Switzerland was spared direct involvement into the First World War, nevertheless the global conflict had tremendous political and economic impact on the neutral republic. Major antagonisms emerged ...between the different linguistic groups sympathising with opposing belligerent coalitions as well as between different social strata. Food and fuel shortages and wartime inflation as well as a lack of integration of the labour movement into the political system and its partial shift to the left resulted in a wave of strikes and protest in the second half of the war that continued into the first two post-war years. Its culmination was a national general strike in November 1918 lasting for three days upon the war’s conclusion, and that in bourgeois circles was wrongly considered an attempted revolution. Whilst this is considered the most severe crisis in modern Swiss history, from a transnational perspective, it was no more than a relatively mild variation of the worldwide upheavals going on at the time.
Afterlives of war documents the lives and historical pursuits of the generations who grew up in Australia, Britain and Germany after the First World War. Although they were not direct witnesses to ...the conflict, they experienced its effects from their earliest years. Based on ninety oral history interviews and observation during the First World War Centenary, this pioneering study reveals the contribution of descendants to the contemporary memory of the First World War, and the intimate personal legacies of the conflict that animate their history-making.
Abstract
This roundtable offers four diverse perspectives on Peter Jackson’s innovative and controversial World War I documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018). Jackson’s film breaks the mold ...of the documentary genre in its manipulation and montage of the visual and audio archives held at the Imperial War Museum in London. Yet he puts his technical virtuosity and resources at the service of a very traditional interpretation of the war, focusing almost entirely on the experience of young Englishmen on the Western Front. Scholars Santanu Das, Susan R. Grayzel, Jessica Meyer, and Catherine Robson offer their reflections on both the gains and losses of Jackson’s paradoxical original use of historical documents and old-fashioned rendering of the war’s experiential elements. They consider, respectively, the experience of colonial troops, the place of women in the war, and Jackson’s creative, if controversial, interpretation of the visual and aural archive.
The article describes the consequences of the implementation of the prohibition known as the “dry law” of 1914 in the Russian Empire cities and villages. The article studies the impact of restrictive ...measures on the well-being of the population, health status, socio-cultural atmosphere, spiritual needs. On the basis of those years journalism analysis a conclusion is drawn about the differences in the prevalence of illegal alcohol consumption in the city and the countryside under the conditions of the “dry law”.
The Great War had a devastating impact on some Lithuanian immigrant families living in Great Britain. In 1917, after Britain and Russia signed a military agreement, the mobilisation was announced of ...foreign men living in Britain who were former subjects of the Russian tsar. The Lithuanians had to decide quickly whether to join the British army or return to Russia and fight on the Russian side. For disadvantaged immigrant families, the mobilisation of men and the loss of the main breadwinner were a major misfortune, and the British government had to provide benefits to the families of the mobilised soldiers. After the war, only a few of the Lithuanian men who had been transported to Russia were able to return to Britain to rejoin their families. The repatriation of these families to Lithuania was organised through the efforts of the British government and the Lithuanian Embassy in London. This article uses historiography and the Lithuanian weekly newspaper Išeivių draugas, published in Scotland from 1914, to describe the Lithuanian community during the Great War, and to analyse how the outbreak of the war, and in particular the Convention of 1917, affected the families of Lithuanian immigrants. The author focuses on the situation of Lithuanian women, their activities during the war, and their concern for the fate of their mobilised men and their families.
The paper focuses on the Sadomasochism of the Lebanese novelist, poet and diplomat Tawifq Yusuf Awwad, due to the horrible childhood which has shaped his character. When the First World War broke out ...he was three years old, and when the terrible famine killed two-thirds of the people of Mount Lebanon in 1916 he witnessed these scenes of death, I attempt to investigate how such scenes affected on his life and depicted in his early writings.
Soldiers fight not only with and against machines, but also with and against their ideas of those machines. Although the design and deployment of First World War tanks have been extensively ...researched, mental images of the technology also played an important part in the machine's impact and have received insufficient attention (notable exceptions are Fox's study of German tank illustrations, Searle's analysis of the visual representations of tanks in British periodicals, and Tate's and Wright's cultural histories that examine British perspectives of the tank). This essay explores the ways in which soldiers and journalists serving with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) constructed ideas of the tank that reflect particularly American views of the war, technology, agency, and masculinity. Viewing the tank as less of a monster and more of a motor, American soldiers of the AEF frequently used language that infantilized, feminized, and subdued the tank, thus communicating their belief in the superiority of the United States and in their own confident virility.
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