Category Archives: Research

New book: Dear Miss Walker. Gallipoli, Egypt & Palestine 1915-1918, Wartime Letters from Distant Fronts

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A new book by Toddy Hoare will be published by Helion & Company in early autumn 2018.

Reginald Hoare commanded the 4th Queen’s Own Hussars from 1905 to 1909 and was a senior brigadier-general at the start of the First World War, commanding a brigade of Yeomanry regiments including the Royal North Devon Yeomanry, which his late brother had commanded after leaving the Royal Navy, the Royal Devon Yeomanry, the Somerset Yeomanry, the Ayrshire Yeomanry, and the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, with other attachments. Throughout the war he continued to raise, train and fight this brigade at Gallipoli, in Egypt and Palestine, and finally on the Western Front in France during the second half of 1918, where he was wounded and invalided home in September. Before Gallipoli he wrote to Miss Walker, who was the daughter of a polo friend, and the correspondence continued up to their eventual wedding in October 1918 on his discharge from hospital. Dear Miss Walker includes a background to his pre-war soldiering and exchanges with a bumptious young subaltern, W S Churchill, who was in his winning regimental polo team. Through the social exchanges of the writer and recipient and their backgrounds leading up to their wedding this book provides an interesting social perspective, as well as a vivid insight into the fighting at the respective fronts and the doings of senior ranks on active service. Further insights have been gleaned from the respective Regimental Histories that were written after the First World War, and included where appropriate. Most of the photographs that illustrate this volume were taken by Reginald Hoare himself. Sadly he never spoke about his experiences to his children, so no other record or source relating to his campaigns exist.


Photographs reproduced with permission from Toddy Hoare. Copyright: Toddy Hoare.

Franklin Research Grants (post-doctoral)

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Scope
This American Philosophical Society program of small grants to scholars is intended to support the cost of research leading to publication in all areas of knowledge. The Franklin program is particularly designed to help meet the cost of travel to libraries and archives for research purposes; the purchase of microfilm, photocopies or equivalent research materials; the costs associated with fieldwork; or laboratory research expenses.

Eligibility
Applicants are expected to have a doctorate or to have published work of doctoral character and quality. Ph.D. candidates are not eligible to apply, but the Society is especially interested in supporting the work of young scholars who have recently received the doctorate.

Award
From $1,000 to $6,000.

Deadlines
October 2, December 1; notification in January and March.

Contact Info
Linda Musumeci
Director of Grants and Fellowships
American Philosophical Society
LMusumeci@amphilsoc.org
215-440-3429

URL: http://www.amphilsoc.org/grants/franklin

CFP: Vulcan Early-Career Prize: social history of military technology

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The Vulcan Early-Career Prize for the best article in the field of social history of military technology

Vulcan: The International Journal of the Social History of Military Technology invites submissions for its inaugural Early-Career Prize. The winning article as judged by the editorial board will be published in the 2018 volume (6) of Vulcan, and will officially be announced as the prize winner in the journal volume as well as on the journal webpage. The winner will receive a cash prize of €500. The prize is open to graduate students who are currently registered at a higher education institute, or to those who have obtained their doctoral degree after January 1, 2012.

Vulcan is a peer-reviewed journal, appearing in one issue per year, that addresses military technology as both agent and object of social change. Vulcan publishes original research articles, book reviews, and short notes and communications that go beyond traditional hardware stories of military technology. Academic and popular histories of weapons, warships and other physical manifestations of warfare have tended to assume a strictly utilitarian or rational basis for invention, innovation and use. Such approaches may ignore some very important questions: What are the social values, attitudes, and military (and non-military) interests that shape and support or oppose these technologies? What are the consequences of gender, race, class, and other aspects of the social order for the nature and use of military technology? Or, more generally, how do social and cultural environments within the military itself or in the larger society affect military technological change? And the indispensable corollary: how does changing military technology affect other aspects of society and culture?

Vulcan casts a wide net, taking a very broad view of technology and its wider ramifications that encompasses not only the production, distribution, use, and replacement of weapons and weapon systems, but also communications, logistic, scientific, medical, and other technologies of military relevance. Papers may range widely in space and time, and we welcome especially submissions on non-Western and premodern topics. Themes might include the ways in which social factors (including politics and economics), and other extra-military factors have influenced and been influenced by the invention, R&D, diffusion, or use of military technologies; the roles that military technologies play in shaping and reshaping the relationships between institutions; historiographical or museological topics that discuss how military technology has been analyzed, interpreted, and understood in other fields, other cultures, and other times.
Submission Requirements

Articles should be based extensively on primary research, must not have been previously published in another form or outlet, and should not be currently under consideration by another journal or book series. Essays (between 8,000 and 12,000 words) should be written in American English, and conform to The Chicago Manual of Style (15th Edition). Papers should include an abstract of approximately 150 words and 5–8 keywords. Detailed submission instructions can be found at brill.com/vulc. Submissions for the prize should be submitted online through the Vulcan Editorial Manager by 31 December 2017. In order to allow for sufficient time for the peer review process, early submissions are welcomed.

