Hanna Smyth, who is completing her DPhil on the relationship between Commonwealth War Graves Commission sites and identity, recently contributed to the Trusted Source project, which is a National Trust-TORCH (The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities) collaboration. Her article on Kipling and the IWGC (Imperial War Graves Commission) can be found here.
Category Archives: Research
Fraenkel Prize Lecture: Hello to All That: Catholicism in Germany and Austria-Hungary during the First World War
The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide
Wednesday 14 September 2016, 6:30pm – 8pm
Offering a more nuanced approach to religious belief during the Great War, Patrick J. Houlihan‘s talk shares research from his book analyzing the lived religion of everyday Catholic belief beyond stark dichotomies. Houlihan’s book, Catholicism and the Great War, which received the Fraenkel Prize in 2015, illuminates the spectrum of belief and unbelief during the Great War, thus revising master narratives of secularization and modernism that dominate the First World War’s cultural history. This book highlights the comparative relevance for the trajectories of Central Europe’s Protestants, Catholics, and Jews into the cataclysm of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Dr. Patrick J. Houlihan is Research Fellow in History at the University of Oxford. He received his PhD in History from the University of Chicago in 2011. Since 2016, he is a member of Oxford’s “Globalising and Localising the Great War” project, particularly its focus on Global Religions, which has received major multi-year funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the United Kingdom. His publications include Catholicism and the Great War: Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914-1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), the manuscript of which was awarded in 2015 the Fraenkel Prize in Contemporary History from the Wiener Library.
Admission is free but booking is advised as space is limited. Please visit our What’s On page to reserve your ticket
Contact Info:
The Wiener Library for the Study of the Holocaust and Genocide
29 Russell Square
London
WC1B 5DP
www.wienerlibrary.co.uk
European Film Gateway: WW1 Topics
European Film Gateway: Improving search results on WW1 topics by streamlining metadata amongst content providers.
A guest blog on Europeana Pro discusses how using a thematic entry point into the WWI collections allows educators to explore different aspects of the war across different countries, for example the lives of civilians, or how animals were used in the war.
See here for the blog.
Epitaphs of the Great War
Epitaphs of the Great War: The Somme by Sarah Wearne (Uniform Press) was published on 1 July 2016. Sarah Wearne is the archivist at Abingdon School.
‘If you think Twitter’s 140-character rule restrictive, the families of those killed in the First World War had a mere 66 to compose an inscription, an epitaph, for their relation’s headstone. Throughout the centenary, @wwinscriptions will publish some of these thousands of inscriptions, revealing a voice that has not been heard before, the voice of the bereaved. A voice that speaks of love, sorrow, pride, grief and despair, it quotes the bible, literature, hymns and popular songs, and it tells us something about the dead, who they were, where they lived, what they looked like and how they died.’
For more see information, see www.epitaphsofthegreatwar.com or @WWinscriptions
An article in The Telegraph on the book is available here.
CWGC Living Memory Project
The Living Memory project remembers the “forgotten front” – the 300,000 war graves and commemorations right here in the UK.
In 2016 the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) in partnership with Big Ideas Company are asking the public in the British Isles to re-connect with the war dead buried in their own communities.
CWGC has 200 large sites in the UK, almost all in big city cemeteries and linked to the hospitals: the majority of these men either died of their wounds in hospital or (in 1918-19) died in the influenza epidemic. In total CWGC graves in the UK are located in over 12,000 locations. They must not be forgotten.
The CWGC Living Memory project is offering funding and resources to community groups to enable them to help us raise awareness of war graves in the UK. They are looking to support activity throughout the 1414 days of the Somme Centenary from the 1st July – 18th November 2016.
They are particularly keen to work with community groups who would like to visit and plan some activities around Oxford Botley Cemetery, one of the most notable sites in the UK. See here for further information on Botley Cemetery.
Living Memory project documents:
Living Memory Resource Pack low res
Living Memory Information for networks
Living Memory Funding Application Form
KCL Conference Report: Jutland, History and the First World War
King’s College London’s Defence-in-Depth blog has posted a conference report on Jutland, History and the First World War.
This is the fifth in a series of posts connected to a King’s College First World War Research Group and Corbett Centre Event to mark the centenary of the Battle of Jutland. Recordings of all of the papers from the event can be accessed for free on the site.
Wolvercote WW1 Aerodrome Memorial
The community project, Wolvercote WW1 Aerodrome Memorial, aims to establish a new memorial to 17 airmen who died in accidents associated with this WW1 aerodrome on Port Meadow. The project is a repository for photographs and information about Wolvercote Aerodrome and its WW1 heritage. Pembroke College has some affiliation with pilot training undertaken at the aerodrome, accommodating RFC/RAF cadets undergoing theoretical/ground based training at the No.2 School of Military Aeronautics, before a posting to a flying school such as Port Meadow.
The project’s latest development is the decision over an agreed memorial design and location. They have now commenced fund raising.
A very brief overview of the history of aviation on Port Meadow, which had its peak from mid 1916 to mid 1919 is here: Aerodrome history overview July 2015
Their project Facebook page has an overview of the project and lots of other information.
A BBC WW1 At Home feature, entitled ‘Port Meadow Aerodrome, Oxfordshire: Challenges of Training with the Royal Flying Corps‘, was broadcast in June 2014. The casualty list has expanded slightly since then with two airmen identified who were killed near Ascot while on an official flight from Port Meadow.