Chapter Eight. Newcomers and World War II

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War

Physical Education, Exercise, Fitness and Sports: Early PM&R Leaders Build a Strong Foundation

War is the most wrenching of all political transitions. From peace to war and from war to peace this double movement can have vast geopolitical, ideological and social consequences. The labels we apply to such transitions are as important as the events themselves. Sometimes these concepts are developed retrospectively; often they are taken from the vocabulary of the time. But the labels are rarely neutral, either in their political bias or their analytical implications. Although as historians we now live in an Age of Discourse, scholars have been selective about the concepts they choose to scrutinize as historical artifacts. One major blind spot is the two 'world wars'. It is now almost impossible to imagine the twentieth century without the categories of 'the first world war' and 'the second world war'. Together they define the first half of the century with 'pre-war' and 'inter-war' eras as punctuation marks. They also conjure up the ultimate horror world war three lurid imaginings of which helped to prevent the Cold War from turning hot. Yet, use of the term 'world war' for these conflicts was by no means axiomatic. While some countries applied this label to the war of 1914-18, others did not. Something like consensus only developed in the 1940s. In conceptual terms, therefore, it took the 'second world war' to create the first. But use of the latter term was by no means a foregone conclusion. As we shall see, only in 1948 did the British government formally decide that the country had just been fighting the 'second world war'. Other major belligerents, notably the Soviet Union, China and Japan, continued to use quite different language. To a large extent, the discourse of world war was a German and American construction foreshadowed in their conflict of 1917-18 and its aftermath, and then confirmed in the ideological struggle between Roosevelt and Hitler in 1939-41. As such, it may be understood as both product and procreator of globalization. These terminological issues have attracted surprisingly little attention from scholars. Most histories of the two great conflicts usually take their titles for granted.1 In this short article I can only be suggestive raising questions

This special issue on war writing consists of articles based on presentations at the War in Estonian Culture, Literature and History conference held 15–16 December 2022 at the Estonian Literary Museum. The conference focused on the question of the lasting influence and meaning of the two world wars in Estonian culture, literature and history writing. These questions were underscored by the Russian–Ukrainian war which broke out in February 2022 and which actualised memory of the Second World War, the commemoration of its victims, and a weighing of the consequences, influence and meanings of the war for different memory communities. Anniversaries of historical events that have changed world history call for new scholarly perspectives on the past. Thus, in recent years, in connection with the 100th anniversary of the First World War, studies of related topics have become more frequent, including in Estonia. The article collection The First World War in Estonian Culture (2015) is the first step toward an investigation of the representations of the First World War in Estonian culture. In these studies, diaries and letters have particular value. Surviving private letters permit a better understanding of this great war and its meaning for Estonians mobilised for it. From the perspective of Estonian history, the most significant result of the First World War was the disintegration of the Russian Empire, which made possible the birth of Estonia – colonised for centuries –, as an independent state. Estonia was one of the nation-states that emerged from the disintegration of empires. In 2018, based on the Estonian experience and in an international framework, Anu Raudsepp and Tõnu Tannberg presented our perspective on the influence of the First World War on the creation of nation-states and resultant challenges to the writing of history textbooks. Though the independent Estonian republic was proclaimed on 24 February 1918, the declaration was followed by German occupation in 1918 and the defence of Estonia’s freedom against Soviet Russia in the War of Independence of 1918–1920. The 100th anniversary of the War of Independence also inspired new scholarly research. In 2019 Tõnu Tannberg edited a collection of articles entitled The Many Faces of the War of Independence. The 100th anniversary of the Tartu peace treaty was marked in 2020 by the publication of collective research by historians in a two-volume magisterial work on the history of the War of Independence. The Second World War has been deemed the largest catastrophe in history caused by human hands, during which 60 or 70 million people perished and the destruction changed cityscapes and landscapes beyond recognition. The war reached Estonia in summer 1941 when Soviet occupation was replaced by German occupation. The war years have been represented in the works both of exile writers and writers who remained in Estonia after the war. In Estonian war literature, war poetry has a clear profile, authored by writers who fought in the Second World War on the German side and fled Estonia during the war: Arved Viirlaid, Harri Asi, Kalju Ahven, Einar Sanden, Jyri Kork, Tiit Lehtmets and Eduard Krants. Themes related to war are reflected in the prose of Arved Viirlaid, Ilmar Talve, Ilmar Jaks, Harri Asi, Heino Susi and Agu Kask. Arved Viirlaid’s central work Graves without Crosses I–II (1991, 2009, 2015) is the most popular and most frequently translated work representing the Second World War in Estonian literature. The Tartu cycle by Bernard Kangro and autobiographical short stories by Gunnar Neeme are also remarkable. In Soviet Estonian literature the representation of the Second World War was ideologically constrained; but nevertheless two noteworthy autobiographical war novels were published in the 1970s: Ülo Tuulik’s documentary novel In the Path of War in 1974 (unabridged version 2010) and Juhan Peegel’s I Fell in the First Summer of War in 1979. In addition to belles lettres our historical memory is shaped by autobiographical texts such as memoirs, life stories, autobiographies, letters and diaries, which enable the reader to gain insight into the changes that war brought to everyday life and how people learned to adjust to them. If the memoirs of former combatants have evinced the avoidance of personal points of view and preferences for the matter-of-fact style of reportage, the memoirs and other autobiographical texts of civilians are dominated by the judgments, moods and feelings of the writer as a person. Historical writing on the Second World War is diverse. If from the perspective of western European countries, the main embodiment of evil was Hitler, the situation was much more complicated for eastern European countries. Lack of knowledge of acts of violence committed during the Second World War and later repressions in the countries of eastern Europe and the disregard for international war law by Germany and the Soviet Union have had a significant impact on how the Second World War has been handled in research by historians in Europe and the United States. In most research on the Second World War matters related to the Baltic States are regarded as unimportant compared to the larger processes that took place. Nevertheless, the Baltic states were strategically important both for Hitler’s Germany and the Soviet Union, making the Baltic question a bone of contention among the allied countries. Over time events that happened in eastern European countries during the Second World War have come increasingly to the fore in scholarly accounts with radically different viewpoints: Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (2010) by Timothy Snyder, Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe (2011) by Norman Davies, Soldiers of Memory: Second World War and its Aftermath in Estonian Post-Soviet Life Stories (2011, ed. by Ene Kõresaar). The special issue on war writing contains eight articles on the topic of war, one article on a free topic, a series of translations from the publishing house Loodus, and the archival discovery section in which a letter from the First World War is discussed.

