The “Sticky Sediment” of Daily Life: Radical Domesticity, Revolutionary Christianity, and the Problem of Wealth in Britain from the 1880s to the 1930s

2012 ◽  
Vol 120 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seth Koven
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Moral Responsibility ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Justice ◽  
Ethical Imperative ◽  
Early Twentieth Century

This essay examines an early twentieth-century Christian revolutionary habitus—a “technique of Christian living”—based on the conviction that everyday life was an essential site for reconciling the claims of individual and community, the material and the spiritual. The pacifist-feminist members of London’s first “people’s house,” Kingsley Hall, linked their vision of Jesus’s inclusive and unbounded love for humanity to their belief in the ethical imperative that all people take full moral responsibility for cleaning up their own dirt as part of their utopian program to bring social, economic, and political justice to the outcast in London, Britain, and its empire. In imagining what a reconstructed post-World War I Britain might become, Kingsley Hall’s cross-class band of workers used mundane practices to unmake and remake the late-Victorian and Edwardian philanthropic legacy they inherited.

Englishness, Empire and Nostalgia: A Heterodox Religious Community's Appeal in the Inter-War Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Belief Networks ◽  
Healing Ministry ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Rich

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.

scholarly journals PLAYING ON UNCLE SAM'S TEAM: AMERICAN CHILDHOODS DURING WORLD WAR I

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-690 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mischa Honeck
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Young People ◽  
World War I ◽  
Children And Adolescents ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Childhood And Youth ◽  
Constructions Of Childhood

If World War I has interested historians of the United States considerably less than other major wars, it is also true that children rank among the most neglected actors in the literature that exists on the topic. This essay challenges this limited understanding of the roles children and adolescents played in this transformative period by highlighting their importance in three different realms. It shows how childhood emerged as a contested resource in prewar debates over militarist versus pacifist education; examines the affective power of images of children—American as well as foreign—in U.S. wartime propaganda; and maps various social arenas in which the young engaged with the war on their own account. While constructions of childhood and youth as universally valid physical and developmental categories gained greater currency in the early twentieth century, investigations of young people in wartime reveal how much the realities of childhood and youth differed according to gender, class, race, region, and age.

An Imperfect Mahlerite

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-103
Author(s):  
Matthew Mugmon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Aaron Copland ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Events ◽  
French Music ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
And Performance

As one of the chief representatives of French music in the early twentieth century, Nadia Boulanger is typically ignored in discussions of the reception of Gustav Mahler’s music, which—like most studies of reception—focus primarily on press accounts and public events. Moreover, Boulanger is usually considered in the context of a broader French aversion, in the first half of the twentieth century, to Mahler’s late-Romantic Austro-German idiom. But a range of documentary evidence concerning her attendance at the 1920 Mahler festival in Amsterdam, including previously unexamined correspondence as well as scores annotated in her hand, reveals that, motivated by a post-World War I spirit of internationalism, Boulanger contributed materially to the study and performance of Mahler. She encouraged audiences to consider his music’s emotional power and analyzed it in a way that drew attention to its orchestration and the horizontal aspects of its construction. She also introduced such figures as Aaron Copland to Mahler’s music, preparing him to approach it in a way that centered on the vocabulary of neo-classicism. Boulanger’s engagement with Mahler not only contributes to our picture of the composer’s reception, but also reveals the historiographical value of discourses that take place behind the scenes.

Alexander Von Mörk and Poldi Fuhrich: The Conception of Heroes in Cave Exploration in the Early Twentieth Century

2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johannes Mattes
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Military Officers ◽  
World War ◽  
Military Equipment ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Personality Cult ◽  
The Social ◽  
Iconic Status

The Austrians Alexander von Mörk (1887-1914) and Poldi Fuhrich (1898-1926) became two of the leading cave explorers in the early twentieth century. After qualifying as an academic painter, Alexander von Mörk fell as an officer in World War I. Poldi Fuhrich, who worked as a teacher, received international recognition during her lifetime as one of the very few female cave explorers. She died in a cave accident in Styria, Austria. Mörk and Fuhrich achieved iconic status as martyrs of cave science and became role models for speleologists. My research examines the parallels in the conception of these heroic figures and the ‘parameters’ of their memorial. How and to what end was their memory perpetuated and exploited by the following generation of explorers? Expedition diaries, protocols of caving clubs, and obituaries in newspapers are used as sources for analyses. The results show a strong correlation between the commemoration of the fallen soldiers of World War I and the conception of heroic figures in speleology. While the personality cult of Fuhrich declined in the mid-thirties due to the social exclusion of women from the scientific study of caves, Mörk was increasingly celebrated as a mythical and self-sacrificing founder and enthusiastic German nationalist. The commemoration of the deceased in cave science was related to the militarisation of club life during the twenties. This is reflected in the radicalisation of language, the usage of military equipment in cave exploration, and the nomination of military officers as club officials.

