Armistice Day Research Articles

A Hero for our Time: Bernard Knox

A Hero forour Time: Bernard Knox MARIANNE MCDONALD -Bernard Knox, who died on 22 July 2010 at the age of ninety-five,was a man who lived about as long as his beloved Sophocles, who wrote about heroes and at the same time was known for his charm and "hail-fellow, well met" personality. Knox was a hero himself and the most learned as well as congenial man one would ever be privi leged tomeet. He would be welcomed into heaven, but ifhe went sightseeing in hell?some writers likeDante had tastes like that?he could charm Satan into giving him safe passage through, and even Cerberus would need no sop. I remember a story he enjoyed telling about the time he was fightingon the side of the partisans in Italy in World War II. Towards the end of thewar, as he was out walking a bit far from his camp, he met a column ofNazi soldiers whom he was able to persuade that thewar was over and to surren der to him, because then things would go better for them. They believed him, and he marched them back to camp as his prisoners, only for them to learn that thewar was in fact not yet over. He learned how to speak well in several languages and as a youth used to hold forth inLondon's Hyde Park, de veloping skillswhich not only made him a teacher to die for, but saved his own lifeon numerous occasions. He was aman who could have taken pride inhaving made things better not only for his students, many of whom he helped throughout their lives, but also, by fighting for causes inwhich he believed, for thewhole world. He was born in 1914 in Bradford, in theWest Riding of Yorkshire, and spoke with a Bradford accent throughout his life.He was a committed Socialist because he believed in the common ARION 18.2 FALL 20I0 132 a hero for our time: bernard knox man, sowhen he attended St. John's College, Cambridge, he made friends on the basis not of social class but of heart and of quality ofmind. Knox studied classics at Cambridge. In 1936, he took his A, about which he speaks ruefully: "I had made rather a mediocre showing in the final part of the Tripos, ending up with a second class (at least, I comforted myself, I did better thanAuden, who got a third, and Housman, who failed com pletely)."1 During that time, he was too busy at Cambridge, marching in theAnti-War Movement, to take his studies seri ously while Hitler was galloping to power. Bernard's sister, Elizabeth L. Campbell, had a picture of a demonstration with students holding placards that said things like "Scholarships, not battleships." Knox and his friendDonald Maclean are there shouting slogans. Knox's sisterwrote on the back of the photograph: "Bernard studying the Classics at Cambridge." During a march on Armistice Day, 11 November 1933, they met with physical and verbal abuse, including critical com mentary of the vegetable, fruit, and egg sort, but theywere successful in leaving theirwreath on the War Memorial. The secondary school that he attended in 1926 offered cadet military training. There he learned to shoot, livewith bugle calls, and conduct combat maneuvers. However, his at titude by the time of his Cambridge years was that all war was as senseless as thewar described by Euripides inhis Tro jan Women, perhaps the greatest anti-war play everwritten. (Euripides also strikes a very modern tone?something I'm sure thatKnox appreciated?for example, inhisHelen, when he suggests thatwar was divinely instigated as a form of pop ulation control! Even in the fifthcentury bc, thatwas a mor dant take?the thought thatworld overpopulation was to be regulated bywar.) Knox was also influenced by the then cur rent novels and memoirs?from Robert Graves' Goodbye to All That to Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on theWest ern Front?as well as the poetry ofWilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg. His thinking, then,was influ enced by both ancient and modern literature. Marianne McDonald 133 In addition to all this,Knox was shaped by his family's ex perience: they...

Achieving Growth and Excellence in Medicine

November 11, 2009 will mark over 90 years of commemorating Armistice Day, the end of World War I. Although conflict in the Middle East reminds us that WWI failed to end all wars, it did serve as both substrate and catalyst for the development of modern plastic and reconstructive surgery. This article will outline those ingredients most directly responsible for the growth of the specialty, tracing its development in response to armed conflict, and implications for continued excellence both in reconstructive surgery and other fields in the future.

