From Towns into Battlefields

2020 ◽  
pp. 19-56
Author(s):  
Alex Dowdall

Chapter 1 explores the topography of the urban battlefield, and provides an urban history of the Western Front. It describes how Arras, Reims, Nancy, Lens, and other towns were progressively transformed into battlefields in the period after August 1914. It describes the transformation of urban space by the First World War, through artillery bombardment, the fortification of these towns by the militaries, and the proliferation of military weaponry and defensive architecture. It discusses how civilians changed their routines to adapt to the urban battlefield, and argues that as much as possible civilians at the front aimed to maintain a semblance of normality. This was encouraged by local authorities, and represented as a form of heroic resistance in the face of the enemy. The chapter charts the physical impact of urban warfare near the front, and describes the extent of urban destruction during the period of the stable Western Front. It also charts the transformation of the civilian population of the front, through discussions of evacuation policies and the scale of civilian death and injury.

2017 ◽  

Stefan George's "Der Stern des Bundes" is one of the most provocative and unusual works of poetry in the history of German literature. Here, on the eve of the First World War, George unfolds social, religious, poetic, personal, philosophical and even economic issues. Members of Georges´s famous "circle" as well as his contemporaries perceived of the "Stern des Bundes" as a prediction of coming catastrophes and a warning, as a stimulus for peaceful and intimate community building in the face of great crises and as a reaffirmation of a hopeful outlook towards a shared world. Krise und Gemeinschaft assembles introductory and survey articles, contributions to key words from the “Stern”, and interpretations of key poems. It is especially aimed at readers who are still unfamiliar with the "Stern".


Adeptus ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karolina Wróbel-Bardzik

A “green city” – attractions, animals and modernity: The establishment of the Warsaw Zoological Garden in independent PolandThe article describes the history of establishing the Warsaw Zoological Garden in independent Poland after the First World War, a watershed period when it was possible to implement modern designs not only in the broader, national context, but also in the local and urban environment. Intensive discussions on the form of modernity attempted to find its version which would combine European and local inspiration. To some extent, the establishment of a modern zoo also defined the place of animals in the urban space. While some species were excluded from the city centre, others were put in the sphere of leisure time. „Zielone miasto” atrakcji, zwierzęta i nowoczesność. Powstanie warszawskiego ogrodu zoologicznego w odrodzonej PolsceArtykuł dotyczy założenia warszawskiego ogrodu zoologicznego po odzyskaniu przez Polskę niepodległości. Był to moment przełomowy, pozwalający na wprowadzenie istotnych zmian modernizacyjnych zarówno w kontekście narodowym, jak i lokalnym, miejskim. Toczyły się wówczas dyskusje na temat wizji nowoczesności, poszukiwano takiej jej wersji, która łączyłaby trendy europejskie i lokalne inspiracje. Założenie ogrodu zoologicznego jako nowoczesnej instytucji określało w pewnym stopniu także miejsce zwierząt w przestrzeni miejskiej. Zauważalne były wówczas procesy rugowania niektórych gatunków zwierząt z miasta czy sytuowania innych w obrębie kultury czasu wolnego.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 563-583 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laraine Porter

Referencing a range of sources from personal testimonies, diaries, trade union reports and local cinema studies, this chapter unearths the history of women musicians who played to silent film. It traces the pre-history of their entry into the cinema business through the cultures of Edwardian female musicianship that had created a sizeable number of women piano and violin teachers who were able to fill the rapid demand created by newly built cinemas around 1910. This demand was further increased during the First World War as male musicians were called to the Front and the chapter documents the backlash from within the industry against women who stepped in to fill vacant roles. The chapter argues that women were central to creating the emerging art-form of cinema musicianship and shaping the repertoire of cinema music during the first three decades of the twentieth century. With the coming of sound, those women who had learned the cinema organ, in the face of considerable snobbery, were also well placed to continue musical careers in Cine-Variety during the 1930s and beyond. This article looks particularly at the careers of Ena Baga and Florence de Jong who went on to play for silent films until the 1980s.


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.


This collection of essays examines the various ways in which the Homeric epics have been responded to, reworked, and rewritten by women writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1914 with the First World War, it charts this understudied strand of the history of Homeric reception over the subsequent century up to the present day, analysing the extraordinary responses to both the Odyssey and the Iliad by women from around the world. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ—memoir, poetry, children’s literature, rap, novels—testify not only to the plasticity of Homeric epic, but also to the widening social classes to whom Homer appeals, and it is unsurprising to see the myriad ways in which women writers across the globe have played their part in the story of Homer’s afterlife. From surrealism to successive waves of feminism to creative futures, Homer’s footprint can be seen in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring an array of critical approaches to bear on the work of authors ranging from H.D. and Simone Weil to Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Tempest. Students and scholars of classics—as well as those in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature, and women’s writing—will find much to interest them, while the volume’s concluding reflections by Emily Wilson on her new translation of the Odyssey are an apt reminder to all of just how open a text can be, and of how great a difference can be made by a woman’s voice.


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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