Liberalism and the Welfare State in Britain, 1890–1945

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger E. Backhouse ◽  
Bradley W. Bateman ◽  
Tamotsu Nishizawa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
World War ◽  
Liberal Party ◽  
Labour Government ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Creation ◽  
The Welfare State

This chapter establishes that the British welfare state was the creation of Liberals as much as socialists. By the early twentieth century, the “New Liberalism” was moving the Liberal Party away from Gladstonian Liberalism, and the Asquith government took major steps toward a welfare state before World War I. The economists arguing for the welfare state included many Liberals, notably Alfred Marshall, J. A. Hobson, A. C. Pigou, William Beveridge, and John Maynard Keynes. British Liberalism was varied, and influential strands within it were strongly supportive of the welfare state. Beveridge and Keynes, in particular, were responsible for much of the intellectual architecture of the welfare state as it was implemented by the first postwar Labour government of Clement Attlee.

Economic Strength and Diplomatic Attitudes: The Formation of French Hostility Before World War I

1978 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 34-55
Author(s):  
Jonathan J. Liebowltz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
International Conflict ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Alliance System ◽  
Insight Into

The rivalry between France and Germany was one of the most important themes of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history. It was at the heart of the alliance system of this period and helped to produce that most horrible conflict, World War I. Understanding the causes and nature of Franco-German hostility would help to explain the war’s outbreak. A study of this hostility might also be a way of testing some of the theories of conflict recently developed by scholars from several disciplines but rarely applied by historians in their work. I shall discuss here several models of international conflict and show how one of them, relating images of national strength to diplomatic attitudes, can increase our insight into the formation of French hostility between 1871 and 1914.

The Moroccan Crisis of 1905–6

2019 ◽  
pp. 41-60
Author(s):  
Frank C. Zagare
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Incomplete Information ◽  
Game Model ◽  
World War ◽  
Causal Mechanisms ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Strategic Relationships

This chapter focuses on the Moroccan crisis of 1905–6, which was the first in a series of early twentieth-century confrontations that are generally considered to have led to World War I. The chapter interprets this crisis in the context of an incomplete information game model, the Tripartite Crisis Game, and one of its proper subgames, the Defender–Protégé subgame. British support of France during the 1906 Algeciras Conference, which ended the crisis, the firm stand that France took at the conference, and the German decision to press for a conference, are explained in terms of the model’s principal variables. In addition, the chapter discusses the Entente Cordiale and the “deterrence vs. restraint dilemma” associated with it, and similar strategic relationships. While the analysis is not necessarily at odds with the conclusions of some historians, it is more powerful because it is explicit about the causal mechanisms at work.

Sooner than you think: the Pre-1914 UK Productivity Slowdown was Victorian not Edwardian

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 736-748
Author(s):  
Nicholas Crafts ◽  
Terence C Mills
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Productivity Growth ◽  
Labour Productivity ◽  
World War ◽  
Productivity Slowdown ◽  
Labour Productivity Growth ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Bank Of England ◽  
Severe Deterioration

Abstract This paper re-examines UK productivity growth in the decades before World War I using a new dataset compiled by the Bank of England. We find that the productivity slowdown of the early twentieth century was quite modest and does not deserve to be called a climacteric. A more serious slowdown in labour productivity growth occurred in the 1870s. Neither of these episodes should be regarded as a precedent for the current severe deterioration in UK productivity performance. Nor should a late-Victorian productivity slowdown be attributed to the end of the steam age despite the popularity of this belief.

Abattoirs-Usines, the Modernizing Project for the French Meat Trade, and World War I

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 116-137
Author(s):  
Kyri W. Claflin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Business Models ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
World War ◽  
Trade Reform ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Cattle Market

In the early twentieth century, French academic veterinarians launched a meat trade reform movement. Their primary objective was the construction of a network of regional industrial abattoirs equipped with refrigeration. These modern, efficient abattoirs-usines would produce and distribute chilled dead meat, rather than livestock, to centers of consumption, particularly Paris. This system was hygienic and economical and intended to replace the insanitary artisanal meat trade centered on the La Villette cattle market and abattoir in Paris. The first abattoirs-usines opened during World War I, but within 10 years the experiment had begun to encounter serious difficulties. For decades afterward, the experiment survived in the collective memory as a complete fiasco, even though some abattoirs-usines in fact persisted by altering their business models. This article examines the roadblocks of the interwar era and the effects of both the problems and their perception on the post-1945 meat trade.

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