scholarly journals ‘Weeping tears of blood’: exploring Italian soldiers' emotions in the First World War

Modern Italy ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vanda Wilcox

Emotion plays a vital role in any rounded history of warfare, both as an element in morale and as component in understanding the soldier's experience. Theories on the functioning of emotions vary, but an exploration of Italian soldiers' emotions during the First World War highlights both cognitive and cultural elements in the ways emotions were experienced and expressed. Although Italian stereotypes of passivity and resignation dominated contemporary discourse concerning the feelings and reactions of peasant conscripts, letters reveal that Italian soldiers vividly expressed a wide range of intense emotions. Focusing on fear, horror and grief as recurrent themes, this article finds that these emotions were processed and expressed in ways which show similarities to the combatants of other nations but which also display distinctly Italian features. The language and imagery commonly deployed offer insights into the ways in which Italian socio-cultural norms shaped expressions of personal war experience. In letters that drew on both religious imagery and the traditional peasant concerns of land, terrain and basic survival, soldiers expressed their fears of death, isolation, suffering and killing in surprisingly vigorous terms.

2021 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 395-406
Author(s):  
Dobrosława Antonów

The paper draws attention to one of the emergency taxes in the history of the Polish Treasury, i.e. a tax on war profits. It was levied under the Decree of 5 February 1919 on the Establishment of a Tax on War Profits. This levy introduced a concept which was developed in Europe and built on the First World War experience. In the reborn Poland, the tax was supposed to have two functions: fiscal — as a source of financing the extraordinary expenditure arising from the war against the Soviets and a social function — as an additional burden on those taxpayers who were able to accumulate wealth and earn substantial profits as a result of the First World War.


2020 ◽  
pp. 127-149
Author(s):  
Alexey Y. Timofeev

The anniversary of the First World War in Serbia has become an oc-casion for exacerbating public discussion and drawing attention to the rise of revisionism in NATO countries. Fear of a revision of the history of World War I infl uenced Serbian society and elites on the eve of the centenary. The concerned Serb elites responded with a wide range of events organized in Serbia and Republika Srpska. Within the framework of the commemorative events dedicated to the anniversary, monuments, installed and restored by the Serbian authorities and their foreign part-ners, have received special signifi cance. These were monuments to the Serbian patriot G. Princip, to the famous Iron Regiment, to the woman volunteer-soldier Milunka Savic. They are traditional fi gures of the Ser-bian memory of the First World War. At the same time, Serbian authori-ties did not succeed in their attempt to perpetuate in monumental forms the head of the Serbian military intelligence D. Dimitrievic-Apis, the leader of the Serbian nationalist organization Black Hand, which patron-ized the Mlada Bosna organization that prepared the assassination on Franz Ferdinand. The Russian-Serbian monuments of the First World War in Serbia presenting Nicholas II and the military brotherhood of the two peoples were of special signifi cance. All new monuments have become memorial sites and at the same time attractive points for vari-ous political forces expressing their sympathies and antipathies through symbolic gestures towards them.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew McCaffrey

AbstractFrank A. Fetter is often classified as an American representative of the Austrian school, yet surprisingly, there is practically no published record of his views of the Austrians or theirs of him, and there is no indication that he ever seriously interacted with them after the First World War. However, Fetter enjoyed many personal and professional relationships with the Austrians, and they shared a reciprocal influence on each other's ideas that deeply influenced their respective research programs. This paper draws on unpublished archival records to explore Fetter's unique place in the history of economics, in particular, his positive and negative interactions with the leading individuals and institutions of the Austrian school. Their half-century of influence sheds light on Fetter and his role in American economics, but also brings to light a wide range of information about the lives, works, and personal relations of the Austrians that have not been included in their biographies or institutional histories.


