The Great Migration in Context: The Chicago Experience, 1916–1918

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher R. Reed
Keyword(s):  
Black Business ◽  
First World War ◽  
Past Century ◽  
Great Migration ◽  
World War ◽  
Wall Street ◽  
The Past ◽  
The North ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

The unanticipated and massive migration of half a million African Americans between 1916 and 1918 from the racially oppressive South to the welcoming North surprised the nation. Directly resulting from the advent of the First World War, the movement of these able-bodied workers provided essential labor to maintain wartime production that sustained the Allied war effort. One-tenth of the people who surged north headed to and remained in Chicago, where their presence challenged the status quo in the areas of employment, external race relations, internal race arrangements, politics, housing, and recreation. Once in the Windy City, this migrant-influenced labor pool expanded with the addition of resident blacks to form the city’s first African American industrial proletariat. Wages for both men and women increased compared to what they had been earning in the South, and local businesses were ready and willing to accommodate these new consumers. A small black business sector became viable and was able to support two banks, and by the mid-1920s, there were multiple stores along Chicago’s State Street forming a virtual “Black Wall Street.” An extant political submachine within Republic Party ranks also increased its power and influence in repeated electoral contests. Importantly, upon scrutiny, the purported social conflict between the Old Settler element and the newcomers was shown to be overblown and inconsequential to black progress. Recent revisionist scholarship over the past two decades has served to minimize the first phase of northward movement and has positioned it within the context of a half-century phenomenon under the labels of the “Second Great Migration” and the “Great Black Migration.” No matter what the designation, the voluntary movement of five to six million blacks from what had been their traditional home to the uncertainty of the North and West between the First World War and the Vietnam conflict stands as both a condemnation of regional oppression of the human spirit and aspirations of millions, and a demonstration of group courage in taking on new challenges in new settings. Although Chicago would prove to be “no crystal stair,” it was on many occasions a land of hope and promise for migrants throughout the past century.

scholarly journals The First World War and its Legacy in the Middle East

2016 ◽  
pp. 91-108
Author(s):  
Eugene Rogan
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
First World War ◽  
Past Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Great War ◽  
First World

The First World War proved a crucial turning point in the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. Under conditions of total warfare, conscripts and civilians suffered greater losses and depredations than in any other conflict in the region before or since. The Great War also led to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after four centuries of rule over the Arab lands, to be replaced by a modern state system actively negotiated between the Entente Powers in the course of the war. While the borders of Middle Eastern states have proven remarkably enduring over the past century, so too have the problems engendered by the wartime partition diplomacy.

Ale na razie tu cisza” – fotografie sprzed katastrofy w wybranych zapisach literackich (Stefan Chwin, Ryszard Kapuściński, Wisława Szymborska)

2020 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Magdalena Strąk
Keyword(s):  
Time Perspective ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
First World War ◽  
General Concept ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

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.

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

scholarly journals “Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915-1939

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Fantauzzo
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Sinai Peninsula ◽  
World War ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
War Machine ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Over 450,000 British soldiers fought as part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. Between 1915-1918, they fought their way across the Sinai Peninsula, into southern Palestine, captured Jerusalem, and overran the Turkish Army, leading to the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in October 1918. Despite being the war’s most successful sideshow, the Egypt and Palestine campaign struggled to gain popular attention and has largely been excluded from First World War scholarship. This article argues that returning soldiers used war books to rehabilitate the campaign’s public profile and to renegotiate the meaning of wartime service in interwar Britain. The result of sporadic press attention and censorship during the war, the British public’s understanding of the campaign was poor. Periodic access to home front news meant that most soldiers likely learnt of their absence from Britain’s war narrative during the war years. Confronting the belief that the campaign, prior to the capture of Jerusalem, was an inactive theatre of war, British soldiers refashioned themselves as military labourers, paving the road to Jerusalem and building the British war machine. As offensive action intensified, soldiers could look to the past to provide meaning to the present. Allusions to the campaign as a crusade were frequently made and used to compete with the moral righteousness of the liberation of Belgium.

The Belgian national past: Between commemoration and silence

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-57 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valerie Rosoux ◽  
Laurence van Ypersele
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The One ◽  
Memory Conflicts ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

This article examines the gradual deconstruction of the Belgian national identity. Is it possible to speak of a de facto differentiation or even ‘federalization’ of the so-called ‘national past’ in Belgium? How do Belgians choose to remember and forget this past? To contribute to an understanding of these issues, the article considers two very different episodes of Belgian history, namely the First World War and the colonization of the Congo. On the one hand, the memory of the First World War appears to provide the template for memory conflicts in Belgium, and thus informs the memories of other tragedies such as the Second World War. On the other hand, the memory of the colonial past remains much more consensual – providing a more nuanced picture of competing views on the past. Beyond the differences between the ways in which these episodes are officially portrayed, the same fundamental trend may be observed: the gradual fragmentation of a supposedly smooth and reliable national version of history.

