Conrad and the First World War

During the First World War, Conrad believed himself peripheral to a transitional historical moment. In November 1914, he wrote: 'the thoughts of this war sit on one's chest like a nightmare. I am painfully aware of being crippled, of being idle, of being useless with a sort of absurd anxiety' (CL 5, 427). In August 1915, Conrad felt the 'world of 15 years ago is gone to pieces; what will come in its place God knows, but I imagine doesn't care' (CL 5, 503). The political forces of nineteenth-century Europe that had fashioned Conrad's literature, notably imperialism and nationalism, were undermined and unleashed anew by the violence of the Great War and the uncertain legacy of the conflict. Conrad closely observed Poland's fate throughout the war in his relationship with Polish activist Józef Retinger, which inspired 'A Note on the Polish Problem' (1916) and 'The Crime of Partition' (1919). While 1918 saw the political rebirth of Poland, antagonisms provoked by the redrawing of Europe's historical boundaries made Conrad uneasy. On Armistice Day, he wrote: 'The great sacrifice is consummated - and what will come of it to the nations of the earth the future will show. I can not confess to an easy mind. Great and very blind forces are set free catastrophically all over the world' (CL 6, 302)

Readers and Reading in the First World War

This essay consists of three individually authored and interlinked sections. In ‘A Digital Humanities Approach’, Francesca Benatti looks at datasets and databases (including the UK Reading Experience Database) and shows how a systematic, macro-analytical use of digital humanities tools and resources might yield answers to some key questions about reading in the First World War. In ‘Reading behind the Wire in the First World War’ Edmund G. C. King scrutinizes the reading practices and preferences of Allied prisoners of war in Mainz, showing that reading circumscribed by the contingencies of a prison camp created an unique literary community, whose legacy can be traced through their literary output after the war. In ‘Book-hunger in Salonika’, Shafquat Towheed examines the record of a single reader in a specific and fairly static frontline, and argues that in the case of the Salonika campaign, reading communities emerged in close proximity to existing centres of print culture. The focus of this essay moves from the general to the particular, from the scoping of large datasets, to the analyses of identified readers within a specific geographical and temporal space. The authors engage with the wider issues and problems of recovering, interpreting, visualizing, narrating, and representing readers in the First World War

Canada and the First World War: A Canadian War Museum Internet Exhibition

Canada and the First World War is the largest internet resource ever developed by the Canadian War Museum. The goal of this site is to provide visitors across the country and around the world with the most comprehensive and authoritative site for the history of Canada and Canadians in the First World War. Like our permanent galleries, the site’s goal is to tell the story of Canada’s role in the First World War at the international, national, and personal levels. While the CWM’s collection dictated, to some degree, the extent of the storyline, this will be an important site for researchers, students, and the interested public

War on scale : models for the First World War battlefront

This essay traces the evolution and use of military scale models during the First World War. The application of such models by all belligerents is characterized by an enormous diversity in scale, context, construction method and purpose. Between the two extremes of a full scale replica of the Paris agglomeration and the tiny boxed miniature of a POW prison cell, a whole range of military models can be distinguished. On one hand, the model production can be considered part of a long tradition of military terrain modeling, as is evident in the examples of relief maps and training models. On the other hand, the rapidly changing technological and tactical developments during the Great War –such as strategic aerial bombing, camouflage and submarine warfare—require the creation of new types of scale models. During the last stages of the war, the encapsulation of the model as research object in a laboratory, looked at through optical devices and studied through model photography, demonstrates how this technological progress paves the way for a scientific approach towards warfare. The evolution of the models thus illustrates how war was waged on a variety of scales and that its theatre was far from limited to the battlefield itself

John Terrane: A Study of a First World War Revisionist

Of all the British military historians who started writing about the First World War during the boom of the sixties, perhaps no one has had greater influence or generated more controversy than John Alfred Terraine. As G.F. Elliot wrote in a 1965 review, John Terraine is one of the younger generation of British military analysts who are now proving, with brilliance and vigour, the value of the long view in putting World War I in proper perspective. It is this idea of perspective, trying to bring balance to the historical arguments concerning the British contribution to the First World War, that drove John Terraine in all his work. Terraine\u27s nine books on the British Expeditionary Force challenged the comfortable mainstream theories and assumptions, defended the generals, and debunked the myths. His opinions gave him both notoreity and influence

The First World War between Memory and History: A Conference Retrospective

Long after the guns of the First World War went silent on 11 November 1918, the war continues to spark debate. The many points of contention were on full display at the “From Memory to History” conference, hosted by Western University in London, Ontario, over three days in November 2011. Scholars and enthusiasts from around the world gathered to share, debate, and ultimately demonstrate that the war’s many legacies are still open to interpretation, even as the centenary of the war’s outbreak approaches. Perhaps the most crucial lesson learned is that both memory and history are malleable concepts, prone to revision, and there are numerous narratives in many disciplines that remain untold, even with an event as well-documented as the First World War

Learning the Fighting Game: Black Americans and the First World War

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 immediately after the war. This study explorers early NAACP activism, the Garveyite movement, and the early foundations of the Civil Rights Movement

The First World War Letters of H.J.C. Peirs: A Digital History

This poster provides a high-level overview of The First World War Letters of H.J.C. Peirs: A Digital History project, giving information on its creation, the collection of letters, how it has used digital mapping, and its use in the classroom