2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tea Sindbæk Andersen

This article investigates the developments of public memory of the First World War as it is written into the national narratives of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia on the way to the centennial of the war’s outbreak. The First World War constitutes both a shared and a divided memory in Serbia, Croatia, and Bosnia. Though the war was a catastrophe everywhere, to Serbia it also became a triumph on the allied side, whereas in Bosnia and Croatia it was mainly a state collapse. Yet, the First World War also provided the immediate conditions for the creation of the first Yugoslav state, and consequently the history of the war was narrated within a Yugoslav context, echoing the triumphant Serbian narrative. With the fall of socialist Yugoslavia, the memory of the First World War developed quite differently in the three states. Different lessons are being drawn from war history, often with the aim of situating the nation within a European context. In Serbia, First World War narratives remain national and heroic and are framed as a virtuous, pro-democratic, and European legacy. In Croatia and Bosnia, First World War history is being created anew and, at least in the Bosnian case, with an aspiration to present Bosnia’s war experience within a discourse of European reconciliation. Based on analyses of popular history books, history debates in newspapers and media, and political commentary, the article shows how the First World War as public memory has moved from Yugoslav to national narratives with an increasingly European aspiration.


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.


Author(s):  
Felix S. Kireev

Boris Alexandrovich Galaev is known as an outstanding composer, folklorist, conductor, educator, musical and public figure. He has a great merit in the development of musical culture in South Ossetia. All the musical activity of B.A. Galaev is studied and analyzed in detail. In most of the biographies of B.A. Galaev about his participation in the First World War, there is only one proposal that he served in the army and was a bandmaster. For the first time in historiography the participation of B.A. Galaev is analyzed, and it is found out what positions he held, what awards he received, in which battles he participated. Based on the identified documentary sources, for the first time in historiography, it occured that B.A. Galaev was an active participant in the First World War on the Caucasian Front. He went on attacks, both on foot and horse formation, was in reconnaissance, maintained communication between units, received military awards. During this period, he did not have time to study his favorite music, since, according to the documents, he was constantly at the front, in the battle formations of the advanced units. He had to forget all this heroic past and tried not to mention it ever after. Therefore, this period of his life was not studied by the researchers of his biography. For writing this work, the author uses the Highest Orders on the Ranks of the Military and the materials of the Russian State Military Historical Archive (RSMHA).


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 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
T.N. GELLA ◽  

The main purpose of the article is to analyze the views of a famous British historian G.D.G. Cole on the history of the British workers' and UK socialist movement in the early twentieth century. The arti-cle focuses on the historian's assessment and the reasons for the workers' strike movement intensi-fication on the eve of the First World War, the specifics of such trends as labourism, trade unionism and syndicalism.


Author(s):  
Billie Melman

Empires of Antiquities is a history of the rediscovery of the imperial civilizations of the ancient Near East in a modern imperial order that evolved between the outbreak of the First World War and the decolonization of the British Empire in the 1950s. It explores the ways in which near eastern antiquity was redefined and experienced, becoming the subject of imperial regulation, modes of enquiry, and international and national politics. A series of globally publicized spectacular archaeological discoveries in Iraq, Egypt, and Palestine, which the book follows, made antiquity material visible and accessible as never before. The book demonstrates that the new definition and uses of antiquity and their relations to modernity were inseparable from the emergence of the post-war international imperial order, transnational collaboration and crises, the aspirations of national groups, and collisions between them and the British mandatories. It uniquely combines a history of the internationalization of archaeology and the rise of a new “regime of antiquities” under the oversight of the League of Nations and its institutions, a history of British attitudes to, and passion for, near eastern antiquity and on-the-ground colonial policies and mechanisms, as well as nationalist claims on the past. It points to the centrality of the new mandate system, particularly mandates classified A in Mesopotamia/Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan, formerly governed by the Ottoman Empire, and of Egypt, in the new archaeological regime. Drawing on an unusually wide range of materials collected in archives in six countries, as well as on material and visual evidence, the book weaves together imperial, international, and national histories, and the history of archaeological discovery which it connects to imperial modernity.


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