scholarly journals “Be Prepared!” (But Not Too Prepared)

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-62
Author(s):  
Lucy Andrew
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Male Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Future Role ◽  
Physical Deterioration ◽  
Strong Emphasis ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Ideal

This article examines the shifting representation of the ideal of masculinity and boys’ role in securing the future of the British Empire in Robert Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement from its inauguration in 1908 to the early years of World War I. In particular, it focuses on early Scout literature’s response to anxieties about physical deterioration, exacerbated by the 1904 Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration. In Baden-Powell’s Scouting handbook, Scouting for Boys (1908), and in early editions of The Scout—the official magazine of the Scout movement—there was a strong emphasis on an idealized image of the male body, which implicitly prepared Boy Scouts for their future role as soldiers. The reality of war, however, forced Scouting literature to acknowledge the restrictions placed upon boys in wartime and to redefine the parameters of boys’ heroic role in defense of the empire accordingly.

scholarly journals Samuel Beckett’s Trilogy and the Revolution of the Body in Vichy France

2020 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
William Davies
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
The Body ◽  
Male Body ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Physical Deterioration ◽  
Vichy France ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
The Revolution

This essay explores the depiction of the degenerating male form in Samuel Beckett’s post-World War II trilogy of novels (Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable) in the context of Vichy France’s ideology of the body—specifically the male body—and the propaganda of the regime’s Révolution nationale, which Beckett would have encountered in wartime France. Read with this historical situation in mind, this essay argues that Beckett’s move from the limping Molloy to the bed-bound Malone and finally to the physically limbless figure of The Unnamable gives expression to a reality of physical deterioration that is unique to the degenerating body, a reality that also inverts the ideal of physical perfection that regimes such as Vichy produced. Analyzed in this way, Beckett’s work can be seen to aggravate and challenge both Vichy’s idolization of the strong, athletic male form and the ways in which Vichy and other midcentury ideologies produced narratives of the body steeped in a narrow and ultimately violent essentialism.

The Making of a Cause Lawyer

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jens Meierhenrich
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Social Democracy ◽  
Early Years ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
Nazi Era

This chapter provides the biographical and historical context necessary for understanding Fraenkel and his time. The analysis is organized into three sections: his early years, the Weimar Years, and the Nazi years. In the first section, I trace Fraenkel’s upbringing in a secular household influenced by the so-called Jewish Enlightenment, or Haskalah; explore the origins of his life-long predilection for social democracy; and recount the intellectual effects of his military service in World War I. In the second section, I reconstruct Fraenkel’s education and socialization as a young lawyer and interpret Fraenkel’s most important Weimar-era writings. I explicate the roles they played in preparing the ground for the writing of The Dual State. In the third section, finally, I commence my analysis of Fraenkel’s Nazi-era thought and conduct up until his escape to freedom in 1938.

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 CONSERVATIVE PARTY AND THE PROBLEMS OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE IN THE EARLY YEARS OF THE SECOND WORLD WAR (on the pages of “Diary of a diplomat” by I. M. Maisky)

2016 ◽  
pp. 32-37
Author(s):  
E. V. Khakhalkina
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Conservative Party ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Early Years ◽  
World War ◽  
Dominant Position ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Second World

The “Diary” of the Soviet diplomat I. M. Maisky, who worked in London for more than ten years first as a messenger, then as the Soviet ambassador to the UK, is one of the valuable sources for the interwar period and the Second World War. The “Diary” contains records of Maisky’s conversations with the leading British politicians and public figures and his own thoughts on a wide range of issues, including the problems of the British Empire. The author of the paper analyzes the views of the Tories on the prospects for the British Empire and the Commonwealth of the postwar period and reveals the plans for the reconstruction of the Empire and its transformation while maintaining the dominant position of Britain in the format of a new relationship with the dominions and colonies. The paper shows that within the British political establishment there was no consensus on the future of the empire and, as the materials of the “Diary of diplomat” evidence, the problem of the evolution of the Empire had a close relationship with other areas of foreign and domestic policy.

