At war with empire: the anti-colonial roots of American anarchist debates during the First World War

Author(s):  
Kenyon Zimmer

America’s multi-ethnic anarchist movement had a rich history of supporting anti-imperial struggles and national revolutions. The three positions that anarchists took on the war—antimilitarist neutrality, qualified support for the Allies, or calculated endorsement of a German defeat of Russia—all had their roots in earlier discourses regarding anti-colonial and nationalist causes. They also engaged in a running dialogue with anarchists in Europe such as Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta. Drawing on American anarchist writings in English, Italian, Spanish, and Yiddish, this chapter outlines the earlier positions anarchists took regarding struggles such as Middle Eastern and South Asian independence movements, the Boer War, the Cuban War of Independence and Spanish-American War, and Zionism and Jewish territorialism. It then examines how the different anarchist factions drew on these previous discussions to make anti-imperialist arguments in support of their stances, and evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of these arguments.

Author(s):  
Eugene Rogan

The First World War proved a crucial turning point in the modern history of the Middle East and North Africa. Under conditions of total warfare, conscripts and civilians suffered greater losses and depredations than in any other conflict in the region before or since. The Great War also led to the breakup of the Ottoman Empire after four centuries of rule over the Arab lands, to be replaced by a modern state system actively negotiated between the Entente Powers in the course of the war. While the borders of Middle Eastern states have proven remarkably enduring over the past century, so too have the problems engendered by the wartime partition diplomacy.


Author(s):  
David Swift

This chapter introduces some of the principle concepts and personalities that would dominate the Left during the years of the First World War, surveys the debate surrounding the Boer War, examines the history of ‘radical patriotism’ on the British Left, and notes the theoretical and actual commitments of the British Left to internationalism and pacifism. It aims to contribute to our understanding of the extent and nature of labour patriotism during the war by examining the continuity or otherwise between the decades immediately preceding 1914. The argument outlined here is two-fold. Firstly, across the labour movement as a whole there was an ambiguous attitude toward nationalism and patriotism. An uncertainty and contradiction resulted from abstract commitments to peace and camaraderie coupled with the realities of the European situation, popular nationalism and broader British culture, and this could sometimes be a problem for the Left. Nonetheless, for many across labour movement their commitments to internationalism and pacifism were superficial at best. Very often their left-wing views were based around an idea of community and nationhood that belied any internationalism. The fight for national survival against Imperial Germany allowed the façade of internationalism to slip, and confirmed the compatibility of left-wing and nationalist sentiment.


2011 ◽  
Vol 80 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua B. Freeman

AbstractAlthough war and militarization have loomed large in the history of the United States for well over a century, labor historians have only infrequently examined the relationship between American labor and the military. The career of General Brice Pursell Disque suggests the complex flow of ideas and personnel back and forth between labor relations in the military and in the civilian economy. First involved with the management of labor as an officer during the Spanish-American War, Disque went on to serve as a prison warden, the head of an army effort to suppress labor radicalism in the timber industry during the First World War, and in business posts involving collective bargaining. Through Disque we can begin to see the multiple connections between labor relations in the so-called free market of the private sphere and in the decidedly unfree arenas of military and penal life.


2000 ◽  
pp. 67-75
Author(s):  
R. Soloviy

In the history of religious organizations of Western Ukraine in the 20-30th years of the XX century. The activity of such an early protestant denominational formation as the Ukrainian Evangelical-Reformed Church occupies a prominent position. Among UCRC researchers there are several approaches to the preconditions for the birth of the Ukrainian Calvinistic movement in Western Ukraine. In particular, O. Dombrovsky, studying the historical preconditions for the formation of the UREC in Western Ukraine, expressed the view that the formation of the Calvinist cell should be considered in the broad context of the Ukrainian national revival of the 19th and 20th centuries, a new assessment of the religious factor in public life proposed by the Ukrainian radical activists ( M. Drahomanov, I. Franko, M. Pavlik), and significant socio-political, national-cultural and spiritual shifts caused by the events of the First World War. Other researchers of Ukrainian Calvinism, who based their analysis on the confessional-polemical approach (I.Vlasovsky, M.Stepanovich), interpreted Protestantism in Ukraine as a product of Western cultural and religious influences, alien to Ukrainian spirituality and culture.


2020 ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Magdalena Strąk

The work aims to show a peculiar perspective of looking at photographs taken on the eve of the broadly understood disaster, which is specified in a slightly different way in each of the literary texts (Stefan Chwin’s autobiographical novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu [The brief history of a certain joke], a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński Na wystawie „Fotografia chłopów polskich do 1944 r.” [At an exhibition “The Polish peasants in photographs to 1944”] and Wisława Szymborska’s Fotografia z 11 września [Photograph from September 11]) – as death in a concentration camp, a general concept of the First World War or a terrorist attack. Upcoming tragic events – of which the photographed people are not yet aware – become for the subsequent recipient an inseparable element of reality contained in the frame. For the later observers, privileged with time perspective, the characters captured in the photograph are already victims of the catastrophe, which in reality was not yet recorded by the camera. It is a work about coexistence of the past and future in the field of photography.


