The Violence of World War, 1914–1920

2020 ◽  
pp. 34-53
Author(s):  
Laura Robson
Keyword(s):  
Political Repression ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
Extreme Violence ◽  
Public Executions ◽  
Imperial Reforms

This chapter investigates the unfolding of the war in the Arab provinces, examining how imperial reforms morphed into extreme violence as the Ottoman state enacted genocidal campaigns against Armenians and practiced political repression against Arab activists while European forces invaded, blockaded, and occupied the famine-stricken Levant. It focuses in particular on the rather sudden delegitimization of Ottoman authority in the Mashriq as a consequence of the multiple Allied invasions; the Committee of Union and Progress’s emerging policies of mass conscription, material requisitioning, and political repression in greater Syria and the Iraqi provinces, symbolized particularly by the public executions in Beirut and Damascus in 1915 and 1916. It also articulates how the Allied military campaigns in Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine aimed not only to defeat the Ottomans but also to establish the outlines of a postcolonial absorption of these territories and their resources into the British and French Empires.

The Suffering of the Perpetrators: The Ethics of Traumatic German Historicity in Karen Bass's Young Adult World War II Novels

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-77
Author(s):  
Doris Wolf
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Childhood Studies ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
Adult World ◽  
The Public Sphere

This paper examines two young adult novels, Run Like Jäger (2008) and Summer of Fire (2009), by Canadian writer Karen Bass, which centre on the experiences of so-called ordinary German teenagers in World War II. Although guilt and perpetration are themes addressed in these books, their focus is primarily on the ways in which Germans suffered at the hands of the Allied forces. These books thus participate in the increasingly widespread but still controversial subject of the suffering of the perpetrators. Bringing work in childhood studies to bear on contemporary representations of German wartime suffering in the public sphere, I explore how Bass's novels, through the liminal figure of the adolescent, participate in a culture of self-victimisation that downplays guilt rather than more ethically contextualises suffering within guilt. These historical narratives are framed by contemporary narratives which centre on troubled teen protagonists who need the stories of the past for their own individualisation in the present. In their evacuation of crucial historical contexts, both Run Like Jäger and Summer of Fire support optimistic and gendered narratives of individualism that ultimately refuse complicated understandings of adolescent agency in the past or present.

المعتقدات والافكار الدينية في بلاد الرافدين من خلال المسلات الملكية

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (29) ◽  
pp. 148-165
Author(s):  
طالب منعم حبيب الشمري ◽  
عبد الرزاق حسين حاجم
Keyword(s):  
Lower Section ◽  
Public Places ◽  
The Public ◽  
Large Stone ◽  
Stone Block ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
Peace And War

  The obelisk is a large stone block with a height ranging from 50 cm to 3 m. It varies in width from one obelisk to another. It is sculptured from one side or two or four sides with prominent picture inscriptions, often accompanied by cuneiform texts for immortalising kings and their military campaigns. This obelisk is constructed in a rectangular or square, and some of them a dome convex or semi-circular or pyramid. The lower section of the obelisks is wide, similar to the base of the base, and another section is sculpted on a slightly sloping end, so that it can easily be attached to the ground or placed on a special base. The rulers and kings of Mesopotamia established and displayed the obelisk in public places in order to be seen by the public.  It also was placed in the yards of temples or public squares and squares and the streets of cities. It used to celebrate their religious, military and historical achievements in order to immortalise their actions. These obelisks are held to commemorate the deeds of kings and their achievements in peace and war as confirmed by the cuneiform texts and the artistic scenes implemented on them.

The Roots of Global Health Inequity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joia S. Mukherjee
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Primary Health Care ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World Bank ◽  
Primary Health ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

This chapter outlines the historical roots of health inequities. It focuses on the African continent, where life expectancy is the shortest and health systems are weakest. The chapter describes the impoverishment of countries by colonial powers, the development of the global human rights framework in the post-World War II era, the impact of the Cold War on African liberation struggles, and the challenges faced by newly liberated African governments to deliver health care through the public sector. The influence of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’s neoliberal economic policies is also discussed. The chapter highlights the shift from the aspiration of “health for all” voiced at the Alma Ata Conference on Primary Health Care in 1978, to the more narrowly defined “selective primary health care.” Finally, the chapter explains the challenges inherent in financing health in impoverished countries and how user fees became standard practice.

Adjusting to Financial Instability in the Interwar Period

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giandomenico Piluso
Keyword(s):  
Private Sector ◽  
Adaptive Strategy ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
International Environment ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Monetary Authorities ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Special Committees ◽  
First World

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.