The Elusive Ideal of Academic Freedom

2021 ◽  
pp. 215-240
Author(s):  
George M. Marsden
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Academic Freedom ◽  
John Dewey ◽  
American Association ◽  
World War ◽  
University Professors ◽  
Lafayette College ◽  
American Schools ◽  
The Ideal

Academic freedom arose as a prominent ideal at major American schools in the early twentieth century and with the founding of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915. The concern was to exclude outside interests of business or religion from limiting academic freedom, as had sometimes happened. As John Dewey advocated, scientifically trained experts should be free to rule. Schools with religious heritage often had both proclaimed the freedom of professors and expected some religiously defined limits on their teaching. That was well illustrated in the controversy at Lafayette College when a conservative Presbyterian president fired a controversial professor. The ideal of academic freedom was elusive, however, because freedom always had limits as was illustrated by the controversies over national loyalty of professors during World War I. The AAUP eventually allowed religious limits on freedom if they were clearly stated in advance.

Forms of Things Unknown

2020 ◽  
pp. 168-175
Author(s):  
Jonathan R. Eller
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Keynote Address ◽  
World War ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Military

Bradbury advanced his visionary role through his keynote address for NASA’s 1987 Goddard Memorial Dinner. Chapter 24 documents how he established a balance between criticism and motivation in spite of his mistrust of the military industrial establishment represented at the event. The chapter also discusses The Toynbee Convector and the importance of the title story, which offers Toynbee’s “challenge and response” insight as the best illustration of Bradbury’s self-perceived purpose as a writer: to show how humanity can shape the future by believing in it to the point of certainty. The chapter concludes with his summer trip to France and his journey to the grave of his uncle Samuel Bradbury, felled by influenza in the final days of World War I.

The Price of Failure

2019 ◽  
pp. 119-134
Author(s):  
Anand Toprani
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Foreign Exchange ◽  
The United States ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Western Hemisphere ◽  
World War ◽  
Cape Of Good Hope ◽  
Energy Needs

This chapter provides critical assessment of Britain’s post-World War I oil strategy and details the strategic consequences of its failure during the early years of World War II. It reveals the irreconcilable dilemma that doomed Britain’s attempts to satisfy its energy needs independently in wartime: a shortage of tankers and foreign exchange. Reducing the foreign exchange burden meant increasing imports from the Middle East, which stretched Britain’s supply of tankers to the breaking point, since there were not enough to redirect imports around the Cape of Good Hope after Italian hostility threatened access through the Mediterranean. Drawing oil from the Western Hemisphere required fewer tankers but also cost foreign exchange. Ultimately, Britain’s survival after 1940—as after 1917—depended upon the assistance of the United States.

The Bomber Always Gets Through

2019 ◽  
pp. 87-116
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Air Power ◽  
Attrition Rates ◽  
Inductive Approach ◽  
The Future

In this chapter, to support the assertion that air power is inherently offensive, Kenneth Walker, in “Driving Home the Bombardment Attack,” argues that in the air, offense dominates defense, and a well-armed and well-flown massed bomber formation can defend against any air-to-air attack. In “Tactical Offense and Tactical Defense,” Frederick Hopkins takes an inductive approach to the question of whether the bomber will always get through. In World War I, only when German defenders concentrated their fighters to British bombers at a ratio of 1.5 to 1 did British attrition rates become too great for sustained operations. Hopkins considers it unlikely such ratios would be achieved in the future given the defender’s dilemma of having to defend everywhere yet also mass forces against an offensive force that could choose the time and location of attack.

Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 309-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Twaddle
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
East Africa ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Residential Segregation ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Test Case ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Meetings ◽  
The World

East Africa is really what one may call a ‘test case’ for Great Britain. If Indians cannot be treated as equals in a vacant or almost vacant part of the world where they were the first in occupation—a part of the world which is on the equator—it seems that the so-called freedom of the British Empire is a sham and a delusion.The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.

The Nuremberg Trial and International Law

1947 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 20-37 ◽  
Author(s):  
George A. Finch
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
International Law ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Law ◽  
Civilized World

Retribution for the shocking crimes and atrocities committed by the enemy during World War II was made imperative by the overwhelming demands emanating from the public conscience throughout the civilized world. Statesmen and jurists realized that another failure to vindicate the law such as followed World War I would prove their incapacity to make progress in strengthening the international law of the future.1

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