This article, using open historical data, attempts to analyze the participation of Soviet border troops in the Great Patriotic War. Using actor-based and managerial approaches, we identify the specifics of border guard combat training, which allowed them to become one of the elite branches of the USSR Armed Forces. Limited information complicates a sociological analysis of this professional group, as much data on the activities of border guards during this period remains unavailable. Our analysis draws on research by historians and military scholars, as well as memoirs by prominent military personnel, publications by amateur historians, and specialized websites devoted to the Great Patriotic War in general and the contribution of border troops in particular. These factors may have contributed to the limited coverage in the academic literature of border guards' activities during the Great War, their heroism, dedication, and professionalism, which was honed even in peacetime. The analysis revealed factors confirming that Soviet border guards were not only representatives of the government but also actively participated in shaping the sociocultural environment in their areas of service. Moreover, the linear border protection system that existed during the Soviet era and the first decade of the post-Soviet era entailed a unified structure of border districts and their subdivisions. However, the regional diversity of our country (socioeconomic, cultural, ethnic, and geographic) necessitated diversifying the approaches used by border guards, both in the performance of their professional duties and in their interactions with the local population. With proper outreach, the local population was actively engaged in cooperation during peacetime, and during the Great Patriotic War, they participated alongside border guards in partisan and sabotage and reconnaissance operations.

This article discusses the widening of the First World War from a European war to a global war and what that meant for the participants. Today's politicians, who talk (albeit tautologically) of an ‘increasingly globalized world’, forget how already ‘globalized’ the world seemed in 1914, especially if you happened to live in London. The fact that the First World War was a global war was itself the product of a global order, shaped by the European great powers and held together by an embryonic economic system. The title ‘the world war’ was a statement about its importance, not a statement about its geographical scale. And yet the French and British official histories, unlike the German, did not use ‘world war’ in their titles, any more than they had used the phrase during the war itself. They preferred the title ‘the Great War’, and in English the war only became widely known as the First World War after 1945, in other words after there had been a Second World War. The article explores the implications of the title ‘the Great War’ and the idea that the war of 1914–1918 was a great European war (a name also used in Britain, especially during the war itself). The article also examines the role of finances in the widening of the war and the global economy during a worldwide conflict. It also discusses the role of empires in the expanding war. However, the financial situation of participants, including those who entered the war at a later date, and the desire for empire were not the only factors in the creation of a global conflict. Decisions made in the interest of individual nations also had an effect on the widening of the war from a regional dispute. The corollary of the article's argument, that the First World War was in some respects an aggregation of regional conflicts, was that the war would not simply end when the European war ended. All that was agreed on 11 November 1918 was the surrender of Germany, largely on terms which reflected the situation within Europe and specifically on the western front. Only here did the guns fell silent at 11am on that day. However, so imperative were the immediate demands of the conflict that there was scant consideration of their long-term effects. Some of the consequences of the fact that the First World War was waged as a global war remained with Europe throughout the Cold War, and others remain in the Middle East to this day.

