History Commons^™

The Red Vienna Sourcebook, Matthew P. Berg

2023 Faculty Bibliography

No abstract provided.

"They Were Only Playin' Leapfrog!": The Infantryman And The Staff Officer In The British Army In The Great War, Benjamin M. Roy

Student Publications

The British Infantryman of the First World War hated Staff Officers more than any other supporting or service branch in the BEF. This essay explores this attitude, its motivations, and the ways complaining helped British Infantrymen endure the Great War. It argues that the British Infantryman felt separate from the Staff Officers because of his intimate understanding of combat and killing and manifested his frustration with the helpless circumstances of war by hating Staff Officers, but ultimately understood the Staff Officer's role and the necessity of their service. By reconsidering the hackneyed views of the 'Poor Bloody Infantry' a new …

"I Deny Your Authority To Try My Conscience:" Conscription And Conscientious Objectors In Britain During The Great War, Albert William Wetter

Honors Projects

During the Great War, the Military Service Act was introduced on January 27, 1916 and redefined British citizenship. Moreover, some men objected to the state’s military service mandate, adamant that compliance violated their conscience. This thesis investigates how the introduction of conscription reshaped British society, dismantled the “sacred principle” of volunteerism, and replaced it with conscription, resulting in political and popular debates, which altered the individual’s relationship with the state. British society transformed from a polity defined by the tenets of Liberalism and a free-will social contract to a society where citizenship was correlated to duty to the state. Building …

Review Of Baptism Of Fire: The Birth Of The Modern British Fantastic In World War I, Ian A. Isherwood

Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications

The Great War had a lasting influence on literature and literary culture in Britain. Spanning the ‘brows’ of literary taste were authors writing in response to the cataclysmic violence experienced by the war generation, at both the war front and the home front. The war's shadow permeated all aspects of cultural expression; its experience found authors who, with varying degrees of success, wrote on its lasting influence to a readership that, as the decades wore on, grew increasingly afraid of another world war. One of the responses undoubtedly influenced by the war was the genre of fantasy. As one of …

For King And Country: Reconsidering The Great War Soldier In Britain, 1914-1945, Nicholas John Schaefer

Master's Theses

In the postwar period historians argued that the horrors of the First World War created an irreparable disconnect between soldiers’ pre and postwar lives. Scholars led by Paul Fussell and Eric Leed presented the Great War as a futile waste of life for a meaningless cause. This historiography argues that the generation which survived the Western Front returned to Britain as jaded shells of their former selves unable to relate to their old lives and families. Bitterness and apathy replaced belief in cause and country. In contrast, recent historiography asserts that British soldiers maintained belief in their country’s cause and …

Remembering The Great War: Writing And Publishing The Experiences Of Wwi, Ian A. Isherwood

Gettysburg College Faculty Books

The horrors and tragedies of the First World War produced some of the finest literature of the century: including Memoirs of an Infantry Officer; Goodbye to All That; the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas; and the novels of Ford Madox Ford. Collectively detailing every campaign and action, together with the emotions and motives of the men on the ground, these 'war books' are the most important set of sources on the Great War that we have. Through looking at the war poems, memoirs and accounts published after the First World War, Ian Andrew Isherwood addresses the key issues …

American Battleship At War: Uss New York, Keith J. Muchowski

Publications and Research

This invited blog post tells the story of the USS New York, a dreadnought built just prior to the outbreak of the First World War and decommissioned after World War II.

"Too Young To Fall Asleep Forever": Great War Commemoration And National Identity In Interwar England And Germany, Angela Clem

History Honors Projects

This thesis compares English and German commemorative practices after the Great War. In England, commemoration strengthened national identity by giving value to communal suffering and creating an almost-mythical figure in the Unknown Warrior, an anonymous soldier buried in Westminster Abbey. In contrast, German commemoration met with political instability, hyperinflation, and the infamous “war guilt clause” of the Versailles Treaty, which rejected a national mode of commemoration. Despite these differences, both countries constructed a new “language of loss” physically (through memorials) and metaphorically (through war literature), forever shaping their respective national identities and collective memories.

Gettysburg Historical Journal 2015

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

No abstract provided.

Learning The Fighting Game: Black Americans And The First World War, S. Marianne Johnson

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

The experience of African American veterans of the First World War is most often cast through the bloody lens of the Red Summer of 1919, when racial violence and lynchings reached record highs across the nation as black veterans returned from the global conflict to find Jim Crow justice firmly entrenched in a white supremacist nation. This narrative casts black veterans in a deeply ironic light, a lost generation even more cruelly mistreated than the larger mythological Lost Generation of the Great War. This narrative, however, badly abuses hindsight and clouds larger issues of black activism and organization during and …

Art As Political Struggle: George Grosz And The Experience Of The Great War, Jeff Michael Ocwieja

Grand Valley Journal of History

The Great War was a highly traumatic event that rocked the Western world and beyond and had a tremendous effect on the professional lives of those who served in the conflict. Included among those profoundly changed by the experience of the war was George Grosz, whose art grew increasingly subversive in light of the horrors of what he had seen both on the battlefield and in the tumultuous political atmosphere of post-war Germany. This article uses the individual experience of Grosz to speak more generally about the German experience during and after the conflict, particularly through engagement with artist's illustrations …

The Great War Heritage: A "Heritage Of One's Own"?, Anne Hertzog

Janie Tremblay

2009. As part of the European cross-border program Inter- reg IV, a research program supported by the Nord department council has been launched by researchers from the University of Lille 3. The aim is to collect the remembrance items and witness accounts from collectors of objects from the two world wars that took place in France so as to be able to conserve and display them.

Gen Ms 27 Early 20th-Century German Print Collection Finding Aid, Julie Cismoski, Kristin D. Morris

Search the General Manuscript Collection Finding Aids

Description:

Printed materials acquired by the donor's father while serving in West Germany during the Cold War. The Collection contains 37 items, books and ephemeral material. Materials deal with German history from the beginning of World War I to the end of World War II. Dates span 1914 to 1983, with the bulk evenly spread between the periods of 1915-1923 and 1934-1942. The collection includes propaganda, war humor, poems, songs, and a film promotional leaflet; stories from German prisoners of war during WWI; and materials related to revolution (following World War I). The two issues of Stern magazine were published …

The Sick Man’S Last Fight: The Role Of The Ottoman Empire In The First World War, Henry A. Crouse

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

The Great War in 1914 to 1918 destroyed mighty empires, and created nations from their ashes. Both the Allied and Central Powers had been dominated by powerful empires. The Ottoman Empire, established by the Turks was at one point the largest empire in the world. Prior to World War I, it had fallen into decline as its territories were gobbled up by other powers. The world dismissed the Ottoman Empire as “the Sick Man of Europe.” Throughout the Nineteenth Century, the rest of Europe waited for the empire to implode. A few years before war broke out, the Turks had …