The Art of Living Inward: Henry James on Rupert Brooke

The Art of Living Inward: Henry James on Rupert Brooke Hazel Hutchison Few sites in the field of literary biography have been so hotly contested as the biography of Rupert Brooke. Within days of his death from blood poisoning on a troop ship in the Aegean, he had been praised by Winston Churchill and wistfully mourned in national newspapers and literary journals. Meanwhile, a battle was brewing between his mother and Edward Marsh, his friend and literary executor, for control over his letters and papers. Brooke was held up by many as a national example of patriotism and as the idealization of youth, while others insisted that he was simply a flawed but talented young man. Things are much the same today. Brooke’s poem “The Soldier” is still read at Armistice Day services and is regularly taught at schools and universities as a fine example of sonnet form. In other camps, however, his poetry is lambasted as nationalistic, emotionally naïve, and conservative in form. So much has been projected onto the memory of this young man that he has become a potent symbol of a particular moment and set of values. Like it or loathe it, he has come to stand for “Englishness”—or at least the particular brand of English nostalgia that was in vogue in the opening stages of the First World War. Many of Brooke’s friends and colleagues protested his appropriation as an icon of establishment values. But cultural momentum was at work. The sheer number of tributes and appreciations written in the weeks after Brooke’s death demonstrates how keen the British were to find a representative figure on which to focus their grief in April 1915 and in the months that followed. Among these appreciations is an essay by Henry James, in the form of a preface to Rupert Brooke’s Letters from America. This is a striking combination of names to find on the flyleaf of a book, so it is intriguing that this essay is not much discussed by scholars either of James or Brooke. Written in the autumn of 1915 and published with Brooke’s travel essays in March 1916, this essay is the last piece of work James completed before his health collapsed in December 1915. The writing of this preface coincided with work on The Sense of the Past and The Middle Years (the third volume of his Autobiography), and many of the themes and concerns evident in these texts [End Page 132] surface in his writing about Brooke: the collision of past and present, the nature of artistry, and the relation of individuality to nationality. This article examines how James used his essay as a platform to discuss the tension between his view of art and his impressions of the First World War—elements more closely connected in James’s mind than one might suppose. Like many of the pieces written about Brooke, James’s essay reveals as much about the writer as it does about the subject and thus occupies a hazy boundary zone between biography and autobiography. Nevertheless, James is more perceptive than many of his contemporaries about Brooke’s limitations and inconsistencies. James first met Brooke in 1909 on a visit to Cambridge University. Little remains in the way of correspondence between the two, but they obviously remained sufficiently in contact for Brooke to feel able to call on James at Lamb House in Rye one evening in 1912, while on a walking tour with James Strachey. Brooke’s account of what happened is reproduced in Edward Marsh’s introductory memoir in Brooke’s Collected Poems: At length I pressed the Bell of the Great Door—there was a smaller door further along, the servants’ door we were told. No answer. I pressed again. At length a slow dragging step was heard within. It stopped inside the door. We shuffled. Then, very slowly, very loudly, immense numbers of chains and bolts were drawn within. There was a pause again. Further rattlings within. Then the steps seemed to be heard retreating. There was silence. We waited in a wild agonising stupefaction. The house was dead silent. At length there was a shuffling noise from...

Raising the dead: war, memory and American national identity*

Abstract.The dead, particularly the war dead, play a central role in the development of nationalism, nowhere more so than in America. America's mid‐nineteenth century Civil War produced a recognisable and influential ‘cult of the dead’, comparable in its construction with similar developments in Europe following World War I. Focused on the figure of the fallen soldier, especially the volunteer soldier, this cult found physical expression in the development of national cemeteries devoted not just to the burial of those who fell in the war but to the idea of America as a nation, in the development of monuments to the dead that, again, reinforced the new national symbolism of the war era, and in the beginnings of Memorial Day, an American sacred ceremony with clear parallels with the later Armistice Day ceremonies in Europe. In all these developments, America preceded the European nations by several decades, making America a valuable case study for the role that the cult of the fallen soldier plays in national development more generally.

The Bonus Army: An American Epic (review)

Reviewed by: The Bonus Army: An American Epic G. Kurt Piehler The Bonus Army: An American Epic. By Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen. New York: Walker and Company, 2004. ISBN 0-8027-1440-4. Maps. Photographs. Appendixes. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 370. $27.00. Drawing on an impressive range of primary and secondary sources, Bonus Army offers a riveting account of the struggle by World War I veterans to secure adjusted compensation—a bonus—from the federal government. Paul Dickson and Thomas Allen are not the first historians to write about the long struggle that began shortly after Armistice Day and continued until the bonus was finally paid in 1936, but they have offered a richly textured narrative that pays particular attention to experiences of the rank and file who participated in the Bonus Expeditionary Force. Dickson and Hart are at their best in describing how the corrosive impact of the Great Depression resulted in thousands of desperate veterans descending on the nation's capital in the summer of 1932 demanding an early payment of their bonuses. Living in abandoned government buildings and open fields in Anacostia Park in Washington, these proud veterans tried to maintain their dignity under trying circumstances. Despite the widely held belief of the Military Intelligence Division, General Douglas MacArthur, and the Hoover administration, more wives and children could be found among the bonus marchers than communists. For scholars, one of the strengths of Bonus Army is the focus on the question of race. Although the nation's capital remained a segregated southern city, the bonus encampments were integrated; moreover, black and white veterans marched together when they paraded on Pennsylvania Avenue or gathered on the Capitol grounds. Dickson and Allen are empathetic to the plight and grievances of the World War I veterans who sought a bonus. They skewer the Hoover administration for its insensitivity toward these veterans and lambast MacArthur for driving them out of Washington, D.C., at the point of a bayonet. They are also critical of the Roosevelt administration's effort to diffuse later bonus marches by sending destitute veterans to CCC camps in Florida where many would be killed tragically by a hurricane in 1935. Dickson and Allen write with sincere passion, but Bonus Army would have been a stronger book if the authors grappled with the question at the heart of the debate over the adjusted compensation: What does the nation owe to returning veterans? Do veterans have a special claim on the federal government? This reviewer wishes the authors had given the opponents of the bonus more of their due, especially given the diverse ideological opposition to it. Four presidents—Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, and Franklin Roosevelt—were against it. Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover opposed it because they envisioned a limited role for the federal government and feared the immense cost to the public treasury. Roosevelt had fewer reservations about an expanded federal role and believed the national government should aid Americans buffeted by the Great Depression. He did not, however, believe healthy veterans, by virtue of their wartime service, should receive special benefits. [End Page 857] Dickson and Allen see the passage of the G.I. Bill of Rights in 1944 as a legacy of the Bonus March. Surprisingly, their account of the passage of this groundbreaking legislation does not draw upon the scholarship of either Davis R. B. Ross or Keith Olson, but relies on the superficial work of Milton Greenberg. In many ways, the Second World War veterans did not have to fight the same battles as their World War I counterparts. But the lingering debate over how to treat returning veterans continued after both Korea and Vietnam. In his forthcoming dissertation focusing on the G.I. Bill of Rights and the Vietnam Veteran, Mark Boulton of the University of Tennessee argues that the 1944 G.I. Bill of Rights did not permanently settle the debate central to the Bonus March. As presidents, both Dwight Eisenhower (an aide to MacArthur during the Bonus March) and later Lyndon B. Johnson sought to place strict limits on veterans' benefits. Like his Republican counterparts of the interwar years, Eisenhower believed in a more limited...