Summary The notion of a (socio-) metabolic transition has been used todescribe fundamental changes in socioeconomic energy andmaterial use during industrialization. During the last century,Japandevelopedfromalargelyagrarianeconomytooneoftheworld’s leading industrial nations. It is one of the few industrialcountries that has experienced prolonged dematerializationand recently has adopted a rigorous resource policy. This arti-cle investigates changes in Japan’s metabolism during industri-alization on the basis of a material flow account for the periodfrom 1878 to 2005. It presents annual data for material ex-traction, trade, and domestic consumption by major materialgroup and explores the relations among population growth,economic development, and material (and energy) use. Dur-ing the observed period, the size of Japan’s metabolism grewby a factor of 40, and the share of mineral and fossil materialsin domestic material consumption (DMC) grew to more than90%. Much of the growth in the Japanese metabolism wasbased on imported materials and occurred in only 20 yearsafter World War II (WWII), when Japan rapidly built up largestocks of built infrastructure, developed heavy industry, andadopted patterns of mass production and consumption. Thesurge in material use came to an abrupt halt with the firstoil crisis, however. Material use stabilized, and the economyeventually began to dematerialize. Although gross domesticproduct (GDP) grew much faster than material use, improve-mentsinmaterialintensityarearelativelyrecentphenomenon.Japanemergesasarolemodelforthemetabolictransitionbutis also exceptional in many ways.www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jie

