Tag Archives: First World War

Symposium: Nova Scotia and the Great War Revisited: Cultural Communities, Memory and the First World War

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It has been 100 years since the “war to end all wars”, from 1914 to 1918. Come hear academic, museum, community and youth speakers share ideas and discuss new research on the little-known contributions of cultural communities in Nova Scotia to the conflict. Explore different community views on the importance of commemoration and memory of the experience of the First World War. See how local Nova Scotian contributions fit in the larger Atlantic Canadian, national and international contexts.

Presentations Include
• No. 2 Construction Battalion in July 1916: Importance for African Nova Scotians
• Experiences of the Mi’kmaq, Acadian and Gaelic Nova Scotian communities
• Child soldiers
• The Jewish Legion at Fort Edward in Windsor

Youth Panels
Vimy Foundation participants and Avon View High School

Why is the memory of the Great War still important to students and youth today?

Keynote Speakers
Jonathan Vance, University of Western Ontario
The First World War, Memory and Popular Culture in Canada

Sean Cadigan, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Myth, Memory and the First World War in Atlantic Canadian communities

Friday, June 10th 2016, 12pm to 7:30pm and Saturday, June 11th 2016, 9am to 7pm

Hants County War Memorial Community Centre, 78 Thomas St., Windsor, NS

Full program: http://www.smu.ca/webfiles/Symposiumschedule.pdf

Free Admission, All welcome.

Register in advance:
Online: http://www.smu.ca/NSFirstWorldWar
Phone: 902-420-5668
Email: gorsebrook@smu.ca

Contact Info:
Organized by the Nova Scotia Museum, Saint Mary’s University Gorsebrook Research Institute, Centre d’études acadiennes, Université de Moncton, Army Museum Halifax Citadel, and Parks Canada.

Conference: Peripheral Visions: European Soldiers and Cultural Encounters in the Long Nineteenth Century

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Trinity College Dublin
2 – 4 June 2016

From the late 18th to the early 20th centuries, European powers mounted military expeditions to the eastern periphery of the continent and to the edge of what they considered to be the ‘civilized’ world. From the Napoleonic expeditions to Italy, Egypt and Russia to the British conquest of Egypt in the 1880s, and from the German Empire’s involvement with the Ottoman Empire to the British and French campaigns in Macedonia and Palestine during the First World War, European soldiers ventured into exotic lands. In so doing, they experienced the unknown while also confronting their own cultural pre-conceptions about the territories they visited and the people against or amongst whom they fought. Often the places they invested were redolent with European cultural significance (Rome, Egypt, Jerusalem), a significance belied by the modern realities of those same sites. In making war, they mapped a Europe of their own imagining. Yet because they engaged in the overt violence of war and the more covert violence of occupation, their encounters were not those of tourists, traders or travel writers, though they certainly contained elements of all three. There was a military specificity to what they saw, to whom they encountered and to how they did so. The encounters were important for the soldiers themselves, for their home countries and for the societies to which they went. Indeed, in terms of numbers and influence, these militarized encounters were one of the most important ways in which Europeans engaged with the eastern and southern periphery of their continent in the course of the long 19th century.

The conference is open to interested scholars. We request intending participants to register (with no charge) in advance. In order to do so, and for all further information, please contact: Dr Fergus Robson (frobson@tcd.ie) or Dr Mahon Murphy (murphm73@tcd.ie)

Further information and conference programme: Peripheral Visions Conference Programme

CfP: Remembering Muted Voices: Conscience, Dissent, Resistance, and Civil Liberties in World War I through Today

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Conference Dates: October 19-21, 2017
National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial, Kansas City, MO, USA

During the Great War, many people questioned the claims of the Allied and Central powers, desired a negotiated peace, opposed intervention, refused to support the war effort, and/or even imagined future world orders that could eliminate war. Among them were members of the peace churches and other religious groups, women, pacifists, radicals, labor activists, and other dissenters. Intolerance and repression often muted the voices of these war critics. Almost overnight, the individuals and groups who opposed the war faced constraints on their freedom to advocate, organize, and protest from the government, the press, and war supporters. Peace advocates, antiwar activists, and conscientious objectors also confronted internal disagreements over how to respond to the war and advance the cause of peace. Yet, those who opposed World War I helped initiate modern peace movements and left a legacy that continues to influence antiwar activism.

