Popular Culture, Art Education, and the Committee on Public Information During World War I, 1915-1919

2011 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Funk
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War I ◽  
Art Education ◽  
Public Information ◽  
World War

The Impact of World War I

1996 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Gleason
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
World War I ◽  
Public Information ◽  
National Research Council ◽  
Food Distribution ◽  
Catholic Higher Education ◽  
World War ◽  
Planning And Control ◽  
Organizational Issues ◽  
Catholic History

The importance of World War I as a watershed in twentieth-century American history has long been recognized, and recent studies agree that that interpretation applies to higher education and to American Catholic history. Not surprisingly, it also applies to the development of Catholic higher education. The war did not in itself revolutionize that activity, but by reinforcing and accelerating tendencies already at work it closed the door on one epoch and set the stage for another. The decisive difference between the two eras was that the war settled in favor of the modernizing reformers the debate over the organizational issues discussed in Chapter 2. This came about because efforts to rationalize Catholic higher education were swept along in what David M. Kennedy has called “the great war-forced march toward a better articulated structuring of American life.” Coming after two decades of industrial consolidation and in the midst of a craze for “efficiency,” wartime mobilization brought the movement for planning and control to an unprecedented level of intensity. “Czars” were appointed, or national commissions established, to supervise industrial production, agriculture and food distribution, fuel supplies, labor, the railroads, and shipping. Mobilization of opinion was entrusted to the Committee on Public Information, which reached into every corner of the land, including the schools. This was all carried on at a high pitch of patriotism; the same emotion, along with the felt need to keep pace with ongoing changes, led to the creation of many voluntary agencies of coordination, such as the American Council on Education and the National Research Council, to mention two quite important for higher education. By far the most important result of this impulse among American Catholics was formation in 1917 of the National Catholic War Council and its transformation after the war into a permanent organization called the National Catholic Welfare Conference (both of which used the initials NCWC). Scholars have only recently begun to unravel the complexities of this story, but their work makes clear that, precisely because the NCWC represented so important a step toward centralization, its formation aroused fierce opposition from Catholics fearful of encroachments on their own freedom of action.

scholarly journals INTRODUCTION

2014 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 653-656
Author(s):  
Mustafa Aksakal
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
World War ◽  
New States ◽  
History Of ◽  
School Curricula

Scholars of the Middle East and North Africa are only too familiar with the momentous changes set in motion by the events of World War I. Given the number of new states and political movements that emerged in the war's aftermath, it seems only fair to describe it as “the single most important political event in the history of the modern Middle East.” Elizabeth F. Thompson recently likened the war's impact on the Middle East to that of the Civil War in the United States. To be sure, the passing of a century hardly proved sufficient for coming to terms with the legacy of either war. In fact, analyses and discussions of World War I in the Middle East have remained highly politicized, in school curricula, in academia, and in popular culture and the arena of public memory. History and historical interpretations are always contested, of course, and there is little reason to believe that accounts of World War I in the Middle East and North Africa will become less so anytime soon.

Popular Culture and Modern War

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Abra
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
New Technologies ◽  
World War ◽  
Jazz Age ◽  
Total War ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Cultural Forms

This bibliography includes histories that explore the manifold meanings and purposes that popular culture has possessed in wartime. Popular culture provides entertainment and escapism for soldiers and civilians, while also allowing them to imagine and give expression to their wartime identities, and social and political worlds. Militaries embrace song or sport to entertain, but also to train and condition their troops. On the home front, it is often on the movie screen or the dance floor, or at the concert hall or the baseball game, where critical issues about class, race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity and nation are reflected, experienced, and debated. Popular culture also serves as a potent means of official and unofficial propaganda, and can offer a means of resistance against authoritarianism or occupation, or a pathway toward recovery from war. The bibliography adopts a broad definition of “popular culture,” which eliminates socially and historically constructed distinctions between “high” and “low” cultures, to consider the wide range of leisure forms and performing arts that entertained and shaped the experience of individuals and societies in wartime. The focus is primarily on popular cultural forms that possess an interactive or technologically-driven relationship between producer and consumer, or performer and audience, and so the bibliography does not deal with literature or the visual arts, which each have their own disciplinary specialists and immense scholarly literatures. The bibliography is also only concerned with popular culture produced during the war or wars in question, rather than as part of the retrospective articulation of individual or collective memory. Temporally, it is focused on the era of total war and beyond, including World War I, World War II, the Cold War and decolonization, and the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Significantly, at almost precisely the same moment in the early 20th century, warfare and popular culture both evolved and modernized in critical ways. The First World War erupted just as the Jazz Age took hold; new technologies for cultural dissemination emerged, and the transnational commercial leisure industries surrounding music, film, dance, theater, sport and a range of other cultural forms expanded exponentially. Works in this bibliography are concerned with what followed, and the intertwined modernities of both war and popular culture.

The History of Reading in Australia

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Buckridge
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
World War ◽  
Australian Society ◽  
Political Propaganda ◽  
History Of

A history of reading in Australia needs to go beyond the question of what Australians have read in the course of their history (though this question in itself is important) to tackle the more elusive question of how they have read. This question implies a recognition that reading is not a single, uniform activity but a congeries of “literate techniques” that are spread unevenly across the reading population at any given moment, and that are themselves subject to evolution and change as new cultural, political, and educational pressures exert their influence on how people read. The multiplicity and heterogeneity of reading practices are especially evident in the first half of the 20th century, particularly between World War I and World War II when reading itself came to be problematized as never before by the rise of advertising, cinema, popular culture, and political propaganda. It is important too to consider the ways in which reading as an institution in its own right, something above and beyond both the texts being read and the activity of reading them, has developed historically. Here the question is not so much what people have read, or how, but why. What values—positive and negative—have been attributed to reading, by whom, and in association with what social ideals, purposes, and anxieties? Also relevant here is the changing place of reading in Australian society more broadly. In particular, its changing relationship with writing as a valued component of Australian culture is of interest.

scholarly journals Science Fiction in Belgrade in the 1920s: A Possible Contribution to the Development of Metropolitan Belgrade

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 203-212
Author(s):  
Miodrag Milovanović
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
Specific Area ◽  
World War ◽  
The People ◽  
Words And Images

Historian Jovana Babović claims that post-World War I Belgrade residents embraced different foreign cultural influences in an attempt to become citizens of western type metropolis. Various examples that support her claim were discovered through analysing a specific area of popular culture — science fiction — and enriched with interesting findings about surprisingly fast translations of certain stories, at the very beginning of the establishment of science fiction as an independent genre by Hugo Gernsback, publisher of the world’s first SF magazine Amazing Stories (1926). Several stories from its first issues appeared after only a few months in the Belgrade magazine Reč i slika [Words and Images], with faithful copies by domestic illustrators of original drawings by the leading US genre illustrator of that time, Frank R. Paul. Despite the relatively small number of translated stories, influence on domestic writers and illustrators of popular fiction was significant. The importance of these stories is reflected in the growing penetration of Serbian popular culture by US influences, which began to gain signifi cance in relation to the hitherto dominant French, German and Russian influences. Unfortunately, considering that most of the people involved in these activities died during World War II, and that there is no archived documentation, the pathways by which these stories reached readers in Serbia have yet to be uncovered.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document