Teesid: Sõjakäsitlus tavateadvuses on paljukihiline: selles on nii isikliku/perekondliku kogemuse elemente kui ka kollektiivsete ajalookujutluste ühtlustavaid mõjusid. Esimene maailmasõda on meist ajas sellisel kaugusel, kus see on muundunud sündmuse esialgsest kommunikatiivse mälu vormis meenutamisest institutsionaliseeritud kultuurimälu osaks. 2014. aastal viidi kahekümnes Euroopa riigis läbi üliõpilaste küsitlus, selgitamaks tänapäeva noorte kollektiivseid kujutlusi Esimesest maailmasõjast. Artiklis kirjeldame Eesti noorte Esimese maailmasõjaga seotud arusaamu ja võrdleme neid teistes Euroopa riikides elavate noorte arusaamadega. Eraldi analüüsime vastuseid küsimusele „Mida saame õppida Esimese maailmasõja kogemusest?“. Lay understanding of war is multi-layered containing elements of personal or family experience as well as the unifying effects of collective memory (representations). The First World War is at such a distance from us that a change in the form of collective historical representation has taken place, from the initial commemoration of the event in the form of communicative memory to part of institutionalised cultural memory (Assmann 2008). According to today’s view, the First World War is second most important global historical event (Liu et al. 2005). In 2014, one hundred years after the beginning of the First World War, a survey of students was conducted in twenty European countries (within the framework of COST Action IS1205 Social Psychological Dynamics of Historical Representations in the Enlarged European Union) to investigate the commonalities and differences in social representations of the War among young Europeans. Young people were asked about their factual knowledge of the War, their family war experiences, feelings related to the War, and more general interpretations of the war such as what they considered the main causes of the War to be, who was attributed the responsibility for the outbreak of the War, how they evaluate the violence of the different parties, how they perceive the distribution of the roles of aggressor and victim, etc. Background characteristics included cultural and national identity, anti-war attitudes, etc. In Estonia, the survey was conducted in both Estonian and Russian. In the article, we describe the main results of these studies. Previous analysis found that Europeans share a common representation of the causes of the First World War, although young people in Western and Eastern European countries have different interpretative frameworks when thinking about this war (Bouchat et al. 2019a; Pawliczek 2014). While in Western Europe it is the tragic Great War, with a definite beginning and end, in Eastern Europe there is not such a clear collective perception. The First World War led to various other wars in these countries, as a result of which empires fell apart and many small countries, including Estonia, gained independence, paradoxically a positive consequence of the War for these nations. Awareness of family or national war victimhood is linked to anti-war attitudes today; for more pacifist young people the First World War is associated with real and emotional human suffering, while less pacifist young people think more abstractly about the geopolitical results of the War (Bouchat et al. 2019b). Young people growing up in peacetime Europe after the Second World War have generally been free from militaristic propaganda. There has been a purposeful attempt to shape young people’s approach to history in schools, the trend of which in most European countries has been to reconcile former enemies (Rosoux et al. 2019). The survey discussed in the article showed considerable commonality and consensus in the representation of the First World War. The descendants of the former hostile parties evaluate this war in the same way, can reproduce the same facts, events, and characters, and interpret the causes and consequences of the war similarly. Looking back, young people primarily see the futility of War and the unnecessary human suffering. Thus, pacifism as one of the cultural consequences of the War is a viable common sense way of thinking today. Analysing Estonian war literature, Jaan Undusk (2016) has come to the conclusion that ‘passive pacifism’ and indifference to war are characteristic of Estonians. Unlike the communicative memory of the Second World War, where former intergroup enmity is still alive at times, in the collective cultural memory of the First World War, emotionality has faded and transformed; for example former war excitement or rage has become sadness and grief. Instead of enmity between countries and peoples, one sees rather a social conflict between greedy and reckless elites and ordinary people sacrificed for their interests (Bouchat et al. 2019a). One hundred years later, the First World War appears to the youth of Europe as a warning, a negative symbol that is contrasted with united Europe as a peace project (Bouchat et al. 2023). In this way, history has been transformed into a shared symbolic resource, war in collective memory acting as a supporter of international peace. Young people have developed a homogeneous anti-war-oriented collective image of the First World War. Estonian youth’s factual knowledge of the First World War was surprisingly good, considering the marginality of this war from the point of view of Estonian identity or current inter-group relations: Estonians do not feel like victims or war criminals, they do not feel the desire for revenge, there is no need to forgive anyone or demand an apology from anyone. We separately analysed Estonian young people’s answers to the question "What can we learn from the experience of the First World War?" Generalising the answers, we can conclude that most young people took a progressive, linear view of history, according to which war is an anomaly, a disease of society that can and should be prevented. The lessons of the First World War were primarily perceived as ways of preventing future conflict and avoiding the mistakes made in the past, both at the level of individuals, social groups (the elite), and society as a whole. A stable and peaceful world was perceived as the norm.

1. Introduction Ashley Jackson and James E. Kitchen 2. The First World War as a global war Hew Strachan 3. Sir Charles Lucas and The Empire at War Ashley Jackson Part I: War on Imperial Frontiers 4. South Africa and World War I N.G. Garson 5. Spoils of war: Sub-imperial collaboration in South West Africa and New Guinea, 1914-20 Colin Newbury 6. 'Khaki crusaders': crusading rhetoric and the British Imperial soldier during the Egypt and Palestine campaigns, 1916-18 James E. Kitchen 7. From defeat to victory: logistics of the campaign in Mesopotamia, 1914-1918 Kaushik Roy 8. British Understandings of the Sanussiyya Sufi Order's Jihad against Egypt, 1915-17 John Slight 9. Marching to the Beat of an Imperial Drum: Contextualising Australia's Military Effort During the First World War Rhys Crawley Part II: Home Fronts 10. Cyprus's Non-military Contribution to the Allied War Effort during World War I Antigone Heraclidou 11. African agency and cultural initiatives in the British Imperial military and labor recruitment drives in the Gold Coast (colonial Ghana) during the First World War Kwabena O. Akurang-Parry 12. Norman Lindsay and the 'Asianisation' of the German Soldier in Australia during the First World War Emily Robertson 13. War opinion in South Africa, 1914 Bill Nasson 14. The War Munitions Supply Company of Western Australia and the Popular Movement to Manufacture Artillery Ammunition in the British Empire in the First World War John S. Connor 15. The expatriate firms and the Colonial economy of Nigeria in the First World War Peter J. Yearwood 16. The influence of racial attitudes on British policy towards India during the First World War Gregory Martin 17. William Morris Hughes, Empire and Nationalism: The Legacy of the First World War James Cotton Part III: Soldiers and Fighting Fronts 18. 'You will not be going to this war': the rejected volunteers of the First Contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force Nic Clarke 19. Dominion Cartoon Satire as Trench Culture Narratives: Complaints, Endurance and Stoicism Jane Chapman and Dan Ellin 20. 'Accurate to the Point of Mania': Eyewitness Testimony and Memory Making in Australia's Official Paintings of the First World War Margaret Hutchison 21. Informing the enemy: Australian prisoners and German intelligence on the Western Front, 1916-1918 Aaron Pegram 22. The Prisoner Dilemma: Britain, Germany, and the Repatriation of Indian Prisoners of War Andrew Tait Jarboe 23. 'All in the Same Uniform'? The Participation of Black Colonial Residents in the British Armed Forces in the First World War Jacqueline Jenkinson 24. Australian and New Zealand fathers and sons during the Great War: expanding the histories of families at war Kathryn M. Hunter 25. Loss and Longing: Emotional Responses to West Indian Soldiers during the First World War Richard Smith 26. Conclusion: The First World War Centenary in the UK: 'A Truly National Commemoration'? Andrew Mycock

