A People’s History of Classics explores the influence of the classical past on the lives of working-class people, whose voices have been almost completely excluded from previous histories of ...classical scholarship and pedagogy, in Britain and Ireland from the late 17th to the early 20thcentury. This volume challenges the prevailing scholarly and public assumption that the intimate link between the exclusive intellectual culture of British elites and the study of the ancient Greeks and Romans and their languages meant that working-class culture was a ‘Classics-Free Zone’. Making use of diverse sources of information, both published and unpublished, in archives, museums and libraries across the United Kingdom and Ireland, Hall and Stead examine the working-class experience of classical culture from the Bill of Rights in 1689 to the outbreak of World War II. They analyse a huge volume of data, from individuals, groups, regions and activities, in a huge range of sources including memoirs, autobiographies, Trade Union collections, poetry, factory archives, artefacts and documents in regional museums. This allows a deeper understanding not only of the many examples of interaction with the Classics, but also what these cultural interactions signified to the working poor: from the promise of social advancement, to propaganda exploited by the elites, to covert and overt class war. A People’s History of Classics offers a fascinating and insightful exploration of the many and varied engagements with Greece and Rome among the working classes in Britain and Ireland, and is a must-read not only for classicists, but also for students of British and Irish social, intellectual and political history in this period. Further, it brings new historical depth and perspectives to public debates around the future of classical education, and should be read by anyone with an interest in educational policy in Britain today.
The article is examined R. Kipling’s “Epitaphs of the War” (1919) appeared as a summing up of his experience during the First World War. The work reflects the writer’s feeling of tragedy and ...grandiosity of that historical event. Kipling himself witnessed many episodes of the war and survived his personal tragedy – the death of his son John in 1915. The article aims to analyze the genre originality of the epitaph in the context of R. Kipling’s anti-war theme. Although this part of Kipling’s creative heritage remains less well-known, it is attracting the attention of Ukrainian literary critics and translators now. To reveal the specificity of that poetic work, the comparative and historical-literary methods are applied. The original form of the epitaphs is presented as an epigram which allows one to hear either a voice of a perished soldier or of someone who is reading the epitaph. This manner – not to depict and explain but to transcribe reality – is very recognizable of Kipling’s “masculine style”. In such a manner the first English laureate of the Noble Prize creates a diverse picture of the War in a variety of its tragic episodes and men’s destinies. Thus, a universal picture is born and the main conclusions of the author become transparent. Kipling creates a generalized image of the War by depicting those incredible variants of death “in which life may be extinguished” (J.M.S. Tompkins). Among the dead – “the beginner”, who didn’t realize yet that the war was a reality, not a game as well as the 18 years old soldier of the Royal Air Force (“R.A.F. (Aged Eighteen)”); the sentinel who falls asleep on his post (“The Sleepy Sentinel”); the one who was afraid to face death (“The Coward”) and was severely punished for that by his own combatants and many other tragic stories of the war. The climax of the cycle is the one epitaph in which Kipling formulates his main conclusion about the war – it is “Common Form”. The very title of this epitaph could be interpreted as a “generally used form of explanation” which in Kipling’s ironical presentation is identical to “the main conclusion”. His personal summing up of the event is formulated in the final words: “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied”. Namely in these words personal and universal meet. Kipling had feelings of guilt about pushing his son to go to war. At that time, he was captured by patriotic illusions as well as many writers of his country. The perception of the War as a great battle for national and human freedom was the ground on which the main pathos of the War was formed. It penetrated the literary works, the mood of people and resulted in the main myth that appears at any war. Conclusion. The voices of the perished in the First World War that sound in Kipling’s epitaphs create not only the general image of that historical event but a penetrating image of any military confrontation of people, in which human victims, losses and tragedies are inevitable. His epitaphs, without doubt, are relevant in our modern context as well. In addition, they demonstrate different sides of writers’ possible participation in the event in dynamics: from war propagandist to quite another estimation of the war due to one’s personal experience. The poetological peculiarity of Kipling’s epitaphs is in his return to the antique tradition of genre interpenetration of epigram and epitaph. That is what makes the writer’s style recognizable as well as his intention not to depict or comment but to “decipher” the living reality in many shades out of which the wholeness of the world is created. In the interpretation of death, the emphasis is shifting from the philosophical to humanitarian and social-political one. Instead of memento mori (transient of earthly existence), Kipling focuses his attention on the violent death during the war (correlating and identifying the image of war and the image of death) which is presented as a vain sacrifice in the name of someone’s interests. Instead of the idea of equality of death and sacrifice or traditional philosophical meditations about death as an eternal peace, a stay in eternity, Kipling gives a whole spectrum of emotional-expressive connotations connected with his perception of the war – fear, horror, murder, sensation of shock got of imagining what the dead thought and felt at the last moment of their life. Kipling’s epitaphs present the dead soldiers’ voices addressed to contemporaries and descendants containing not only their personal experience of some concrete episodes of the war but a generalized summing up of the war with its senseless sacrifices and by that giving a kind of warning to those who are alive. The theme of lies and far-fetched ideals and their illusory character as well as the theme of false patriotism dominates in Kipling’s epitaphs adding the traces of civic lyrics to that genre. The structural basis of epitaphs is a couplet close to the epigram and a quatrain with a philosophical generalization. Irony is recognizable key artistic modus of Kipling with the help of which he creates a certain character type of the real world simultaneously giving his estimation of the emerging concept of the world which he obviously rejects.
