scholarly journals World War I commemoration and student historical consciousness: A study of high-school students' views

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Melanie Innes ◽  
Heather Sharp
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
World War I ◽  
History Education ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Political Climate ◽  
World War ◽  
School Students ◽  
The Public ◽  
Strong Focus ◽  
The Public Sphere

Commemoration of World War I (WWI), and specifically the Gallipoli campaign, holds a significant place in the Australian public imagination. This is currently heightened with the WWI centenary commemorations (2014–18) occurring on a local, national and international scale. In the current political climate, there has been a resurgence of nationalism amid fear of terrorist attacks and uncertain political futures. Traditionally, history education has been considered, by some, a tool for the promotion of national identity, despite history education literature and many curriculum documents increasingly focused on fostering historical consciousness in students. The Gallipoli campaign, and subsequent Anzac mythology, has maintained a strong focus in Australia as a means of promotion, and often celebration, of Australian culture in public history, including personal and familial connections via ancestral participation in WWI. This article explores the types of historical education conducted in three high schools. As part of a regular history lesson, students were provided with five sources and a series of questions to answer about the Gallipoli campaign as a historical and commemorative event. Students' responses are analysed in this paper using Jörn Rüsen's typology of historical consciousness (Rüsen, 2004) to gain an understanding of how students think about the commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign. Specifically, this paper is interested in students' navigation of collective memory and nationalistic narratives evident in the public sphere and popular culture, and how these inform a sense of historical consciousness.

Defining and Defending Valid Citizenship During War: Jewish Immigrant Businesses in World War I Britain

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
STEPHANIE SEKETA
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Business Networks ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
World War ◽  
Business Decisions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Behavior ◽  
Political Associations ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Corporate Actions

Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, many British companies relied on transnational business networks and global associations. However, the tensions produced by World War I created an environment in which consumers, journalists, and politicians actively promoted economic protectionism and consumer nationalism through various Buy British movements. Entrepreneurs under scrutiny took a variety of approaches to manage this hostile environment and avoid the financial, political, and cultural ramifications of suddenly having their and their family members’ valid citizenship questioned and outright attacked in the public sphere. During the war, neutral, passive, or absent patriotism drew suspicion. Any suspicions about loyalty could spark an avalanche of attacks, with each one being exponentially more difficult to defend as fear built in people’s minds. Citizenship was more than a legal matter; it was a layered set of dynamic activities and enterprises in which corporate actions became tied to expression of loyalty. People were judged by their cultural behavior, political associations, legal citizenship, and business decisions. I argue that some firms reacted by defining themselves, their products, and their services as “British,” erasing their “foreignness” as a defense against attacks on their citizenship and loyalty.

scholarly journals Separating Spheres

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanna Pepin ◽  
David Cotter
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
Three Dimensions ◽  
School Students ◽  
The Public ◽  
Gender Attitude ◽  
The Family ◽  
Monitoring The Future ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Egalitarian Attitudes

The authors investigated whether trends in attitudes about gender were consistent with the gender stall primarily occurring in the family domain and examined potential mechanisms associated with changing gender norms. Using data from Monitoring the Future surveys (1976–2015), the authors assessed three components of trends in youth’s beliefs about gender: the marketplace, the family, and mothers’ employment. Findings showed continued increases in egalitarianism from 1976 throughthe mid-1990s across all three dimensions. Thereafter, support for egalitarianism in the public sphere plateaued at high levels, rising support for mothers’ employment persisted at a slower pace, and conventional ideology about gender in families returned. The changing demographic composition of American high school students did not account for the gender attitude trends. Youth’s mothers’ employment and increased education were related to increased egalitarianism. Changes in population averages of mothers’ employment and educational attainment were only weakly associated withincreases in egalitarian attitudes.

A Countermovement on the Verge of Defeat

2020 ◽  
pp. 134-152
Author(s):  
Teri Finneman
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Emotional Reactions ◽  
Social Movement Theory ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Movement Theory ◽  
Suffrage Movement ◽  
The Public Sphere

This chapter examines how the mainstream local and regional press covered the antisuffrage perspective in the critical year of 1917 as it became increasingly evident that the suffrage movement had momentum to secure a federal amendment. The goal here is to increase understanding of press portrayals of a countermovement and thus to add to literature on social movement theory. Its findings reveal that most coverage situated the suffrage debate in the context of World War I. Antisuffragists relied on negative discourse that criticized the patriotism of the suffragists and argued that women did not want the added burden of voting. In contrast, suffragists avoided emotional reactions and instead based their arguments on facts and on the benefits of women being in the public sphere. This study contributes to prior research on countermovements and the implications of taking a negative and narrow approach when attempting to undermine a social movement

Surplus Histories, Excess Memories

2017 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-144
Author(s):  
Harry Harootunian
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Historical Consciousness ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
Central Position ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Historical Practice

In the reckoning of historian Enzo Traverso, the accumulative inventory of the past’s crimes has exceeded the ‘frontiers of historical research’ and colonised the public sphere to ‘interpellate our present’. The quarrel over the crisis of historicism before World War ii has been superseded by postwar debates that have now spilled over into everyday life that demand recognition as instances of the continuing collision of claims of a past that refuses to pass and the formation of a new historical consciousness in which collective memory of the crimes occupies a central position. Traverso’s purpose has been to repair this emergent dichotomy between historical practice and memoration, event and experience, as well as to overcome attending binary couplings like subjective and objective, individual and group in order to avoid falling into an unbridgeable antinomy that risks collapsing into contradiction.