This interdisciplinary conference, hosted by the National World War I Museum at Liberty Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, USA, will explore the experiences of those who were in any way critical of the Great War, sometimes at great cost. We welcome paper, panel, poster, roundtable, and workshop proposals that engage in diverse ways with issues of conscience, dissent, resistance, and civil liberties during World War I in the United States and around the world. We encourage proposals that examine historical and contemporary parallels to the war. Strong conference papers will be given consideration for publication in special issues of the journals Mennonite Quarterly Review and Peace & Change.

Topics might include:

War Resistance as an Expression of Religious Conscience
Secular Dissent and Resistance to War (feminists, socialists, and other movements and communities)
The Costs of War: economic, political, social, physical, psychological, etc.
Civil Liberties in World War I and War Today
Race and Empire in World War I
The Legacy and Relevance of World War I Peace Activism to the Present
The Causes and Prevention of War: World War I and Since
Teaching World War I and Peace History in High School and College
Memory, Memorialization, and the Public History of World War I

The program committee invites interested participants to send a 1-page proposal focused on the theme of the conference by January 31, 2017 to John D. Roth (johndr@goshen.edu).

Warwick History of Violence Network Workshop

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Friday 13 May 2016, S0.19 Social Sciences Building, University of Warwick

Network Coordinators:
Jonathan Davies · Christopher Read

The history of violence has been the subject of extensive research. The Warwick History of Violence Network provides a focus for all areas of research into personal, social, political, and cultural violence. This includes but is not limited to interpersonal violence comprising lethal violence (murder and manslaughter), non-lethal violence (assault and rape), and consensual violence; collective violence (carnival, charivari, and massacres); individual and group political violence (riots, strikes, terrorism and revolution); and state violence against the individual (execution, punishment, terror). The Network also investigates cultural polemics and violence. In addition, it ignores the traditional differentiation of war from violence.

The Network is strongly interdisciplinary, drawing on anthropological, economic, emotional, environmental, gender, geographical, historical, legal, medical, philosophical, political, psychological, rhetorical, sociological, spatial, and visual approaches. The Network ranges from the late Middle Ages to the present and reaches across the globe with members working on Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

10-30 Reception and Coffee

11-00 – 11.30 Richard Bessel (York) Keynote introduction: Violence: A Modern Obsession

11.30 – 1-00 Revolutionary Violence: Theory and Practice
Steve Smith (All Souls) Revolutionary violence
Philippe le Goff (Kingston) Auguste Blanqui and the question of violence
Alistair Dickins (Manchester) Rewriting a Violent Script? The Fear of Popular Unrest in the Russian Revolution, 1917

1-00 – 1-45 Lunch Break

1-45 – 3-30 War, Race, Drugs and Violence
Pierre Purseigle (Warwick) War, violence, and solidarity. The urban experience of the First World War
Ben Smith (Warwick) Mexican cartels and the Drugs Wars
Michael Fleming (Warwick) Narrating anti-Semitic violence to the British governing class: The Weekly Political Intelligence Summary and the Holocaust.
Brendan McGeever (Birkbeck) Why was anti-Semitic violence such a problem within the revolutionary left specifically in Ukraine/western Russia in 1918 and 1919?

3-30 – 4-00 Break

4-00 – 4-30 Summary of the Day – Future Plans
The Convenors

Download programme here: Warwick History of Violence Network Workshop Programme

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Getting to Warwick: By car – There are a number of car parks on campus. For Social Sciences Car Parks 8, 10 and 15 are within five minutes walk. (Pay and Display – £3 for full day). Postcode for satnav: CV4 7AL
By Train: Coventry Station then taxi or bus no 12X, 11 and 11U from station forecourt –to the campus (30 mins approx)
Full details on University website: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/about/visiting/directions/

THERE IS NO FEE BUT WOULD ANYONE OTHER THAN SPEAKERS PLANNING TO ATTEND PLEASE CONTACT ONE OF THE CONVENORS SO WE CAN ESTIMATE CATERING REQUIREMENTS ETC.

Conference report: The Great War in the Middle East 1911-1923, 20-21 April 2016

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A major international conference, entitled ‘The Great War in the Middle East 1911-1923’ organised jointly by the War Studies Department of the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and the Changing Character of War Programme at the University of Oxford, took place on 20-21 April 2016. It re-examined the origins, conduct and consequences of the First World War in the Middle East. This conference brought together historians of the Middle East and the First World War to discuss this formative event and to relate the Great War to the broader period of conflict that affected the Ottoman Empire from 1911 to 1923.