The article is based on the memoirs of Colonel D.L. Kazantsev, and also on the documents of the Russian State Military Historical Archive; it deals with the military censorship practices in the Grand ...Duchy of Finland during the First World War. The author demonstrates that the establishment of military censorship in the territory of Finland went with delays and great difficulties. The censorship of the mail, telegrams in local languages and local periodicals sent to Finland was to be carried out. It was, however, almost impossible to exercise censorship control over the entire volume of correspondence and all printed matter. The reasons for the lack of effectiveness of censorship were, at first, a lack of understanding on the part of the leadership of the importance of the tasks of censorship of the postal items. At a later period the difficulties of censorship caused by the small number and lack of qualifications of local military-censorship commissions.
This article offers an analysis of mnemonic traces in Galadio, Didier Daeninckx’s 2010 novel. I demonstrate that by fictionalizing the history of the persecution of Afro-Germans under National ...Socialism, the novel exposes antiblackness as a neglected phenomenon of the Third Reich. Synchronously, applying Michael Rothberg’s theoretical framework, the article discusses the dialogue between Jewish and Afro-German legacies of violence in the novel, as well as the intricate relation between colony, camp and what Paul Gilroy defines as camp mentality. Furthermore, I argue that Daeninckx engages with French colonial aphasia: in my interpretation, his oblique approach to the French imperial past conveys its simultaneous presence and absence, which is key to disabled memory. Finally, I focus on the ethics of commemoration in Galadio, which claims space for black soldiers in French collective memory of the two world wars, yet at the same time challenges imperial loyalties and homogeneous approaches to French national identity.
This article explores the debates on film exhibition and censorship during the war years in India. The First World War (1914-18) was a watershed moment for the rapidly burgeoning cinema exhibition ...business in India. During the war, the government of India was caught by surprise at the pace with which the business had spread in the country. When the need for cinema propaganda arose in India, the government began to assess the nature of commercial networks the cinema exhibition companies had been able to build. Throughout the war years, the Government of India debated ways of intervening in the cinema business either by competing with the monopolistic cinema companies or by introducing censorship laws to control exhibition spaces and content. At the behest of the war propaganda department in London, the government of India found itself playing a reluctant arbitrator in a bitter competition between two influential cinema companies - Madan and Bandman - for the exhibition of Britain Prepared. This article further draws attention to the continuities between pre-war censorship debates and the war-year debates that led to the enactment of the first Cinematograph Act (1918) in India. By exploring the pre-war censorship debate about the exhibition of Johnson-Jeffries film, this article reviews a commonly held assumption in Indian film history that film censorship began in the country during the war years.
Although disabled veterans have usually been described as the First World War's most visible legacy in European history, there has been a lack of interest in them in Ottoman-Turkish historiography. ...This article aims to fill this gap by examining the hardships the Ottoman-Turkish disabled veterans encountered and the treatment they received at the hands of the authorities from the end of the First World War through the formative years of the Turkish Republic (1918-1930). The article demonstrates the dismal state of the early twentieth-century Ottoman-Turkish welfare system and social state policy regarding war veterans, and, more importantly, reveals the ideological and cultural reasons for the neglect of First World War veterans. Choosing the victory in the War of Independence, rather than the defeat in the First World War, as its foundation myth, the new Turkish nation-state tended to ignore the disabled veterans of the First World War and prioritized those of the former. The weakness of disabled veterans' associations prevented them from becoming an influential civil pressure group. Moreover, the militarist image of the healthy masculine warrior as a representation of the strong society made the visibility of disabled veterans less desirable.
In this paper, the authors present the results of the anthropological research conducted upon a sample of 50 skulls belonging to skeletons from the Mausoleum Crypt of the First World War Heroes, in ...Iași – Calea Galata (Iași County, Romania). The skulls have been collected during consolidation and rehabilitation of the monument, in 2020–2021. After estimating the age at death and sex, followed by metric data analysis, a typological and paleodemographic study was performed. Most skulls were recorded in the young adult category (50.00%), followed by middle adult (38.00%), adolescent (8.00%) and old adult (4.00%) ones. Distribution by sex categories indicates a higher frequency of males (92%). The morphometrical typology in the analysed sample corresponds to a population mixture, with the predominance of the Mediterranido-Dynaric elements, and Alpinoid, Nordoid and East-Europoid influences.
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