On the Terrible War of 5675

2012 ◽  
pp. 299-309
Author(s):  
George (Gedaliah) Silverstone
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
First World War ◽  
Jewish Literature ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Masses ◽  
First World

This chapter studies an early example of a sermon which focuses more on the toll taken by the First World War on the masses of Jewish civilians living on the contested territories of the Eastern Front rather than on the implications of the war for the general values of culture and civilization. Here the sermon of George (Gedaliah) Silverstone does not underline the patriotism of Jews towards all the countries where they lived, but rather emphasizes the underlying unity of the Jewish people, and the sometimes painful tension between that unity and such patriotism. The preacher introduces it by speaking of the reaction of his listeners to the story they have read ‘in the newspapers’, apparently within the past few days. In addition to narratives drawn from the contemporary newspapers, there are two other major components of the sermon's message, drawn from traditional Jewish literature. The source provides hope for a providential, redemptive dénouement to the bloodshed, in the traditional homiletical style.

L’Envoi

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Mass Spectrometer ◽  
Noble Gases ◽  
First World War ◽  
Neutrino Experiment ◽  
The Moon ◽  
World War ◽  
Electrical Currents ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Churchill’s expression was glorious Rodomontade, but in the end it is still nothing but rodomontade. Understanding the causes of the First World War did not help us to understand the different factors that were operating in 1939, and understanding the results of our isolationism when Hitler began strutting around did not help us avoid the opposite mistakes we made by waging “preventive” war in Vietnam and Iraq. “The past is a different country; they do things differently there,” and we learn nothing from them except that we cannot predict the future. This is true even more with science than with politics. At the end of every century, there is a spate of experts predicting what the new century will bring. But in 1900 no one predicted radio, much less television, or antibiotics or computers or MRI or CAT scans, or cyclotrons or trips to the moon, or even that man might fly. So I cannot pretend that the history written here will tell us what breakthroughs are in store for those working with the noble gases. That’s why they call it research; if you knew what the result of your experiment was going to be, there’d be no point in doing it. I thought I knew what the result of Ray Davis’s neutrino experiment was going to be, and so I thought there was no point in doing it. I was wrong, and glad to be, for it’s the surprises that drive us forward: Rutherford’s helium particles bouncing backwards, the xenon-129 peak poking up beyond where it ought to be, the argon-39 peak appearing where it oughtn’t to be at all, the electrical currents suddenly running wild through the heliumcooled mercury, et cetera and so forth and so on. What’s coming next? I have no idea and, no matter what they tell you, neither does anyone else. Which is what makes it all so exciting. Exactly fifty years after I first met the noble gases at Brookhaven in the summer of 1958, I turned off the mass spectrometer and retired.

‘The Colossus of the North’: One Man's Account of Queensland During the First World War

2004 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-37
Author(s):  
Malcolm Saunders
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
First World War ◽  
The Other ◽  
Small Scale ◽  
World War ◽  
The North ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Principal Source ◽  
First World

Australians — not least of all historians and political scientists — have long wondered whether Queensland was any different from the other colonies/states. Some of the ways in which it differs from most of its southern sisters — such as its geographical size and decentralised population — have always been obvious. No less well known has been its pursuit of agrarian policies. For much of the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, governments of all political persuasions in Queensland preferred to develop primary rather than secondary industries, and consequently favoured rural rather than urban areas. An integral part of agrarianism was its emphasis on closer settlement — that is, breaking the pastoralists' (or squatters') hold over vast areas of land and making smaller and suitable plots of land available to men of limited means, people most often referred to almost romantically as ‘yeoman farmers’. Governments envisaged a colony or state whose economy was based less on huge industries concentrated in a few hands and situated in the cities than on a class of small-scale agriculturalists whose produce would not only feed the population but also be a principal source of wealth.

Ensemble Intercontemporain at 40, Philharmonie de Paris

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (282) ◽  
pp. 80-81
Author(s):  
Stephanie Jones
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Original Sin ◽  
First Century ◽  
Worth Living ◽  
World War ◽  
Life Worth Living ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Bernard Stiegler ◽  
First World

In response to Paul Valéry's words after the First World War in La Crise de l'esprit – ‘We later civilisations … we too now know that we are mortal’ – the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler remarks, in his own chapter entitled ‘Apocalypse Without God’ in his What Makes Life Worth Living, We too, earthlings of the twenty-first century know that we are capable of self-destruction. And if in the past the possibility of such an extinction of our kind was inconceivable other than as the consequence of God's anger – of original sin – today there is no longer any religious reference at the origin of this extreme global pessimism’ (p. 9).

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