Mothers of France

Author(s):  
Victoria Duckett

This chapter explores new interconnections between private and public life, the provincial home and the global stage, in Mothers of France, a patriotic film that was made to encourage Americans—particularly women—to participate in World War I. More specifically, it considers how Sarah Bernhardt in Mothers of France was used as a propaganda tool to sway American audiences to the Allied cause. Now engaging ideas about nation and nationhood in explicitly combative ways, the film's narrative begins in the bourgeois home but quickly moves into a provincial village and then into the trenches of the war. In the film Sarah Bernhardt appears at her most “cinematic” in contemporary terms, because film allowed her, literally, to move after the amputation of her leg. This chapter considers how World War I brings new meanings to the notion of “the home front” by following Bernhardt as a mother in the home, then see her as a patriot in the town, and finally as a nurse on the home front.

AJS Review ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 129-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lloyd P. Gartner

Our tale opens in some little town in the Pale of Settlement between the 1880s and World War I. A well-spoken, well-dressed young man appears and courts an attractive girl of a family belonging to the great majority of the Jewish townspeople—that is, impoverished and burdened with many children. The unknown suitor offers charm and gifts, and speaks knowingly of the great places he has seen and where he has a good business—Paris, Johannesburg, London, or New York. Will the girl accompany him westward and become his bride once they reach their destination.He does not want to stay long enough in town to marry publicly, since he might be seized for military conscription. The girl, excited by the prospect, implores her parents to give their consent to this proposal. She feels she loves this young man. With him, the bleak life and dismal future in the town will be exchanged at a stroke for happiness and prosperity in a great, distant city. Every month a few young townspeople were leaving, mainly for America. Already there were many more marriageable girls in town than there were young men for them. How could such a chance be thrown aside? Might it ever recur? If the girl wondered why of all the numerous poor girls in town she was enjoying these attentions, she would answer in her own mind by complimenting herself on her prettiness. Her parents, or her surviving parent or step-parents, gave their consent.


2021 ◽  
pp. 9-26
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Garodnick

This chapter begins by describing the redbrick buildings that emerge out of the East Village on Manhattan's East Side, the plain and unenticing facades of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village that disguise the unique slice of city life that takes place within. It talks about Stuy Town's idyllic quality that contradicts the tumultuous history that produced this middle-class enclave tucked in the midst of Manhattan. It also explains Stuy Town's roots that are planted in bitter soil as the town was born of government-backed, and subsidized, racist policies and displaced with poor New Yorkers. The chapter tells Stuy Town's story of activism, where elected officials, civil rights leaders, and tenants joined together to fight against corporate greed and unjust policies, and for the rights of New Yorkers. It recounts how Stuy Town emerged from a housing crisis in New York City that began during World War I.


Author(s):  
David A. Rennie

Hemingway’s World War I writing developed, first, as he honed his distinctive style and progressed toward completing his first novel. In the 1930s, Hemingway shifted approach, however, and his World War I-related writings came under the influence of his interest in social inequality (To Have and Have Not); his shift toward showing instead of implying interiority in Across the River and into the Trees; and the general imposition of his ego into his private and public writing. He remained committed, however, to the idea of the inherently complex nature of warfare.


2012 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 196-219 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eldon J. Eisenach

AbstractAfter summarizing the ways in which Progressive intellectuals attacked individualist understandings of rights and mechanistic understandings of constitutional government, a series of second thoughts on this argument are pursued. The first centers on the ways in which progressivism differed from New Deal liberalism, especially regarding “big government.” Progressive understandings of politics rest on a distinction between “government(s)” and “state,” derived from Tocqueville and Lincoln’s understandings of popular sovereignty. Secondly, this distinction is reinforced by their stress on an articulate and coherent public opinion that would provide democratic legitimacy to all forms of governing institutions, both “public” and “private,” that serve the common good. The Civil War experience was their model, one which they first thought would be reincarnated in the preparation for World War I. Given both private and public assaults on free speech, Progressives in the 1920s often led the movement for protections of civil liberties and for a new respect paid to the First Amendment. The conclusion examines the continuities and discontinuities of Progressive political thought in contemporary political discourse.


2001 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 138

AbstractThe article deals with the German migration to Russia in general and the fate of German settlements in the Southern Caucasus in particular. After a short overview over the motives and ways of German migration to Russia from its early days in the 10th century until the end of the first Russian Revolution in 1908 the author describes at some length the history of German settlements in Transcaucasia, i.e. the territory divided today between the Republics of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan. The first 31 German families of migrants, which belonged to the chiliastic sectarian movement arrived in the Southern Caucasus in spring 1817 and founded near to Tbilissi the settlement Marienfeld. They were soon to be followed by other German migrants which were engaging themselves all over Transcaucasia in agriculture, gardening and cattle-breeding. In 1900 the number of German settlers in the area amounted to about 12 thousand people. Although spread over a vast territory the German villages were in contact which each other, establishing their own network of religious and educational institutions. German-speakers reached as far south as Schuscha, a town in today's Nogorny Karabakh. Two small German villages were even to be found near to Mount Ararat, on the very Russian-Turkish border, around five kilometres from the town of Kars. Although both villages were left by their German inhabitants in 1914 due to World War I, still in 1971 some old German style houses now inhabi-ted by Turkish families could be identified in the place.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
O. W. Saarinen

Kapuskasing, Ontario warrants special mention in the history of Canadian land use planning. The town first acquired special prominence immediately following World War I when it was the site of the first provincially-planned resource community in Canada. The early layout of the settlement reflected the imprints of both the "city beautiful" and "garden city" movements. After 1958, the resource community then became the focus for an important experiment in urban "fringe" rehabilitation at Brunetville, a suburban area situated just east of the planned Kapuskasing townsite. The author suggests that the role of the Brunetville experiment in helping to change the focus of urban renewal in Canada from redevelopment to rehabilitation has not been fully appreciated.


Author(s):  
Verjiné Svazlian

The Young Turk leaders of the Ottoman Empire participated in World War I having expansionist objectives and with their former pan-Turkic and pan-Islamic plan to carry out the genocide of the Armenians. The mobilization and the collection of arms of the Armenians started with the war. The governor of Van Djevdet pasha besieged the town with the Turkish armed forces. The people of Van struggled heroically, till the last drop of their blood, to defend their elementary human right for survival and their Motherland. The testimonies and historical songs, communicated by 35 eyewitness survivors of the heroic battle of Van, which I have enscribed, audio- and video-recorded, have served as a basis for the preparation of the present article.


Author(s):  
Joseph Locke

Fleeting political defeats could not blunt the rising power of Texas’s evangelical activists, and clerics’ cloistered denominational worlds sustained their efforts through all of the bitter political battles over prohibition and other moral reforms during the early twentieth century. Shielded from the stormy winds of politics and the public’s anticlericalism, the clerical culture nourished new generations with the gospel of politics and southern religious leaders pushed triumphantly into public life behind the issue of prohibition. Aggressive religious leaders such as J. Frank Norris and Robert Shuler outmaneuvered hostile politicians, including Governor James Ferguson, and elevated Morris Sheppard, the “father of national prohibition” and a firm champion of Christian nationalism, to the U.S. Senate. By the time the United States entered World War I, clerics were well-positioned to implement the Eighteenth Amendment, allowing for the national prohibition of alcohol.


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