H. G. Wells and the Wartime Imagination

2017 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Cole
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
Moral Life ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
Scale Challenges ◽  
At Home

No figure is more powerful as a symbol of mass warfare in the twentieth century than the civilian, whose vulnerability on a world scale challenges the moral life of our societies. The story of the civilian has recently become the focus of scholarship on the First World War. This paper discusses some of the wartime writings of H. G. Wells – arguably the most influential and widely-read civilian writer during and immediately after the war, who has been completely overlooked by literary critics and war scholars – to argue that in several wartime works with huge readerships, Wells took up the position of civilian in new and activist terms, first, as a matter of imagination, and second, as a matter of responsibility. Wells's textual efforts intersect in intriguing ways with more familiar war writings, but also depart quite radically from them, as he boldly assigns the role of world pacifist to those at home – out of combat, but sharing with soldiers a sense of rage and frustration, and a belief that such violence must not become the world's norm.

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.

Image at War

Vulcan ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 76-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Siotto
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The Press ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
First World ◽  
At Home

The press was well accustomed to utilizing illustrations and photographs at the start of the First World War. This widespread use of images helped the people at home to better understand a war that differed enormously from previous conflicts. Images became a powerful instrument of propaganda, but also retained their usual function in entertaining and educating the reader. In this regard, technology offered new challenges and opportunities to the press in that the novelties of warfare had to be described to the public at home and images offered immediacy and clarity, and at the same time the new weapons’ marvel, even if terrifying, caught the attention and curiosity of the reader and “sold” magazines. The ample use of illustrations and photographs depicting technology in the magazines suggests how important the role of the press was in influencing both how the public understood the events on the frontline and how difficult it was for them to comprehend the new technological warfare.

Modernism Under Review: Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-194
Author(s):  
Marjorie Perloff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
First World

This essay offers a critical re-assessment of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era. It argues that Kenner's magisterial survey remains important to our understanding of Modernism, despite its frankly partisan viewpoint. Kenner's is an insider's account of the Anglo-American Modernist writing that he takes to have been significant because it sought to invent a new language consonant with the ethos of the twentieth century. The essay suggests that Kenner's impeccable attention to the Modernist renovation of language goes beyond formalism, since, for him, its ‘patterned energies’ (a term derived from Buckminster Fuller's theory of knots) relate Modernism to the larger complex of artefacts within which it functions and, beyond these, to what he takes to be the great works of the past and to the scientific-technological inventions of the present. But the essay also points out that Kenner's is an eccentric canon, which makes no room for Forster, Frost, Lawrence, or Stevens. Furthermore, Kenner's emphasis on the First World War as a great cultural rupture, while plausible, works less well for Joyce and Williams than it does for Pound and Eliot.

The role of nitrogen in transforming British agricultural productivity production prior to and during the First World War

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 583-609
Author(s):  
John Martin
Keyword(s):  
Agricultural Production ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Coal Gas ◽  
Major Threat ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Food Shortages ◽  
War Effort ◽  
First World

This paper explores the reasons why artificial or mineral sources of nitrogen, which were more readily available in Britain than in other European countries, were only slowly adopted by farmers in the decades prior to and during the First World War. It considers why nitrogen in the form of sulphate of ammonia, a by-product of coal-gas (town-gas) manufacture, was increasingly exported from Britain for use by German farmers. At the same time Britain was attempting to monopolise foreign supplies of Chilean nitrate, which was not only a valuable source of fertiliser for agriculture but also an essential ingredient of munitions production. The article also investigates the reasons why sulphate of ammonia was not more widely used to raise agricultural production during the First World War, at a time when food shortages posed a major threat to public morale and commitment to the war effort.

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.

The Strange Radicalism of Thomas Carnduff and St John Ervine

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connal Parr
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
First World War ◽  
Class Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
Abbey Theatre ◽  
Unpublished Work ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

St John Ervine and Thomas Carnduff were born in working-class Protestant parts of Belfast in the 1880s, though Ervine would escape to an eventually prosperous existence in England. Orangeism, the politics of early twentieth-century Ireland, the militancy of the age—and the involvement of these writers in it—along with Ervine’s journey from ardent Fabian to reactionary Unionist, via his pivotal experiences managing the Abbey Theatre and losing a leg in the First World War, are all discussed. Carnduff’s own tumultuous life is reflected through his complicated Orange affiliation, gut class-consciousness, poetry, unpublished work, contempt for the local (and gentrified) Ulster artistic scene, and veneration of socially conscious United Irishman James Hope. It concludes with an assessment of their respective legacies and continuing import.

Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron Shaheen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
American Literature ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
First World War ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
Prosthetic Devices ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
First World

Drawing on rehabilitation publications, novels by both famous and lesser-known American writers, and even the prosthetic masks of a classically trained sculptor, Great War Prostheses in American Literature and Culture addresses the ways in which prosthetic devices were designed, promoted, and depicted in America in the years during and after the First World War. The war’s mechanized weaponry ushered in an entirely new relationship between organic bodies and the technology that could both cause and attempt to remedy hideous injuries. This relationship was evident in the realm of prosthetic development, which by the second decade of the twentieth century promoted the belief that a prosthesis should be a spiritual extension of the person who possessed it. This spiritualized vision of prostheses held a particular resonance in American postwar culture. Relying on some of the most recent developments in literary and disability studies, the book’s six chapters explain how a prosthesis’s spiritual promise was largely dependent on its ability to nullify an injury and help an amputee renew (or even improve upon) his prewar life. But if it proved too cumbersome, obtrusive, or painful, the device had the long-lasting power to efface or distort his “spirit” or personality.

scholarly journals Religion and Reform in the City: The Re-Thinking Chicago Movement of the 1930s

1986 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-337
Author(s):  
Jacob H. Dorn
Keyword(s):  
Progressive Era ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Machines ◽  
The First World War ◽  
The City ◽  
Urban Leaders ◽  
First World ◽  
Urban Civilization

Historians have produced a rich and sophisticated literature on urban reform in the progressive era before the First World War. It includes numerous studies of individual cities, biographies of urban leaders, and analyses of particular movements and organizations. This literature illuminates important variations among reformers and their achievements, the relationships between urban growth and reform, and the functional role of the old-style political machines against which progressives battled. Similarly, there are many examinations of progressive-era reformers' ideas about and attitudes toward the burgeoning industrial cities that had come into being with disquieting rapidity during their own lifetimes. Some of these works go well beyond the controversial conclusions of Morton and Lucia White in The Intellectual Versus the City (1964) to find more complex—and sometimes more positive—assessments of the new urban civilization.

THE ORIGINS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1253-1271
Author(s):  
TALBOT C. IMLAY
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Öffentliche Meinung ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Anticipating total war: the German and American experiences, 1871–1914. By Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+506. ISBN 0-521-62294-8. £55.00.German strategy and the path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870–1916. By Robert T. Foley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0-521-84193-3. £45.00.Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xiii+368. ISBN 0-375-41156-9. £26.95.The origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+552. ISBN 0-521-81735-8. £35.00.Geheime Diplomatie und öffentliche Meinung: Die Parlamente in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritanien und die erste Marokkokrise, 1904–1906. By Martin Mayer. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Pp. 382. ISBN 3-7700-5242-0. £44.80.Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+344. ISBN 0-521-79101-4. £48.00.The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus. By Annika Mombauer. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Pp. ix+256. ISBN 0-582-41872-0. £15.99.Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871–1914. By Terence Zuber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+340. ISBN 0-19-925016-2. £52.50.As Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig remark in the introduction to their edited collection of essays on the origins of the First World War, thousands of books (and countless articles) have been written on the subject, a veritable flood that began with the outbreak of the conflict in 1914 and continues to this day. This enduring interest is understandable: the First World War was, in George Kennan’s still apt phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the beginning of the short twentieth century, the war amounted to an earthquake whose seismic shocks and after-shocks resonated decades afterwards both inside and outside of the belligerent countries. The Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of fascist and Nazi movements, the accelerated emergence of the United States as a leading great power, the economic depression of the 1930s – these and other developments all have their roots in the tempest of war during 1914–18. Given the momentous nature of the conflict, it is little wonder that scholars continue to investigate – and to argue about – its origins. At the same time, as Hamilton and Herwig suggest, the sheer number of existing studies places the onus on scholars themselves to justify their decision to add to this historiographical mountain. This being so, in assessing the need for a new work on the origins of the war, one might usefully ask whether it fulfills one of several functions.

THE ROLE OF ENGLAND IN THE FORMATION OF THE PROTO-STATEHOOD OF THE IRAQI KURDS AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR (1918–1920) IN THE MANDATE TERRITORIES FORM

2020 ◽  
pp. 179-191
Author(s):  
Kirill V. Vertyaev ◽  
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Iraqi Kurdistan ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Political Boundaries ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Distribution Of Power ◽  
First World

The article develops the stadial formation thesis of the proto-statehood among the Iraqi Kurds. The concept of national identity of the Iraqi Kurds remains the subject of a complex and long-lasting discussion. The main obstacle for the emergence of the Kurdish integral nationalism is still the fact that the Kurds speak different dialects of Kurdish language, and still maintain political and inter-clan conflicts over the distribution of power (not to mention the futility of any attempts to define political boundaries of Iraqi Kurdistan). Ironically, Great Britain faced practically the same contradictions during its occupation of Mesopotamia at the end of the WWI (following the Mudros armistice in October 1918), when British attempts to create an independent Kurdish state failed for a number of reasons, which are discussed in the article. In our opinion, this period was responsible for the formation of proto-statehood in Kurdish area (Kingdom of Kurdistan, for example, obtained classic characteristics of a chiefdom, but at the same time had a vivid anti-colonial, anti-imperialist orientation). The phenomenology of the British government’s political relations with such ‘quasi-states’ presents the subject for this article’s analysis.

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