scholarly journals Historisising twentieth-century historiography

HISTOREIN ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 139
Author(s):  
Antonis Liakos
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Digital Era ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Totalitarian Regimes ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First World

The twentieth century has been described as a dark century of wars, holocausts, death and pain. This is true, but it is only a partial image of the century. This article discusses five major challenges and their relations to historiography: a) the disintegration of empires, decolonisation and the rise of new nations; b) the impact of world wars (genocides, revolutions, totalitarian regimes); c) the boom in technoscience and the digital era; d) the ascent of rights, the transformation of gender relations and mass literacy; and e) globalisation. These changes were experienced by three generations of historians. The first generation appeared before the First World War, the second from 1918 to 1970 and the third from 1970. The question we pose is: has the history of historiography responded to these challenges or does it also have its internal logic? And how has it responded?

ENGLISH LABOUR AND TRADE UNIONISM OF THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY IN THE COVERAGE OF THE BRITISH HISTORIAN G. D. H. COLE

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
T.N. GELLA ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
First World

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.

scholarly journals The Local versus the Global in the history of relativity: The case of Belgium

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-250
Author(s):  
Sjang L. ten Hagen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Diversity ◽  
First World War ◽  
Global History ◽  
World War ◽  
Global Pattern ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

ArgumentThis article contributes to a global history of relativity, by exploring how Einstein’s theory was appropriated in Belgium. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, yet the early-twentieth-century Belgian context, because of its cultural diversity and reflectiveness of global conditions (the principal example being the First World War), proves well-suited to expose transnational flows and patterns in the global history of relativity. The attempts of Belgian physicist Théophile de Donder to contribute to relativity physics during the 1910s and 1920s illustrate the role of the war in shaping the transnational networks through which relativity circulated. The local attitudes of conservative Belgian Catholic scientists and philosophers, who denied that relativity was philosophically significant, exemplify a global pattern: while critics of relativity feared to become marginalized by the scientific, political, and cultural revolutions that Einstein and his theory were taken to represent, supporters sympathized with these revolutions.

Towards a Fourth Reich? The History of National Bolshevism in Germany

1951 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-210
Author(s):  
Klemens von Klemperer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
Human Relations ◽  
World War ◽  
Modern Psychology ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alter Ego ◽  
Political Opinions ◽  
First World

National Bolshevism represents a chapter in German-Russian relations since the First World War. As a policy advocating an Eastern orientation for Germany it is a most puzzling and at this day a very acute phenomenon. To those educated to observe the spectrum of political opinions in terms of Right and Left, with the extreme Right at the opposite end from the extreme Left, National Bolshevism seems a paradox. It suggests the meeting of extremes. More concretely the term stands for a rapprochement between German nationalism and Russian Communism. The story of National Bolshevism is the story of two “strange bedfellows.”In the effort to comprehend this upsetting pattern it might be recalled that modern psychology has in many ways succeeded in breaking down our traditional thinking about human relations. Love, for example, has lost its meaning apart from hate, which has become its alter ego. We might be tempted to translate this finding into political terms, and National Bolshevism would appear as an example of a political love-hate relationship. It might also be suggested that the further we get from the origins and die more insight we gain into die workings of die two twentieth century extremes — Fascism and Communism — the more we are struck by dieir affinities. We grant diat Fascism is nodiing more dian “doctrineless dynamism,” whereas Communism goes back to die solid doctrinaire structure of Marxism. And even through European history since 1917 often threatened to lead up to an ultimate conflict between Fascism and Communism, die “transmutation” through which Marxism has gone in modern Russia has brought it ironically close to Fascism. It has become increasingly evident that die fight between die two was a mere sham battle.

scholarly journals British Catholicism and the British Army in the First World War

2002 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 314-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Snape
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Canon Law ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First World

The history of British Catholic involvement in the First World War is a curiously neglected subject, particularly in view of the massive and ongoing popular and academic interest in the First World War, an interest which has led to the publication of several studies of the impact of the war on Britain’s Protestant churches and has even seen a recent work on religion in contemporary France appear in an English translation. Moreover, and bearing in mind the partisan nature of much denominational history, the subject has been ignored by Catholic historians despite the fact that the war has often been regarded by non-Catholics as a ‘good’ war for British Catholicism, an outcome reflected in a widening diffusion of Catholic influences on British religious life and also in a significant number of conversions to the Catholic Church. However, if some standard histories of Catholicism in England are to be believed, the popular Catholic experience of these years amount to no more than an irrelevance next to the redrawing of diocesan boundaries and the codification of canon law.

