. The commemoration of the deceased in cave science was related to the militarisation of club life during the twenties. This is reflected in the radicalisation of language, the usage of military equipment in cave exploration, and the nomination of military officers as club officials.

Liberalism and the Welfare State in Britain, 1890–1945

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger E. Backhouse ◽  
Bradley W. Bateman ◽  
Tamotsu Nishizawa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
World War ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter establishes that the British welfare state was the creation of Liberals as much as socialists. By the early twentieth century, the “New Liberalism” was moving the Liberal Party away from Gladstonian Liberalism, and the Asquith government took major steps toward a welfare state before World War I. The economists arguing for the welfare state included many Liberals, notably Alfred Marshall, J. A. Hobson, A. C. Pigou, William Beveridge, and John Maynard Keynes. British Liberalism was varied, and influential strands within it were strongly supportive of the welfare state. Beveridge and Keynes, in particular, were responsible for much of the intellectual architecture of the welfare state as it was implemented by the first postwar Labour government of Clement Attlee.

Economic Strength and Diplomatic Attitudes: The Formation of French Hostility Before World War I

1978 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-55
Author(s):  
Jonathan J. Liebowltz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
International Conflict ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Alliance System ◽  
Insight Into

The rivalry between France and Germany was one of the most important themes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history. It was at the heart of the alliance system of this period and helped to produce that most horrible conflict, World War I. Understanding the causes and nature of Franco-German hostility would help to explain the war’s outbreak. A study of this hostility might also be a way of testing some of the theories of conflict recently developed by scholars from several disciplines but rarely applied by historians in their work. I shall discuss here several models of international conflict and show how one of them, relating images of national strength to diplomatic attitudes, can increase our insight into the formation of French hostility between 1871 and 1914.

The Russo-Japanese War and the German Wars for Hegemony, 1890–1939

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale C. Copeland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Powers ◽  
World War ◽  
Economic Determinants ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Global War ◽  
First World

This chapter explores the origins of three of the four most important wars of the first half of the twentieth century: the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5, World War I, and World War II in Europe. These three wars had more than just a chronological connection to one another. The Russo-Japanese War helped solidify the diplomatic and economic alignments of the great powers in the decade before 1914, while the disaster of the First World War clearly set the stage for the rise of Nazism and the outbreak of yet another global war a generation later. This chapter focuses on providing a fairly comprehensive account of the causes of the Russo-Japanese War, confining the discussion of the world wars to the economic determinants of those conflicts.

Project Context Rediscovery and Exploration

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon James
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Yale University ◽  
World War ◽  
French Academy ◽  
Military Presence ◽  
The World ◽  
Western Scholarship ◽  
The Military ◽  
Small Team

The ruined city known locally as Salhiyeh was virtually unknown to western scholarship until the twentieth century (Sarre and Herzfeld 1920, 386–95; Kaizer 2017, 64), but its ancient identity remained unknown until the aftermath of the World War I when collapse of the Ottoman empire saw Britain and France divide up much of the Middle East between them (Velud 1988; Barr 2011). As we saw, during operations against Arabs resisting the new western occupation, British-commanded Indian troops bivouacking at the site dug defensive positions and accidentally revealed wall paintings. These were seen and published by visiting American archaeologist James Henry Breasted (Breasted 1922; 1924), who first identified the ruins as those of the historically attested but unlocated ‘Dura . . . called Europos by the Greeks’ (Isidore of Charax, Parthian Stations, 1). The site thereafter fell inside the newly imposed borders of French-controlled Syria (Velud 1988). More substantial excavations were conducted and published with exemplary speed by Franz Cumont in 1922–3 (Cumont 1926), paving the way for the great Yale University/French Academy expedition overseen by Mikhail Rostovtzeff. This ran over ten seasons: (Dates from the Preliminary Reports, and Hopkins 1979, xxii–xxiv, except ninth and tenth seasons from information in Yale archives provided by Megan Doyon and Richard A. Grossmann.) With a Roman military presence attested from the outset, further traces were encountered throughout the city’s exploration, with the heart of the military base area being identified and excavated in the fifth season, and the great ‘Palace of the dux ripae’ in the ninth. While masterminded by Rostovtzeff, and more nominally Cumont, these giants actually only briefly visited the excavations on a couple of occasions. The dig was conducted under a series of field directors: Maurice Pillet, Clark Hopkins, and finally Frank Brown. These led a small team of American and European architects, artists, and archaeologists, mostly male (although women occupied prominent places on the team, including Yale graduate student Margaret Crosby and most notably Hopkins’s wife Susan); they were mostly young and inexperienced (including Hopkins and Brown).

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