Review of “Material Traces of War: Stories of Canadian Women and Conflict, 1914- 1945” by Stacey Barker, Krista Cooke and Molly McCullough

Review of Material Traces of War: Stories of Canadian Women and Conflict, 1914- 1945 by Stacey Barker, Krista Cooke and Molly McCullough

Belonging to the Imperial Nation: Rethinking the History of the First World War in Britain and Its Empire

In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the First World War in 2014–18, the British government set aside funds for a range of commemorative activities. These included a number of “engagement centres” that aimed to bring together academics and local community members in addition to providing separate arts-related programming.1 The Imperial War Museum reworked its main First World War galleries, which opened with great fanfare at the centenary’s start. This denotes a kind of publicly sanctioned interest in a war that Britain had won, after all, but that popular memory had enshrined as something quite different, something that required solemn reflection about the costs of war and reckoning of sacrifices rather than celebrations of victory and service.

Fall 2013 Newsletter of the Sarah Isom Center

The official newsletter of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/isom_report/1010/thumbnail.jp

The Isom Report - Fall 2016

The official newsletter of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/isom_report/1003/thumbnail.jp

At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz

Although the Blitz has come to symbolize the experience of civilians under attack, Germany first launched air raids on Britain at the end of 1914 and continued them during the First World War. With the advent of air warfare, civilians far removed from traditional battle zones became a direct target of war rather than a group shielded from its impact. This is a study of how British civilians experienced and came to terms with aerial warfare during the First and Second World Wars. Memories of the World War I bombings shaped British responses to the various real and imagined war threats of the 1920s and 1930s, including the bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War and, ultimately, the Blitz itself. The processes by which different constituent bodies of the British nation responded to the arrival of air power reveal the particular role that gender played in defining civilian participation in modern war.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/libarts_book/1026/thumbnail.jp

International or transnational?: humanitarian action during the First World War

To what extent was a nascent international humanitarian sphere challenged by the rise of nationalist aid efforts during the First World War? How did wartime nationalisms influence humanitarian mobilisation? Taking the aid effort to prisoners of war as its central case study, this article contends that the similar evolution of national wartime charities in the different belligerent states was due to a transnational learning process, based on nationalism and reciprocity dynamics, rather than simply a manifestation of a shared culture of international humanitarianism. Comparing similar national aid actors in different countries highlights the fact that the national aid response did not develop solely as a result of 'international' norms, but often on the basis of other motivations, predominantly the desire to help the war effort. This transnational learning process has been identified in some historiographical analysis as evidence for the existence of shared international humanitarian norms within belligerent countries; in fact it is also evidence that certain welfare sectors - for example, registration of the missing and dead, military aid bureaucracies or local scouting or Red Cross associations - evolved similarly in response to the logistical challenges created by total war. This paper contends that the nationalist-orientated evolution of charity at the local level during the war created increasing tensions between the national and international humanitarian spheres and it argues that it is necessary to explore this contested evolution of wartime charity in order to understand the complex nature of wartime mobilisation