For further information, please contact the Editor-in-Chief, Steven A. Walton at sawalton@mtu.edu.

New books: ‘Turning Point 1917’ & ‘Le génocide des Arméniens’

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Two new books have been published on the First World War.

Turning Point 1917. The British Empire at War
University of British Columbia Press, 2017.
Authors:
Douglas E. Delaney holds the Canada Research Chair in War Studies at the Royal Military College of Canada. He is the author of The Soldiers’ General: Bert Hoffmeister at War (2005), which won the 2007 C.P. Stacey Prize for Canadian Military History, and Corps Commanders: Five British and Canadian Generals at War, 1939-45 (2011). He is also co-editor (with Serge Marc Durflinger) of Capturing Hill 70: Canada’s Forgotten Battle of the First World War (2016).
Nikolas Gardner holds the Class of 1965 Chair in Leadership at the Royal Military College of Canada. He is the author of Trial by Fire: Command and the British Expeditionary Force in 1914 (2003) and The Siege of Kut-al-Amara: At War in Mesopotamia, 1915-1916 (2014).

Further information here.

For the British Empire and its allies of the Great War, 1917 was a year marked by one crisis after another. There was the overthrow of the Russian czar and the collapse of his massive armies, and the mutinies of the battered French army. There was also social and political upheaval on the home front, including labour unrest in Britain and opposition to conscription in Canada and Australia. But, here and there, glimmers of light pierced the gloom. Soldiers began solving the problems posed by trench warfare. The dominions, inspired by burgeoning nationalism, asserted themselves more in the councils of imperial power. And the United States finally entered the war.

Turning Point 1917 examines the British imperial war effort during the most pivotal and dynamic twelve months of the Great War. Written by internationally recognized historians from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, its chapters explore military, diplomatic, and domestic aspects of how the empire prosecuted the war. Their rich, nuanced analysis transcends narrow, national viewpoints of the conflict to examine the British Empire as a coalition rather than individual states engaged in their own distinctive struggles.

By drawing attention to the events that made 1917 a turning point, this book provides a unique perspective on the war. These events ultimately laid the groundwork for victory, strengthening the position of the British Empire relative to its enemies while, at the same time, forging arrangements to accommodate the increasingly divergent interests and identities of the dominions.

 

Le génocide des Arméniens : représentations, traces, mémoires
Sous la direction de : Joceline Chabot, Marie-Michèle Doucet, Sylvia Kasparian, Jean-François Thibault
Presses de l’Université Laval, 2017.

En 2015 avait lieu le 100 e anniversaire du génocide des Arméniens. Durant la Première Guerre mondiale, plus d’un million d’Arméniens ont été exterminés en raison d’une politique génocidaire instaurée et perpétrée par les autorités en place dans l’Empire ottoman. Aujourd’hui, ce drame est considéré comme l’un des premiers génocides du XX e siècle.

Ce livre, qui réunit des chercheurs nationaux et internationaux, explore les thèmes et les questions qui animent les recherches les plus récentes sur le génocide des Arméniens. Les chapitres qui composent cet ouvrage collectif sont regroupés autour de trois axes : représentations, traces et mémoires. En privilégiant une approche multidisciplinaire, il s’agit de rendre compte des dimensions multiples de cet objet d’étude et de mettre en relief les aspects structurants des débats actuels sur le génocide des Arméniens.

Further information here.

New publications: Literature & the Great War. Toby Garfitt, Oxford & Nicolas Bianchi, Montpellier

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Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature (STTCL) (http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/) is committed to publishing high quality, anonymously peer reviewed articles written in English on post-1900 literature in French, German, and Spanish. All issues are available online.

Recently published special issue: 41.2 (Summer 2017): Writing 1914-1918. National Responses to the Great War. “From the National Context to its Margins: When the World Used Literature to Respond to the Great War”.

Guest Editors: Toby Garfitt & Nicolas Bianchi

Articles on Canada and Argentina as well as France, Germany and Britain. Full table of contents available here.

By shedding light on some original responses to the Great War that are today hardly known, and by asking the same questions of many works written in contexts which were radically different, this STTCL special issue advocates for a genuinely comparative approach to this literature. Born in a context of nationalist withdrawal, these cultural objects also had a paradoxically wide circulation (due to early translations, commentaries, literary reactions, and so on), which is why study of these apparently isolated writers is so valuable.

