11 research outputs found
Believing the unbelievable: the myth of Russians 'with snow on their boots' in the United Kingdom, 1914
PublishedArticleâThis is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Cultural and Social History on1 May 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/ 10.2752/147800414X13802176314528.âIn the opening months of the First World War, a rumour spread across the United Kingdom that Russian soldiers â identified by the âsnow on their bootsâ â had landed in Scotland en route to the Western Front. Despite being relegated to historyâs footnotes as a comical but meaningless episode, this article takes the rumour seriously. Unconcerned with questions of âtruthâ (the rumour was dismissed as fantastical by late October 1914), I will argue that the real value of this story is in what it reveals about British society at the outbreak of war. The rumour emerged as the British Expeditionary Force entered its first big test of the Great War â the battle of Mons â which would result in Germanyâs first great victory and resulting in thousands of casualties. As such the rumour can be interpreted as a form of âsecular apparitionâ bringing consolation to many. It was one of the ways ordinary people made sense of their newly threatening world
Norman Lindsay and the âAsianisationâ of the German Soldier in Australia during the First World War
Union disaffection and social identity: democracy as a source of union revitalization
This article examines union members' evaluation of the relevance of unions and their identification with a traditional collective value frame for union action. It seeks to take account of the impact of increasing labor market heterogeneity, declining instrumentality, and the behavior of unions and employers. Using Canadian data gathered from individual union members and their local union leaders, the study finds that new labor market identities are notlinked to weaker belief in the relevance of unions but are associated with weaker identification with the traditional value frame. Although declining instrumentality and hostile employer behavior are associated with greater identification with traditional value frames, greater union democracy is associated with less membership disaffection on both the relevance of unions and their collective modes of action. Union democracy is therefore found to be a key tool to address membership disaffection and to generate collective identities for a renewed union project