Women and the Warsaw Home Front

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Blobaum
Keyword(s):  
Home Front ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Women And Gender ◽  
Small Minority ◽  
Military Organizations ◽  
The First World War ◽  
And Gender ◽  
First World

This chapter examines the intersection of war and gender in Warsaw. The resurrection of an independent Polish state in the aftermath of the First World War was accompanied by the establishment of equal political rights and suffrage for women, a cause that had minimal support before the war but was accepted after the war with little public debate or dissent. However, that the war itself had something to do with this important development in Polish political culture is assumed rather than established in the historiography of modern Poland and the emerging scholarship about women and gender. Moreover, in the scant literature on the role of women in wartime Poland, the focus had been placed—or misplaced—on a small minority of women who served as volunteers in auxiliary military organizations, particularly those in support of the Polish legions.

On the Fence, Over the Fence

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Schofield
Keyword(s):  
Military Training ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Archaeological Survey ◽  
World War ◽  
The First World War ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

Given the significance of military training in shaping early archaeological practice, and the enthusiasm with which archaeologists have explored the remains of early conflict (from the Roman and medieval periods especially), it is surprising how long it has taken archaeologists to develop interest in more recent conflict. It seems to have taken the fiftieth anniversaries of the Second World War to inspire interest amongst professional archaeologists and across the heritage sector, following a longer history of amateur endeavour. This chapter briefly reviews these earlier histories of the subject, before focusing on some recent examples that illustrate the breadth of research and the opportunities it provides for public engagement. The role of anniversaries appears particularly relevant at the time of writing, with the centenary of the First World War. Alongside archaeological activities along the former Western Front, and in Jordan, an archaeological survey of the UK Home Front is under way.

Emotions in Times of War: Private and Public, Individual and Collective

Total War ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 21-39
Author(s):  
Ute Frevert
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
Entire Duration ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
First World

In private and public affairs the concepts of honour and shame were crucial from the outbreak and throughout the entire duration of the First World War. The roots of these concepts can be traced back to a highly gendered 19th-century aristocratic-bourgeois code of honour and duty, which in 1914 was translated into the willingness to sacrifice one’s own life and the life of beloved ones. While in the early days of the war propaganda focused on female (sexual) honour and the role of protective chivalrous males, humiliation and public shaming—of enemies, ‘cowards’, and POWs, for example—eventually became common practice in warfare and on the Home Front. Yet as the war and its hardships raged on, more and more people became sceptical of these attitudes. Finally, when the war ended, ‘honour’ maintained its importance, especially in negotiating and bearing the terms of armistice and peace.

‘A war film with a difference’: Adrian Brunel's Blighty and Negotiation within the British Studio System of the Late Silent Period

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Botting
Keyword(s):  
Silent Period ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
War Films ◽  
Box Office ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Studio System ◽  
To Come ◽  
First World ◽  
War Film

The creation and viewing of war films was one of the elements in the process by which Britain attempted to come to terms with the horrors of the First World War. During the interwar period, war films took two main forms: those which reconstructed famous battles and melodramas set against a wartime backdrop. However, the film Blighty, directed by Adrian Brunel in 1927, took a slightly different approach, focusing not on military action but on those who stayed behind on the Home Front. As a director during the silent period, Brunel trod a stony path, operating largely on the fringes of the industry and never really getting a firm foothold in the developing studio structure. He remains well regarded for his independent productions yet also directed five features for Gainsborough at the end of the silent period. Of these film, his first, Blighty, is perhaps his most successful production within the studio system in terms of managing a compromise between his desire to maintain control while also fulfilling the studio's aims and requirement for box office success. Brunel's aversion to the war film as a genre meant that from the start of the project, he was engaged in a process of negotiation with the studio in order to preserve as far as possible what he regarded as a certain creative and moral imperative.

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.

The Motif of Sacrifice in the Literature and Culture of the Second World War

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Rawlinson
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
First World War ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
World War ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Anglophone Literature ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Second World ◽  
First World

This chapter explores how Anglophone literature and culture envisioned and questioned an economy of sacrificial exchange, particularly its symbolic aspect, as driving the compulsions entangled in the Second World War. After considering how Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories cast light on the Home Front rhetorics of sacrifice and reconstruction, it looks at how poets Robert Graves, Keith Douglas, and Alun Lewis reflect on First World War poetry of sacrifice. With reference to René Girard’s and Carl von Clausewitz’s writings on war, I take up Elaine Cobley’s assertion about the differing valencies of the First and Second World Wars, arguing that the contrast is better seen in terms of sacrificial economy. I develop that argument with reference to examples from Second World War literature depicting sacrificial exchange (while often harking back to the First World War), including Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy (1952–61), and William Wharton’s memoir Shrapnel (2012).

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.

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.

scholarly journals “Buried Alive”: Experience, Memory, and the Interwar Publishing of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force in Postwar Britain, 1915-1939

2013 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 212-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Fantauzzo
Keyword(s):  
First World War ◽  
Home Front ◽  
Sinai Peninsula ◽  
World War ◽  
The Road ◽  
The Past ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
War Machine ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

Over 450,000 British soldiers fought as part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force during the First World War. Between 1915-1918, they fought their way across the Sinai Peninsula, into southern Palestine, captured Jerusalem, and overran the Turkish Army, leading to the surrender of the Ottoman Empire in October 1918. Despite being the war’s most successful sideshow, the Egypt and Palestine campaign struggled to gain popular attention and has largely been excluded from First World War scholarship. This article argues that returning soldiers used war books to rehabilitate the campaign’s public profile and to renegotiate the meaning of wartime service in interwar Britain. The result of sporadic press attention and censorship during the war, the British public’s understanding of the campaign was poor. Periodic access to home front news meant that most soldiers likely learnt of their absence from Britain’s war narrative during the war years. Confronting the belief that the campaign, prior to the capture of Jerusalem, was an inactive theatre of war, British soldiers refashioned themselves as military labourers, paving the road to Jerusalem and building the British war machine. As offensive action intensified, soldiers could look to the past to provide meaning to the present. Allusions to the campaign as a crusade were frequently made and used to compete with the moral righteousness of the liberation of Belgium.

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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