Medea and British Legislation Before The First World War

1999 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Hall
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
English Translation ◽  
First World War ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Commercial Theatre ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

Euripides' Medea has penetrated to parts of modernity most mythical figures have not reached. Since she first rolled off the printing presses half a millennium ago, she has inspired hundreds of performances, plays, paintings, and operas. Medea has murdered her way into a privileged place in the history of the imagination of the West, and can today command huge audiences in the commercial theatre. Yet in Britain, at least, her popularity on the stage is a relatively recent phenomenon. Medea has transcended history partly because she enacts a primal terror universal to human beings: that the motherfigure shouldintentionallydestroy her own children. Yet this dimension of the ancient tragedy was until the twentieth century found so disturbing as largely to prevent unadapted performances. On the British stage it was not until 1907 that Euripides'Medeawas performed, without alteration, in English translation.

scholarly journals The 1918/19 Spanish Flu in Pisa (Tuscany, Italy)

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Raffaele Gaeta ◽  
Antonio Fornaciari ◽  
Valentina Giuffra
Keyword(s):  
Typical Feature ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spanish Flu ◽  
Pandemic Flu ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City ◽  
First World

The Spanish flu pandemic spread in 1918-19 and infected about 500 million people, killing 50 to 100 million of them. People were suffering from severe poverty and malnutrition, especially in Europe, due to the First World War, and this contributed to the diffusion of the disease. In Italy, Spanish flu appeared in April 1918 with several cases of pulmonary congestion and bronchopneumonia; at the end of the epidemic, about 450.000 people died, causing one of the highest mortality rates in Europe. From the archive documents and the autoptic registers of the Hospital of Pisa, we can express some considerations on the impact of the pandemic on the population of the city and obtain some information about the deceased. In the original necroscopic registers, 43 autopsies were reported with the diagnosis of grippe (i.e. Spanish flu), of which the most occurred from September to December 1918. Most of the dead were young individuals, more than half were soldiers, and all of them showed confluent hemorrhagic lung bronchopneumonia, which was the typical feature of the pandemic flu. We believe that the study of the autopsy registers represents an incomparable instrument for the History of Medicine and a useful resource to understand the origin and the evolution of the diseases.

Theology and Ecumenism after Edinburgh 1910

2019 ◽  
pp. 64-78
Author(s):  
Marlene Finlayson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
Kingdom Of God ◽  
Voluntary Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Protestant Christianity ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First World

How was early twentieth-century Protestant Christianity, so prone to division, able to initiate and sustain a movement that sought Christian unity? What was the significance for the movement of the World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh 1910? What was the effect of the First World War on the newly emerging ecumenical movement? These questions provide the main themes of this chapter. It describes and assesses the impact of the voluntary movements that had been influenced by the Evangelical Awakening; the revivalism of the 1880s; the development of a Kingdom of God theology; and the missionary movement’s goal of evangelizing the world in a generation. It also describes the major contributions of John R. Mott, Joseph H. Oldham, and David S. Cairns in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when the churches had reached a watershed in their relations.

The Classical Figures of Sociology and the Great Seminal Catastrophe of the Twentieth Century

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans Joas ◽  
Wolfgang Knöbl
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
Werner Sombart ◽  
First World

This chapter examines the intellectual prehistory and history of the First World War. Toward the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries, German social scientists in particular had already attempted to theorize the connection between war and capitalism, or war and democracy, with authors such as Werner Sombart and Otto Hintze leading the way. Many European and American intellectuals, including most of the classical figures of sociology, did feel called to give their views on the question of war. In many cases, however, their writings did them little credit. How easily social theory can be led astray is plain for all to see in many of the statements made at the time, in that the bellicist arguments already to be found in the nineteenth century were often shamelessly deployed to denounce the enemy.

scholarly journals The Press Bureau, ‘D’ Notices, and Official Control of the British Press's Record of the First World War

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
David Monger
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Official Control ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Manipulation ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First World

Abstract Concerns about fake news and media manipulation are commonplace in contemporary society, and, throughout the twentieth century, historians regularly presented the First World War as an era of manipulated public messages. Yet, despite broad statements about the impact of press censorship in First World War Britain, publication of an official history of the ‘D’ notice system, and growing revision of historical understanding of the interaction between the state, the press, propaganda, and the public during the war, no thorough assessment of the content of the D notices issued by the Press Bureau to newspaper editors has been undertaken. This article provides a thorough analysis of the more than seven hundred notices issued during the war years. While drawing attention to several exceptions which exceeded plausible claims of a threat to security, it argues that most notices genuinely sought to protect potentially dangerous information and that casual assumptions about misleading state press management are not borne out by a close reading of the actual notices issued.

The Justification of the Godless: Heinrich Vogel and German Guilt

1990 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 327-346
Author(s):  
Haddon Willmer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Weimar Republic ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Complex Response ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
German People ◽  
First World

Guilt has proved an irresistible category for making and interpreting the twentieth-century history of which Germany has been the focus. In that history individuals, organizations, and nations have become guilty. The history of guilt is not made by the wrongdoers alone, but also by those who judge them. Doing wrong and being moralistic often have an evil symbiosis in individuals and communities. Guilt has not always been accurately allocated, and accusations of guilt have been manipulated for political purposes so producing more complex evil. There was guilt for the First World War, but it was untruthfully imposed on Germany alone by Article 231 of the Versailles Treaty. Within Germany, assigning guilt to political opponents, while refusing to accept any responsibility for what had happened, intensified the divisions within the nation and ensured that its policies were inspired by inward as well as outward enmity and unreality. The theologian H. J. Iwand argued in 1954 that the Nazis had taken the Freund-Feind conception of politics to absurdity, blaming (versündigt) the Left for all that happened after 1918. Consequently, Iwand judged the nationalist front in the Weimar Republic to have represented die organisierte Unbussfertigkeit of the German people. Too late, after 1945, it had become politically clear to many, but not to all, that complex historical guilt must be met by a complex response lest its power escalate yet again beyond the control of truth, understanding, and humanity.

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