Author(s):  
Felix S. Kireev

Boris Alexandrovich Galaev is known as an outstanding composer, folklorist, conductor, educator, musical and public figure. He has a great merit in the development of musical culture in South Ossetia. All the musical activity of B.A. Galaev is studied and analyzed in detail. In most of the biographies of B.A. Galaev about his participation in the First World War, there is only one proposal that he served in the army and was a bandmaster. For the first time in historiography the participation of B.A. Galaev is analyzed, and it is found out what positions he held, what awards he received, in which battles he participated. Based on the identified documentary sources, for the first time in historiography, it occured that B.A. Galaev was an active participant in the First World War on the Caucasian Front. He went on attacks, both on foot and horse formation, was in reconnaissance, maintained communication between units, received military awards. During this period, he did not have time to study his favorite music, since, according to the documents, he was constantly at the front, in the battle formations of the advanced units. He had to forget all this heroic past and tried not to mention it ever after. Therefore, this period of his life was not studied by the researchers of his biography. For writing this work, the author uses the Highest Orders on the Ranks of the Military and the materials of the Russian State Military Historical Archive (RSMHA).


2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 276-289
Author(s):  
Luc Vandeweyer

Het wordt in de historiografie van de Vlaamse beweging aanvaard dat Hendrik Conscience door de Brusselse progressieve vereniging ‘De Veldbloem’ in 1872 werd gevraagd om te kandideren voor de parlementaire verkiezingen. Conscience zou dat geweigerd hebben. Dit is uiteraard geen onbetekenend feit in de biografie van de man die ‘zijn volk leerde lezen’.Dit gegeven is terug te voeren op de geschriften van Antoon Jacob (°1889) van na de Eerste Wereldoorlog. Jacob werd beschouwd als een autoriteit inzake Conscience. Maar waar is het bewijs? Hij verwees daarbij naar “uitvoerige correspondentie” maar die is niet te vinden. Het ADVN slaagde erin om de archivalische nalatenschap van de in 1947 gestorven Jacob te verwerven. Daarin bleken heel wat brieven van en aan Conscience te zitten. De briefwisseling met ‘De Veldbloem’ was onderwerp van deze bijdrage. Daarin is geen spoor te vinden van de poging om Conscience op het politieke strijdtoneel te brengen in Brussel. Daarbij moet de vraag gesteld worden hoe Jacob deze archiefstukken verzamelde en wat ermee is gebeurd tijdens zijn turbulente leven en talrijke omzwervingen. Het is best mogelijk dat er een en ander is verloren gegaan. Toch is deze nalatenschap een belangrijke aanwinst voor de studie van de geschiedenis van de Vlaamse beweging en die van Conscience in het bijzonder. ________ The Brussels association ‘De Veldbloem’ seeks contact with Hendrik Conscience. Two recently discovered letters It is an accepted fact in the historiography of the Flemish Movement that the Brussels progressive Association ‘De Veldbloem’ [=the Wildflower] asked Hendrik Conscience in 1872 to be their candidate for the parliamentary elections. It is said that Hendrik Conscience refused the request. This is of course a very significant fact in the biography of the man ‘who taught his people to read.’ This information may be inferred from the writings of Antoon Jacob (°1889) from the period after the First World War. Jacob was regarded as an authority on Conscience. But where is the evidence of this? In his claim, he referred to ‘extensive correspondence’, but that correspondence is not extant. The ADVN managed to acquire the archival legacy of Jacob who died in 1947. It turned out that it included quite a number of letters to and from Conscience. The exchange of letters with ‘De Veldbloem’ was the subject of this contribution. It contains no trace of the attempt to bring Conscience into the political arena in Brussels. It raises the question how Jacob collected these archival documents and what happened to them during his turbulent life and his many peregrinations.  It is certainly possible that some documents have been lost. However, this legacy is still an important acquisition for the study of the history of the Flemish Movement and of Conscience in particular.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 22-33
Author(s):  
T.N. GELLA ◽  

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.


This collection of essays examines the various ways in which the Homeric epics have been responded to, reworked, and rewritten by women writers of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Beginning in 1914 with the First World War, it charts this understudied strand of the history of Homeric reception over the subsequent century up to the present day, analysing the extraordinary responses to both the Odyssey and the Iliad by women from around the world. The backgrounds of these authors and the genres they employ—memoir, poetry, children’s literature, rap, novels—testify not only to the plasticity of Homeric epic, but also to the widening social classes to whom Homer appeals, and it is unsurprising to see the myriad ways in which women writers across the globe have played their part in the story of Homer’s afterlife. From surrealism to successive waves of feminism to creative futures, Homer’s footprint can be seen in a multitude of different literary and political movements, and the essays in this volume bring an array of critical approaches to bear on the work of authors ranging from H.D. and Simone Weil to Christa Wolf, Margaret Atwood, and Kate Tempest. Students and scholars of classics—as well as those in the fields of translation studies, comparative literature, and women’s writing—will find much to interest them, while the volume’s concluding reflections by Emily Wilson on her new translation of the Odyssey are an apt reminder to all of just how open a text can be, and of how great a difference can be made by a woman’s voice.


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