Prejudice against Jews was part of the political, cultural, economic and social landscape in the Union of South Africa long before Nazism made inroads into the country during the 1930s, at which stage Jews constituted approximately 4.5% of the country’s white or European population. Racial discrimination in a country with diversified racial elements and intense political complexities was synonymous with life in the Union long before Apartheid, with its strictly enforced legal, political and economic segregation, became the country’s official policy with the accession to power of the National Party under Prime Minister Dr Daniel François Malan in May 1948. Although the Jews, while maintaining their own sub-cultural identity, were classified within the country’s racial hierarchy as part of the privileged white minority, the emergence of recurrent anti-Jewish stereotypes and themes became manifest in a country permeated by the ideology of race and white superiority. This was exacerbated by the growth of a powerful Afrikaner nationalist movement, underpinned by conservative Calvinist theology. Fear of Communism in the aftermath of the 1917 Russian Revolution and the First World War; disquiet over the arrival of what was seen as disproportionately large numbers of Jewish immigrants during the 1920s; and the effects of the severe world-wide economic depression after the Wall Street stock market crash in October 1929, set the scene for an unprecedented period of antisemitic activity. This was reflected, in part, in legislation aimed at curbing Jewish immigration and the emergence of several antisemitic movements. This dissertation, which covers the period between the First and Second World Wars, explores the perception that South African antisemitism was a foreign import. Based on an examination of archival sources and contemporary publications, the study concludes that prejudice against the Jews was evident in the weltanschauung of right-wing and extremist Afrikaner nationalists long before the influence of Nazism became apparent and was not dependent on the influence of Nazi propagandists in the country. Aggressive Afrikaner nationalism along with economic antisemitism characterised the years between the end of the Great Depression and the outbreak of the Second World War. Antisemitism became a significant issue in elections and towards the end of the 1930s opposition to Jewish immigration was included as an official plank in the political platform of the opposition Purified National Party. Jews were also banned from party membership in the Transvaal, where most Jews resided. Attempts by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and its affiliates together with several non-Jewish organisations to counter the increasing influence of antisemitism, principally among the Right and Radical Right in the ranks of the Afrikaner nationalists, also marked the inter bellum period on which this study focuses.

The history of biological warfare: Human experimentation, modern nightmares and lone madmen in the twentieth century

