The Winchester Repeating Arms Company’s Exports to Foreign Powers During the First World War

2021 ◽  
Vol VII (1) ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Matthew Moss
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Small Arms ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Buffalo Bill ◽  
Before And After ◽  
War Effort ◽  
First World

During the First World War, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company was one of a number of American small arms manufacturers that played a key role in the Entente’s war effort. Winchester provided not only rifles, but also ammunition and munitions materials to all three of the major Allied nations—Britain, France, and Russia. This article was written following a fresh survey of the available documentation from the period which survives in the Winchester archives, now held by the McCracken Library at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, in Cody, Wyoming. As may be expected, the available documentation is incomplete and thus the conclusions contained herein are necessarily limited. Nonetheless, it is clear from the magnitude of Winchester’s work—both before and after the United States’ entry into the war—that the company played a significant role in arming the Entente powers during a period when European industrial capacity was at its limits. This article explores the scope of the company’s work and identifies several of the key items supplied to their European customers. The author also sheds new light on some of the difficulties and challenges Winchester faced in carrying out their wartime production.

African American Soldiers in World War I

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda M. Nagel
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Military Service ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
War Effort ◽  
African American Soldiers ◽  
First World

In the midst of the long black freedom struggle, African American military participation in the First World War remains central to civil rights activism and challenges to systems of oppression in the United States. As part of a long and storied tradition of military service for a nation that marginalized and attempted to subjugate a significant portion of US citizens, African American soldiers faced challenges, racism, and segregation during the First World War simultaneously on the home front and the battlefields of France. The generations born since the end of the Civil War continually became more and more militant when resisting Jim Crow and insisting on full, not partial, citizenship in the United States, evidenced by the events in Houston in 1917. Support of the war effort within black communities in the United States was not universal, however, and some opposed participation in a war effort to “make the world safe for democracy” when that same democracy was denied to people of color. Activism by organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) challenged the War Department’s official and unofficial policy, creating avenues for a larger number of black officers in the US Army through the officers’ training camp created in Des Moines, Iowa. For African American soldiers sent to France with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF), the potential for combat experience led to both failures and successes, leading to race pride as in the case of the 93rd Division’s successes, and skewed evidence for the War Department to reject increasing the number of black officers and enlisted in the case of the 92nd Division. All-black Regular Army regiments, meanwhile, either remained in the United States or were sent to the Philippines rather than the battlefields of Europe. However, soldiers’ return home was mixed, as they were both celebrated and rejected for their service, reflected in both parades welcoming them home and racial violence in the form of lynchings between December 1918 and January 1920. As a result, the interwar years and the start of World War II roughly two decades later renewed the desire to utilize military service as a way to influence US legal, social, cultural, and economic structures that limited African American citizenship.

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.

Stowaways at Bohemia's Shores: Undocumented Emigration and People-Smuggling Networks in Interwar East Central Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 564-583
Author(s):  
Allison Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
The People ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Migrant Smuggling ◽  
First World

AbstractThis article investigates interwar people-smuggling networks, based in Germany and Czechoslovakia, that transported undocumented emigrants across borders from east-central Europe to northern Europe, where the travelers planned to sail to the United States. Many of the people involved in such networks in the Saxon-Bohemian borderlands had themselves been immigrants from Galicia. They had left a homeland decimated by the First World War and subsequent violence and entered societies with limited avenues to earn a living. The “othering” of these Galician immigrants became a self-fulfilling prophecy, as those on the margins of society then sought illegal ways to supplement their income. This article concludes that the poor economic conditions and threat of ongoing violence that spurred migrant clients to seek undocumented passage had driven their smugglers, who also faced social marginalization, to emigration and the business of migrant smuggling.

Iterative Modernism

Transfers ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Greet De Block ◽  
Bruno De Meulder
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
New Order ◽  
World War ◽  
Urbanized Territory ◽  
Access Road ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
New Infrastructure

This article traces the implicit spatial project of Belgian engineers during the interwar period. By analyzing infrastructure planning and its inscribed spatial ideas as well as examining the hybrid modernity advocated by engineers and politicians, this article contributes to both urban and transport history.Unlike colleagues in countries such as Germany, Italy and the United States, Belgian engineers were not convinced that highways offered a salutary new order to a nation traumatized by the First World War. On the contrary, the Ponts et Chaussées asserted that this new limited access road would tear apart the densely populated areas and the diverse regional identities in Belgium. In their opinion, only an integration of existing and new infrastructure could harmonize the historically fragmented and urbanized territory. Tirelessly, engineers produced infrastructure plans, strategically interweaving different transport systems, which had to result in an overall transformation of the territory to facilitate modern production and export logics.

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.

scholarly journals Carrying their native land and their new home in their hearts Mihailo Pupin and Bishop Nikolai of Zica between their native and adopted country

Balcanica ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 245-259
Author(s):  
Maxim Vasiljevic
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The United States ◽  
First World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Native Land ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
First World

The present study gives us an opportunity to look at the Christian heritage that the Serbian immigrants brought to the new land of Americas through the examples of Mihailo Pupin and Nikolai Velimirovic, Bishop of Zica, since these two names are indelibly inscribed in the history of the so-called Serbica Americana. The paper is divided into two sections dealing specifically with their Serbianism and Americanism to show that a distribution of love and loyalty between their native and adopted country functioned in a fruitful way. Based on a detailed analysis of their writings, the author suggests that Serbians and Americans remember Pupin and Velimirovic because they enjoy the benefits of their remarkable contributions. The following aspects of Pupin?s and Nikolai?s lives are examined: their deep concern with the fate of Serbia during and after the First World War; their leading roles among the Serbs in the United States through their assistance in establishing Serbian churches and communities, through their scholarship funds, philanthropic work, etc. Their genuine care for Serbia and Serbs was in no way an obstacle in their adjustment to their adopted country.

Reconstruction and Change

2000 ◽  
pp. 173-196
Author(s):  
Peter N. Davies
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
West African ◽  
Shipping Industry ◽  
World War ◽  
The West ◽  
Freight Rates ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World ◽  
Trade Market

This chapter explores the effects of the First World War on the shipping and West African trade market. It outlines Elder Dempster’s financial and trading position after the war and details the difficulties that came as a result of reduced freight rates, loss of vessels, and a fall in the value of West African produce. It juxtaposes Elder Dempster’s losses with the progress of Dutch and German lines and presents the two rival countries as a threat to the British shipping industry. The chapter concludes with the re-establishment of the West African Lines Conference.

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