ARTISTS AS AVATARS

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 237-252
Author(s):  
PETER CHAMETZKY
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Mental Distress ◽  
World War ◽  
Subject Positions ◽  
The Public ◽  
Artistic Vision ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Nazi Era

Are artists crazy? Are creators more likely to be mad, or madder, than the rest of us? Does mental distress deepen artistic vision? Correlate to genius? Is the drive to fashion a personal pictorial or plastic universe pathological? Bettina Gockel's hefty Tübingen Habilitationsschrift, “The Pathologizing of the Artist: Artist Legends in Modernity,” documents the significant amount of mental energy expended exploring these and related questions from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s. Matthew Biro's The Dada Cyborg argues that the Dadaists’ montages, assemblages, and raucous agitational activities in the public sphere of World War I-era Berlin indicate modernity's disruption of stable subject positions and suggest instead hybrid, “cyborgian” identities. These included challenges to normative notions of sanity, but also to those of gender, ethnicity, race, and national and political allegiance. James van Dyke's study of the Weimar- and Nazi-era career of painter Franz Radziwill, a World War I veteran and self-taught reactionary modernist realist, provides a detailed case study of an artist whom one might, in retrospect, suspect of a degree of grandiosity and careerism bordering on the pathological, but who was driven by a complex of motivations as political as they were personal.

The Public Philosophy: Interest-Group Liberalism

1967 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Theodore Lowi
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
World War I ◽  
Great Part ◽  
The United States ◽  
Private Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Philosophy ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Public Sphere

Until astonishingly recent times American national government played a marginal role in the life of the nation. Even as late as the eve of World War I, the State Department could support itself on consular fees. In most years revenues from tariffs supplied adequate financing, plus a surplus, from all other responsibilities. In 1800, there was less than one-half a federal bureaucrat per 1,000 citizens. On the eve of the Civil War there were only 1.5 federal bureaucrats per 1,000 citizens, and by 1900 that ratio had climbed to 2.7. This compares with 7 per 1,000 in 1940 and 13 per 1,000 in 1962—exclusive of military personnel.The relatively small size of the public sphere was maintained in great part by the constitutional wall of separation between government and private life. The wall was occasionally scaled in both directions, but concern for the proper relation of private life and public order was always a serious and effective issue. Americans always talked pragmatism, in government as in all other things; but doctrine always deeply penetrated public dialogue. Power, even in the United States, needed justification.Throughout the decades between the end of the Civil War and the Great Depression, almost every debate over a public policy became involved in the larger debate over the nature and consequences of larger and smaller spheres of government. This period was just as much a “constitutional period” as that of 1789–1820. Each period is distinguished by its effort to define (or redefine) and employ a “public philosophy.”

Listening to Strangers: Classroom Discussion in Democratic Education

2010 ◽  
Vol 112 (11) ◽  
pp. 2815-2832 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter Parker
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
Classroom Practice ◽  
Assisted Suicide ◽  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Effective Means ◽  
Classroom Discussion ◽  
Physician Assisted Suicide ◽  
School Students ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Background/Context The literature on classroom discussion often undercuts itself by treating discussion only as an instructional method, confining its role to the instrumental. Although discussion does serve as an effective means to other curricular ends (teaching with discussion), the capable practice of discussion can also be considered a curriculum objective in its own right (teaching for discussion). The latter is justified on the grounds that listening and speaking to what Danielle Allen called “strangers” about powerful ideas and public problems is crucial to democratic citizen formation; indeed, it defines democracy, signaling a citizen's coming of age while at the same time creating the public sphere that democracy requires—a space where political argument and action flourish. Purpose /Focus of Study The author outlines a discursive approach to the cultivation of enlightened political engagement in schools. He argues that schools are the best available sites for this project because they have the key assets: diverse schoolmates (more or less), problems (both academic and social), “strangers” (schoolmates who are not friends or family), and curriculum and instruction (schools are intentionally educative places). Ambitious classroom discussion models—for example, seminars and deliberations—can mobilize these assets; but new habits, especially those that build equity and trust, are needed. Setting Two empirical cases of classroom discussion ground the argument in classroom practice. In one, high school students deliberate whether physician-assisted suicide should be legalized in their state. In the other, suburban middle school students conduct a seminar on Howard Fast's novel of the American revolution, April Morning. Research Design This is an analytic essay/argument. Conclusions/Recommendations Schools in societies with democratic ideals are obligated to cultivate enlightened and engaged citizens. Helping young people form the habits of listening to strangers, at that very public place called school, should advance this work.

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.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document