Search

The papers of the Armstrong family of Moyaliffe Castle, County Tipperary, held at the Glucksman Library, University of Limerick in Ireland, contain a unique set of diaries, photographs, correspondence, and ephemera relating to the First World War. The centenary commemorations of 2014–2018 inspired the Library to embark on an ambitious undertaking to showcase the broad range of this material to highlight how archival collections can be used to bring history to life. The project took the form of an online exhibition, which followed the daily lives of the Armstrong family through weekly blog posts published in 'real time' between June 2014 and December 2018. The project represented the first major attempt of the Library's Special Collections and Archives Department at using its collections to develop an online presence. This paper explains how the project came about, and explores in some detail the work involved in its creation, the difficulties faced by the small project team which managed it, and lessons learnt along the way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the most severe crisis of masculinity among British and Dominion soldiers in the First World War did not take place on the Western Front. Instead, British and Dominion soldiers serving on the war's sideshows in Macedonia, Mesopotamia and Palestine believed most acutely that their manliness was in question. Unlike soldiers on the Western Front, they were not battling the main German Army, they were not fighting to liberate occupied France and Belgium, and their war was not to preserve the rights of small nations and the inviolability of international law. This article explores how military masculinity played out much differently on the war's peripheral fronts in two ways. First, it suggests that where a soldier fought mattered more to military masculinity than a soldier's method of enlistment or any other variable. British and Dominion soldiers were fully aware that the home front only considered France and Flanders as the real war, and they actively argued against this misconception to loved ones and in their memoirs. Second, this article demonstrates an additional crisis of masculinity on the war's peripheral fronts: the lack, or more often effacement, of non-white colonial (Eastern Mediterranean and Arab) women. Not only was British and Dominion military masculinity under assault on the war's peripheral fronts, heteronormative sexual relations were also being transformed in a world where few, if any, racially acceptable women were available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work seeks to explore how certain symbols, built over time within a certain cultural context (in this case, said context being the one of western European culture), are re-contextualized within a given situation (World War I) to better serve the means of propaganda. How can a visual representation of a certain symbol, thousands of years old and deeply rooted in cultural heritage, be repurposed and reshaped within months? Also, the article aims to explore the connection between the visual cannon of Orthodox icons and World War I propaganda posters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the emergence of studies attentive to the difference between discourses about emotion and the experience of emotion, particularly within histories of gender and sexuality, social class has been a neglected category. Those historical sources which enable engagement with a subject's emotional life have been largely produced by the elite and middle-classes; it remains notoriously difficult to gain access to the interior lives of ‘ordinary’ people. This article asserts the significance of the ‘ordinary’ diary in enabling exploration of the emotional lives of non-elite women and girls. It focuses on expressions of romantic love and sexual interest, anger and disappointment in the pocket diaries of a working-class scholarship girl from the English East Midlands during the years of the Second World War, to argue that ordinary diaries can help us to move beyond cultural directives concerning appropriate female emotional expression to develop a greater understanding of the daily crafting of the modern self. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how different forms of writing mediate the past. In doing so, I focus on two ostensibly distinct types of authorship: the light that writing projected on-screen, and the life-writings found in letters and diaries. Between 1914 and 1919 in Britain, cinema and personal testimonies intervened in historiography in apparent opposition to one another. It is easy for us now to assume that state-censored, propagandistic movies narrated the state’s version of the First World War, while secret, illegal accounts written by personnel on the Western Front line described actuality (while letter writing was permitted – subject to censorship – all serving personnel were banned from keeping diaries). However, a study of British ambulance trains reveals that films and life-writings have a shared vocabulary, which complicates the two media’s connections to history and to one another. I argue that by interrogating the motifs congruent on the screen and the page, and by reading films and testimonies in tandem, we can rediscover effaced narratives about wartime conditions and marginalised peoples. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author responds to the article "Fiction and memoir of Britain's Great War: disillusioned or disparate?," by Rodney Gerald Beecham, which is presented within this issue. It explores the history and historiography of World War I in literature. the War and collective memory, and the War's influence on British society.

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise untilJourney’s Endand the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A stereotypical image of the nation's First World War soldiers—and a conventional understanding of their war experience and its meaning—is not a concept unique to the British Empire's former Pacific Dominions, but is also promulgated in other parts of the Empire. During the First World War and interwar period, Canada also saw the emergence of a ‘Myth of the Soldier’ that paralleled the Anzac legend in many ways. This article focuses on some of the similarities and differences in Australia and Canada's mythologising of their First World War soldiers, proposing that this process reflects aspects of identity formation common to settler societies within the British world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article offers information on the project "Lives of the First World War," sponsored by the British Imperial War Museum and genealogical website Lives of the FirstWorldWar, which focuses on the personal stories of men and women who made a contribution to World War I.

A personal narrative is presented which explores the experience of a camp cook as a voluntary member of the army of the British Red Cross during the first World War.

An excerpt from the memoir "A Soldier on the Southern Front" by Emilio Lussu is presented which discusses an assault he experienced while deployed on the Asiago High Plateau in Italy during World War I.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's first experience of active combat was as a member of the Lombard Battalion of Volunteer Cyclists and Motorists in the autumn of 1915, when he fought in the mountains of Trentino at the border of Italy and Austria-Hungary. This article examines his experience of mountain combat and how he communicated aspects of it both to specialist, Futurist audiences and to the general public and soldiers, through newspaper articles, manifestos, ‘words-in-freedom’ drawings, speeches and essays written between 1915 and 1917. Marinetti's aim in all of these wartime writings was to gain maximum support for the Futurist movement. Thus, he adapted his views to suit his audience, at times highlighting the superiority of the Futurist volunteers over the Alpine soldiers and at others seeking to distance Futurism from middle-class intellectualism in order to appeal to the ordinary soldier. Marinetti interpreted the war's relationship with the natural environment through an exclusively Futurist lens. He sought to ‘futurise’ the Alpine landscape in an effort to reconcile the urban and technophilic philosophy of his movement with the realities of combat in the isolated, rural and primitive mountains of Trentino. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A comparison is made of official war reports made by British soldiers during World War I with later accounts written by veterans for the public. It presents a reprint of the official report filed with Great Britain's War Office by sublieutenant of the British Royal Naval Division Hugh Kingsmill Lunn, later known as English writer Hugh Kingsmill, detailing his capture by German forces during World War I. He was captured on the night of February 4-5, 1917 while on a foray in the area of the Puisieux River Trenches while attached to the Drake Battalion.

The article discusses various aspects of the "Voices of World War I" pilot project which features human-narrated audio readings of historic documents that are archived at the Connecticut State Library, and it mentions the collaborative work of historians, the Connecticut Radio Information System, and educators. First-person accounts of World War I are assessed.

The article reviews the digital library collection titled "The First World War: Personal Experience," located at https://www.amdigital.co.uk, compiled by online resource company Adam Matthews Digital.

The article reviews the website Europeana, 1914-1918: Untold Stories & Official Histories of WWI, available at http://www.europeana1914-1918.eu/en.