 

Writing the Great War / Comment écrire la Grande Guerre?
Francophone and Anglophone Poetics / Poétiques francophones et anglophones
Edited by Nicolas Bianchi and Toby Garfitt

Series: Romanticism and after in France / Le Romantisme et après en France, Vol. 27
Series Editor: Patrick McGuinness

Peter Lang, Oxford, 2017. XIV, 366 pp.. ISBN: 978-1-78707-198-8 (print)
Available to purchase in ePDF and ePUB formats here.

For France the First World War, or Great War, was a war of national self-defence, but for Britain it was not. Does that mean that French literary treatments of this unimaginably destructive war were very different from British ones? Not necessarily – but much can be learned from considering both traditions side by side, something that is rarely done.

The essays collected in this bilingual volume, by a range of scholars working on literature and history on both sides of the Channel, show that while the wider purposes of the war are striking for their absence in both French and British traditions, there are many common strands: realistic narratives of the trenches, humour as a safety-valve, imagination and creativity. Yet there are differences, too: for instance, there is plenty of French poetry about the war, but no real equivalent of the British «war poets». The volume looks at iconic figures like Owen, Brooke, Barbusse, Apollinaire and Proust, but also at a number of lesser known writers, and includes a study of «poetry of colour», recognising the active contribution of some four million non-Europeans to the war effort. The book includes a preface by the eminent war historian Sir Hew Strachan.

Engagée dans une guerre défensive sur ses frontières, la France connut une Grande Guerre bien différente de celle avec laquelle composèrent ses alliés britanniques. Faut-il en conclure que les deux nations furent amenées à produire des réponses au conflit radicalement différentes? Peut-on dégager des traditions nationales ou des tendances transnationales ouvrant la voie à des comparaisons encore rarement esquissées par la critique littéraire? C’est le pari des contributions de ce volume bilingue, réunissant autour de la question: «comment écrire la Grande Guerre?», les articles de spécialistes francophones et anglophones des domaines historique et littéraire. Il montre la variété des thématiques partagées par les deux traditions littéraires: récits réalistes des tranchées, usage de l’humour comme d’un exutoire salutaire, imagination et créativité; et souligne la présence de différences notables, comme l’absence de mythification en France de la poésie de 14, pourtant elle-aussi produite en masse tout au long de la guerre. L’ouvrage, tout en donnant une place de choix aux écrivains de premier ordre (Owen, Brooke, Barbusse, Apollinaire ou Proust), tente d’offrir quelque visibilité à un certain nombre d’auteurs moins connus, au nombre desquels des auteurs de couleur, à qui leur contribution à l’effort de guerre n’aura pas valu la reconnaissance littéraire attendue. La préface a été rédigée par Sir Hew Strachan, grand spécialiste de l’histoire de la période.

Nicolas Bianchi is a normalien and agrégé de lettres modernes, teaching at Université Montpellier III.
Toby Garfitt is Fellow and Tutor in French at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Blog: Revisiting the 1917 Stockholm Peace Conference: Indian Nationalism, International Socialism, and Anti-Imperialism

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A recent blog by Ole Birk Laursen on the University of Exeter’s Global and Imperial Forum discusses how the centenaries of the Russian revolutions (1917) and the end of the First World War (1918), are connected through the abandoned Stockholm Peace Conference and, given their anti-imperialist narratives, how they impacted the colonial world. Despite the attendance of Indians, Egyptians, Persians and Turks in Stockholm, the scant historical inquiries into this might-have-been moment tend to neglect how such anti-imperial ambitions were tied to world peace.

Ole Birk Laursen (Research Affiliate, the Open University) is a historian of Black and South Asian people in Britain and Europe with a particular focus anti-imperialism and anarchism. In addition to book chapters and journal articles on Indian nationalism, his book The Indian Revolutionary Movement in Europe, 1905-1918 is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press (2019).

Book review: Lawrence of Arabia’s War: The Arabs, the British and the Remaking of the Middle East in WW1, by Neil Faulkner.

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The story of the young war hero has historically captivated Western readers for decades. However, in the recent past, there have been calls to engage more deeply with the lesser-known histories and broader participants in the First World War. In this context, Sneha Reddy argues that Faulkner’s book goes in the other direction and shifts the spotlight back to Lawrence by making him the central focus of his study. Nonetheless, she adds, for a book that is a result of a ten-year endeavour, ending in 2014, to study modern conflict archaeology as part of the Great Arab Revolt Project, it is uniquely placed.

Author: Sneha Reddy is a PhD student at the School of International Relations in the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on French North African and British Indian soldiers in the First World War in the Middle East.

Review on publisher’s site here
Author’s e-print link
Article DOI