Валентина Клюнтер Меліорація на Поліссі (село Секунь) Автор розповідає про осушувальну меліорацію -одну із структурних видів гідромеліорації, котру почали проводити на Поліссі у Волинської губернії наприкінці ХІХ століття.Меліорація, що передувала Першій світовій війні, носила характер каналізації боліт і проявлялася в будівництві каналів: в одних випадках для сплаву лісу, в інших -для розвитку луківництватна болотах.Споруди на каналах, які використовувалися для сплаву лісу, під час Першої світової та Громадянської воєн булі зруйновани і спалені, неглибока мережа каналів на болотах замулилася і втратила свою осушувальну дію.Осушувальні меліорації в межах Малого Полісся спричинили трансформацію ґрунтів у протилежних напрямах.За умов високої культури осушуваного землеробства вони трансформувалися в осушені окультурені ґрунти, а за умов низької культури осушуваного землеробства з численними порушеннями рекомендованих агромеліоративних заходів -в осушені деградовані ґрунти.Згадано село Секунь і події від часів російського царату і до сучасності.Підкреслено, що меліорація давала поштовх економічному життю краю, сприяла запровадженню нових культур і технологій.Вказано, що в меліорації земель Полісся тричі спостерігалися циклічні підйоми й спади.Перші два цикли повязані з зовнішнім факторамисвітовими війнами, а третій -внутрішній -з переходом на ринкову систему господарювання.Кожен цикл завершувався занепадом осушувальних меліорацій.Таким чином, аналізуючи багаторічну історію вивчення гідроморфних грунтів Волині виділено найважливіші результати.З огляду на неоднозначні висновки дощо меліорації на Поліссі сучасних дослідників її вивчення є надактуальним завданням.Ключові слова:

IntroductionThey shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old; Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.Recited at many Anzac and Remembrance Day services, ‘The Ode’, an excerpt from a poem by Laurence Binyon, speaks of a timelessness within the inexorable march of time. When we memorialise those for whom time no longer matters, time stands still. Whether those who died in service of their country have finally “beaten time” or been forced to acknowledge that “their time on earth was up”, depends on your preference for clichés. Time and death are natural bedfellows. War memorials, be they physical or digital, declare a commitment to “remember them”. This article will compare and contrast the purpose of, and community response to, virtual and physical war memorials. It will examine whether virtual war memorials are a sign of the times – a natural response to the internet era. If, as Marshall McLuhan says, the medium is the message, what experiences do we gain and lose through online war memorials?Physical War MemorialsDuring and immediately after the First World War, physical war memorials were built in almost every city, town and village of the Allied countries involved in the war. They served many purposes. One of the roles of physical war memorials was to keep the impact of war at the centre of a town’s consciousness. In a regional centre like Bathurst, in New South Wales, the town appears to be built around the memorial – the court, council chambers, library, churches and pubs gather around the war memorials.Similarly, in small towns such as Bega, Picton and Kiama, war memorial arches form a gateway to the town centre. It is an architectural signal that you are entering a community that has known pain, death and immense loss. Time has passed, but the names of the men and women who served remain etched in stone: “lest we forget”.The names are listed in a democratic fashion: usually in alphabetical order without their rank. However, including all those who offered their service to “God, King and Country” (not just those who died) also had a more sinister and divisive effect. It reminded communities of those “eligibles” in their midst whom some regarded as “shirkers”, even if they were conscientious objectors or needed to stay and continue vital industries, like farming (Inglis & Phillips 186).Ken Inglis (97) estimated that every second Australian family was in mourning after the Great War. Jay Winter (Sites 2) goes further arguing that “almost every family” in the British Commonwealth was grieving, either for a relative; or for a friend, work colleague, neighbour or lover. Nations were traumatised. Physical war memorials provided a focal point for that universal grief. They signalled, through their prominence in the landscape or dominance of a hilltop, that it was acceptable to grieve. Mourners were encouraged to gather around the memorial in a public place, particularly on Anzac Day and Remembrance Day each year. Grief was seen, observed, respected.Such was the industrial carnage of the Western Front, that about one third of Australia and New Zealand’s fatal casualties were not brought home. Families lost a family member, body and soul, in the Great War. For those people who subscribed to a Victorian view of death, who needed a body to grieve over, the war memorial took on the role of a gravesite and became a place where people would place a sprig of wattle, poke a poppy into the crevice beside a name, or simply touch the letters etched or embossed in the stone (Winter, Experience 206). As Ken Inglis states: “the statue on its pedestal does stand for each dead man whose body, identified or missing, intact or dispersed, had not been returned” to his home town (11).Physical war memorials were also a place where women could forge new identities over time. Women accepted, or claimed their status as war widows, grieving mothers or bereft fiancés, while at the same time coming to terms with their loss. As Joy Damousi writes: “mourning of wartime loss involved a process of sustaining both a continuity with, and a detachment from, a lost soldier” (1). Thus, physical war memorials were transitional, liminal spaces.Jay Winter (Sites 85) believes that physical war memorials were places to both honour and mourn the dead, wounded, missing and shell-shocked. These dual functions of both esteeming and grieving those who served was reinforced at ceremonies, such as Anzac or Remembrance Day.As Joy Damousi (156) and Ken Inglis (457, 463) point out, war memorials in Australia are rarely sites of protest, either for war widows or veterans campaigning for a better pension, or peace activists who opposed militarism. When they are used in this way, it makes headlines in the news (Legge). They are seldom used to highlight the tragedy, inhumanity or futility of war. The exception to this, were the protests against the Vietnam War.The physical war memorials which mushroomed in Australian country towns and cities after the First World War captured and claimed those cataclysmic four years for the families and communities who were devastated by the war. They provided a place to both honour and mourn those who served, not just once, but for as long as the memorial remained. They were also a place of pilgrimage, particularly for families who did not have a grave to visit and a focal point for the annual rituals of remembrance.However, over the past 100 years, some unmaintained physical war memorials are beginning to look like untended graves. They have become obstacles rather than sentinels in the landscape. Laurence Aberhart’s haunting photographs show that memorials in places like Dorrigo in rural New South Wales “go largely unnoticed year-round, encroached on by street signage and suburbia” (Lakin 49). Have physical war memorials largely fulfilled their purpose and are they becoming obsolete? Perhaps they have been supplanted by the gathering space of the 21st century: the Internet.Digital War MemorialsThe centenary of the Great War heralded a mushrooming of virtual war memorials. Online First World War memorials focus on collecting and amassing information that commemorates individuals. They are able to include far more information than will fit on a physical war memorial. They encourage users to search the digitised records that are available on the site and create profiles of people who served. While they deal in records from the past, they are very much about the present: the user experience and their connection to their ancestors who served.The Imperial War Museum’s website Lives of the First World War asks users to “help us build the permanent digital memorial to all who contributed during the First World War”. This request deserves scrutiny. Firstly, “permanent” – is this possible in the digital age? When the head of Google, Vint Cerf, disclosed in 2015 that software programming wizards were still grappling with how to create digital formats that can be accessed in 10, 100 or a 1000 years’ time; and recommended that we print out our precious digital data and store it in hard copy or risk losing it forever; then it appears that online permanency is a mirage.Secondly, “all who contributed” – the website administrators informed me that “all” currently includes people who served with Canada and Britain but the intention is to include other Commonwealth nations. It seems that the former British Empire “owns” the First World War – non-allied, non-Commonwealth nations that contributed to the First World War will not be included. One hundred years on, have we really made peace with Germany and Turkey? The armistice has not yet spread to the digital war memorial. The Lives of the First world War website missed an opportunity to be leaders in online trans-national memorialisation.Discovering Anzacs, a website built by the National Archives of Australia and Archives New Zealand, is a little more subdued and honest, as visitors are invited to “enhance a profile dedicated to the wartime journey of someone who served”.Physical and online war memorials can work in tandem. In 2015, the Supreme Court of Victoria created a website that provides background information on the military service of the 159 members of the legal profession who are named on their Memorial board. This is an excellent example of a digital medium expanding on and reinvigorating a physical memorial.It is noteworthy that all of these online memorial websites commemorate those who served in the First World War, and sometimes the Boer or South African War. There is no space for remembering those who served or died in more recent wars like Afghanistan or Iraq. James Brown and others discuss how the cult of Anzac is overshadowing the service and sacrifices of the men and women who have been to more recent wars. The proximity of their service mitigates against its recognition – it is too close for comfortable, detached remembrance.Complementary But Not ExclusiveA comparison of their functions indicates that online memorials which focus on the First World War complement, but will never replace the role of physical war memorials. As discussed, physical war memorials were sites for grieving, pilgrimage and collectively honouring the men and women who served and died. Online websites which allow users to upload scanned documents and photographs; transcribe diary entries or letters; post tribute poems, songs or video clips; and provide links to other relevant records online are neither places of pilgrimage nor sites for grieving. They are about remembrance, not memory (Scates, “Finding” 221).Ken Inglis describes physical war memorials as “bearers of collective memory” (7). In a sense, online war memorials are keepers of individual, user-enhanced archival records. It can be argued that online memorials to the First World War tap into the desire for hero-worship, the boom in family history re