Big Business and the ‘Blitzkriegswirtschaft’: Daimler–Benz AG and the Mobilisation of the German War Economy 1939–42

1997 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-208
Author(s):  
Neil Gregor
Keyword(s):  
German Economy ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
War Economy ◽  
War Of Attrition ◽  
Eastern Front ◽  
Military Campaigns ◽  
Aircraft Production ◽  
Second World ◽  
Male Labour

Since the end of the war itself, research on the German economy during the Second World War has focused – explicitly or implicitly – on the search for an explanation of the disparities in armaments and output between the first and second halves of the war. In the first half of the war, up until the winter of 1941–2, the development of armaments production was characterised by more or less stable levels of output against the background of the series of swift and successful military campaigns in Poland and in the West. This stands in stark contrast to the second half, which witnessed a radical increase in aggregate armaments output which lasted well into the summer of 1944, and which saw tank production reach 589 per cent of the level at which it had stood in January 1942, weapons production reach 382 per cent of its January 1942 level, and aircraft production 367 per cent of its January 1942 level over the same period, to name some of the most obvious successes. These increases were all the more astonishing for the fact that they were achieved against the background of a massive war of attrition on the Eastern Front which placed demands on German resources and drew male labour from German factories into the Wehrmacht on a scale out of all proportion to that experienced in the first half of the war.

scholarly journals The heroes’ children: Rescuing the Great War’s orphans

2021 ◽  
pp. 161189442199268
Author(s):  
Friederike Kind-Kovács
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Child Victims ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Christian Morality ◽  
New Public ◽  
War Orphans ◽  
War Effort ◽  
Hungarian State

World War I and its aftermath produced a particularly vulnerable group of child victims: war orphans. This group included children whose fathers had fallen in battle, who had disappeared, or who had not (yet) returned home. Most of Europe’s war and postwar societies witnessed the massive presence of these child victims, and responded in various ways to rescue them and secure their future survival. This article offers an exploration of the ways in which the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and then later the post-imperial Hungarian state, became invested in providing care and relief to Hungarian war orphans. In contrast to other groups of child victims, whose parents were blamed for neglecting their parental duties, war orphans as the offspring of ‘war heroes’ profited from the public appreciation of their fathers’ sacrifice for the war effort and the Hungarian nation. The public discourse in the contemporary Hungarian media offers a glimpse into the emergence of a new public visibility of these child victims and of a new recognition of the societal obligation to care for them. Exploring World War I and its aftermath as a telling example of political transformation in the 20th century, the article showcases how war orphans were taken to personify essential notions of war- and postwar destruction, while also capturing visions of postwar recovery. It furthermore examines how welfare discourses and relief practices for Hungary’s war orphans were embedded in contemporary gender norms, notions of proper Christian morality and ethnic nationalism. On this basis, the article assesses the ways in which the case of Hungary’s war orphans not only mirrors the professionalization but also the fundamental transformation of child welfare in the aftermath of World War I.

End of War or End of State? 1918 in the Public Memories of Post-Communist Croatia and Serbia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Tea Sindbæk Andersen ◽  
Ismar Dedović
Keyword(s):  
Public Memory ◽  
Positive Outcome ◽  
First World War ◽  
History Textbooks ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
World War ◽  
War Memory ◽  
The Public ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

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.

Disciplinary Uniformity in Uniform—A Success of the Human Rights Act 1998?

2008 ◽  
Vol 72 (2) ◽  
pp. 170-177 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Gale
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Armed Forces ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Human Rights Act ◽  
Human Rights Act 1998 ◽  
Military Discipline ◽  
First World

Apart from an awareness of shameful treatment to some shell-shocked soldiers on active duty in the First World War, the subjects of military discipline in general and courts-martial in particular are unlikely to permeate the consciousness of the public at large or, indeed, the vast majority of criminal lawyers. This article explores some of the history of both, the current position in relation to courts-martial and the planned reforms under the Armed Forces Act 2006. That the Human Rights Act 1998 exposed some of the anomalities and worst practices of courts-martial is undeniable. It seems equally likely that the 1998 Act was at least a catalyst for the wholesale review and modernisation of military discipline carried out by the 2006 Act.

scholarly journals Famous head injuries of the first aerial war: deaths of the “Knights of the Air”

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. E5
Author(s):  
Prateeka Koul ◽  
Christine Mau ◽  
Victor M. Sabourin ◽  
Chirag D. Gandhi ◽  
Charles J. Prestigiacomo
Keyword(s):  
Head Injury ◽  
World War I ◽  
Head Injuries ◽  
World War ◽  
Traumatic Head Injury ◽  
The Public ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Traumatic Head ◽  
The Media

World War I advanced the development of aviation from the concept of flight to the use of aircraft on the battlefield. Fighter planes advanced technologically as the war progressed. Fighter pilot aces Francesco Baracca and Manfred von Richthofen (the Red Baron) were two of the most famous pilots of this time period. These courageous fighter aces skillfully maneuvered their SPAD and Albatros planes, respectively, while battling enemies and scoring aerial victories that contributed to the course of the war. The media thrilled the public with their depictions of the heroic feats of fighter pilots such as Baracca and the Red Baron. Despite their aerial prowess, both pilots would eventually be shot down in combat. Although the accounts of their deaths are debated, it is undeniable that both were victims of traumatic head injury.

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