A report on the conference by Dr Rob Johnson is available here: ME Great War Conference Report

Lecture: Prof Chris Snyder – “Gatsby in Trinity Quad: Oxford and the American Army Education Commission, 1918-19”

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Danson Room, Trinity College, Tuesday 31 May, 4:00pm
Followed by a drinks reception

Under the command of General John G. Pershing, American soldiers began arriving in France in May 1918, at first in small numbers, but eventually the American Expeditionary Force included more than two million soldiers. Well before their success in the Argonne Forest, allied leaders foresaw the logistical problem of dealing with so many soldiers stranded in France during the period between the Armistice and the Treaty of Versailles. One solution was continuing education opportunities for army officers, and thousands were sent to universities in Britain, France, and Italy. This study focuses on a group of about 200 A.E.F. officers who came to Oxford for Trinity Term, 1919. Demographic analysis reveals much about the A.E.F. officer corps (which included several Rhodes Scholars) and about the expectations the U.S. had for this generation of military leaders. F. Scott Fitzgerald drew on all of this in his portrayal of Major Jay Gatsby as a participant in this Oxford project.

Chris Snyder, Professor of History and Dean, Shackouls Honors College, Mississippi State University has been affiliated to the Globalising and Localising the Great War project since Trinity term 2015. He returns to Oxford during Trinity term 2016 to conduct research for his next book.

CfP: Gendering Peace in Europe, 1918-1945

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Humanities Research Institute (HRI), The University of Sheffield
Friday 20 – Saturday 21 January 2017

Organised by Dr Julie Gottlieb, together with Dr Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid and Centre for Peace Studies

During and after the First World War, blueprints for peace and a non-violent reordering of society permeated all countries in Europe. They were political, artistic and practical responses to the experience of total war, based on a wide array of different political and religious values and motives. While many of these ideas and initiatives have been studied in some detail, the gendering of peace in Europe during and between the two world wars has not as yet been systematically analysed.

The gendering of initiatives for and debates over peace was a crucial element of European politics from the onset of the Great War to the struggles over appeasement in the run-up to the Second World War, and to the planning for post-war reconstruction. The gendering of peace is more than just the study of women’s pacifist groups – even though this is an important part of it. The notion of a gendering of peace refers to the fact that the different roles, emotions, and forms of agency that are attributed to men and women were crucial parameters for the ways in which a non-violent re-ordering of national polities and international relations was envisaged and legitimised. For example, male conscientious objectors as well as female pacifists were portrayed as ‘effeminate’, thus delineating a gendered space for the debate over non-violent politics. Discourses on nationalism and sovereignty in the wake of the Treaties of Paris in 1919/20 were ripe with gendered metaphors that portrayed the task of peaceful self-determination as a predominantly male endeavour. Debates over maternalism and the role of mothers in society were a crucial site for conceptualising a critique of belligerence.

The organising themes of the conference are as follows:
1) gender and non-violent practices, including the reception of Gandhi’s ideas in Europe;
2) masculine/feminine values and metaphors in debates over national sovereignty and rearmaments;
3) competing spaces and forms of agency for men and women in European pacifism; 4) the gendering and politicization of pacifism and peace campaigns across the political spectrum; 5) the evolution of pacifist commitment in the face of fascism and war.

We will discuss these issues in a two-day conference, to be held at the HRI on 20-21 January, 2017. The plenary speakers have been confirmed*, and we are now inviting abstracts for 20-minute papers to be presented in parallel sessions. We welcome proposals for individual papers or for panels consisting of three papers and a chair/commentator. Papers can cover any European country, take international or transnational viewpoints, or offer comparative case studies, and come from interdisciplinary perspectives. We especially encourage the submission of proposals from postgraduates and early career researchers.

Please submit your proposal with title, abstract of 250-300 words, and a short bio to julie.gottlieb@sheffield.ac.uk by 23 May, 2016.

It is the intention that a selection of the best conference papers will be published – in revised form – in a peer-reviewed journal or as an edited collection. We are grateful for the funding for this event to the Batley Legacy to the University of Sheffield, and we do not anticipate having to charge a conference fee.

*Confirmed plenary speakers:
Emily Baughan, Caitrona Beaumont, Laura Beers, Clarisse Berthezene, Charlotte Bill (filmmaker) with Helen Kay, Akos Farkas, Julie Gottlieb, Susan Grayzel, Richard Overy, Senia Paseta, Ingrid Sharp, Matthew Stibbe, Judith Szapor, Sonja Tiernan.

Further information here.