Following the global upsurge in conflict in the late 1980s and early 1990s, no confrontation turned out to be more devastating than the Great African War, which led to mass excess mortality with estimates ranging between 2.7 million and 5.4 million people dead in the 1998–2007 period. Unlike the First World War, with which it is often compared because of the multitude of states which battled each other on Congolese territory, Africa’s Great War cannot be defined by unambiguous start and end dates. The violence since the 1990s is perhaps more usefully thought of in analogy with Europe’s Thirty Years’ War in the 17th century or, as some historians argue, the cataclysmic conflict centered on Eurasia that encompassed both World Wars, separated only by a failing truce between 1919 and 1937. With not only alliances changing regularly in the Great African War but also a whole cast of participants joining and leaving the battlefield and the frontlines gradually blurring to the point of becoming virtually indefinable, many scholars prefer using “Congo Wars” to refer to a series of regularly interlinked but sometimes also clearly distinct conflicts—local, national, regional—waged on the territory of what was formerly known as Zaire and now as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Thus, while a narrow definition separates out a “First Congo War” (beginning in September or October 1996 [once again, depending on one’s definition!] and ending on 17 May 1997) from the “Second Congo War” (the Great African War “proper,” from 2 August 1998 to 17 December 2002), other perspectives date the start of the conflict(s) back to the Rwandan genocide and argue that the Congo Wars, in parts of the territory like North and South Kivu and Ituri, are still ongoing. This bibliography takes a relatively expansive view of the conflagration, focusing publications analyzing the central events between 1996 and 2002, but acknowledging the impressive body of scholarship that not only scrutinizes the consequences of six years of catastrophic violence but also traces ongoing localized and/or transnational conflict in the DRC. At the time of writing (summer 2019), some optimism is taking hold after the peaceful (if controversial) handover of presidential power by Joseph Kabila to Felix Tshisekedi in January 2019 following elections in December 2018; violent confrontations among militias and between rebel groups, the MONUC/MONUSCO UN force, and the state still occur regularly, but not since 2013 have insurgents (i.e., the M23 rebellion) credibly threatened to take over an entire province, let alone seek to oust the president in Kinshasa: progress by Congolese standards. Although foreign actors still meddle in Congo’s politics, they do not do so as overtly and probably also not as profusely and effectively in the 2000s. The task will fall to historians a generation from now to assess whether the Congo Wars really have been coming to an end, twenty-five years after they began raging, or whether the current moment merely turned out to be a relatively peaceful interlude separating one set of violent outbursts from another.

Redesigning History in Contemporary Russia (Catherine Merridale) History was always an important tool in the hands of Soviet propagandists. All types of historical work were subject to state interference, from school textbooks and encyclopedias to formal historical research and the commemorative use of public space. This article traces the fate of history in Russia through glasnost and the collapse of communism and into the twenty-first century. It discusses the role that history played in current politics, and also the relationship between popular understandings of the past and the formal teaching of history in schools. It argues that history was central to the ideological ferment of the 1980s, but that it has become increasingly marginal, for economic as well as intellectual reasons, as the new Russian state consolidates its position. The argument is made that the decline of history, which some regard as a sign of Russia’s so-called normalization, allows some past injustices to endure, and also permits prejudices to survive unchallenged. Instead of history, today’s Russians — with some conspicuous exceptions — seem to prefer romantic escapism. They are exhausted by political infighting, including morally-charged debates about the recent past. It remains to be seen what price they may pay for turning away from a closer engagement with the painful memories of their grandparents. The Origins of the Two ‘World Wars’: Historical Discourse and International Politics (David Reynolds) It is now almost impossible to imagine the history of the twentieth century without the terms ‘first world war’ and ‘second world war’. Yet using the language of ‘world war’ to describe these two great conflicts was by no means axiomatic. This article on conceptual history concentrates on four principal belligerents — Britain, France, Germany and the USA. It looks first at how the war of 1914–18 was conceptualized at the time, noting the preference in France and particularly Britain for ‘the Great War’, and then examines rethinking during the 1920s and 1930s. It goes on to show how the term ‘second world war’ triumphed during and after the conflict of 1939–45 — though with important exceptions such as China, Japan and the Soviet Union. In both conflicts the leading proponents of ‘world war’ came from Germany and America, and the ultimate triumph of this concept owes much to the ideological battle between Hitler and Roosevelt in 1939–41. The article ends by suggesting that this dominant paradigm may in some respects distort our understanding of modern history. Journal of Contemporary History Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi, Vol 38(1), 163–166. [0022–0094(200301)38:1;163–166;029970]