O.D. Skelton and the North American mind

NINETEEN THIRTY-FIVE WAS A GOOD YEAR for Canadian-American connection. Prime Minister R. B. Bennett began negotiation of a trade agreement with United States spring. Another leader, Mackenzie King, finished job time to celebrate his success on Armistice Day, 11th of November, from his perspective appropriate occasion to contrast cooperative peoples of America with those of a barbaric Europe.1 O. D. Skelton, King's chief foreign policy adviser as he had been Bennett's, was delighted by substance of freer trade, but even more by its potential for shaping of a North American mind.2 That would distance country from trap of British imperialism and European militarism.THE RISE OF NORTH AMERICANISMThe first four decades of 20th century, period of Skelton's academic and public service career, witnessed rise of a Americanism that went to core of his thought. Americanism was not an organized impulse, nor was it dominant force driving attitudes and policy Canada or United States. But it was on an upwards trajectory during Skelton's adult life.North Americanism came from many directions-from growth of United States' power and ambition, and dimming of British empire's light and authority; from resolution of Canadian-American disputes that had dogged late 19th and early 20th centuries; from sense that a superior American diplomatic structure was taking shape, with International Joint Commission (IJC) as both symbol and evidence of an ability to resolve knotty problems cooperatively; and from continental publicists such as J. T. Shotwell and J. W. Dafoe. It came, too, from intensifying links of economics and culture, and from merchants, doctors, engineers, lawyers, bankers, unionists, bureaucrats, academics, entertainers, and athletes who moved effortlessly and increasingly across border.When Americans and Canadians turned away from world years between two world wars, Americanism took a tighter hold. Sir Robert Falconer, president of University of Toronto, wrote 1925 that America was hope of world: Fear of force is unknown, vessels of war are not seen on lakes nor fortifications on frontier, and such rivalries which exist spring not from incompatible racial ambitions but from legitimate trade between two peoples of mutual affinity and respect. How sad, by comparison, was the plight of Europe: country set against country, race against race, frontiers watched by suspicious guardians, enclaves and fragments of peoples only tolerated by necessity.' Canadians regularly traveled to League of Nations to read what became known, and not a complimentary way, as speech, prescribing IJC's methodologies of investigation, reason, and discussion as a remedy for world's ills. Canadians, Mackenzie King told League 1928, lived in perfect harmony ... with their neighbour to south.4From 1935 into second World War, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, St. Lawrence University, and Queen's University convened large and buoyant Canadian-American relations conferences, alternating between Canadian and American sites and drawing on a wide range of expertise from both countries. In 1936, J. T. Shotwell launched Carnegie's series of scholarly examinations of relationship, which eventually reached 25 sober blue volumes. At first of Canada-US meetings, held upstate New York, J. W. Dafoe, celebrated editor of Winnipeg Free Press, argued that Canada and United States constituted a cultural, intellectual, and moral unity, North American character and range.5 That summarized a broad intellectual trend.6By later 1930s, according to US Chamber of Commerce, there were 11 non-governmental organizations United States pushing for close Canadian-American relations. …

Armistice Day and weapons of mass destruction

Armistice Day and weapons of mass destruction

In the Sweat of Our Brow: Citizenship in American Domestic Practice During WWII—Victory Gardens

Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt eat the herb of the field; in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Genesis 3:17-19 There is no reason, then, for anyone forbidding us to see in the Garden, symbolically, the life of the blessed; in its four rivers, the four virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice; in its trees, all useful knowledge; in the fruits of the trees, the holy lives of the faithful; in the tree of life, that wisdom which is the mother of all good; and in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the experience that results from disobedience to a command of God. punishment which God imposed on the sinners was just and, therefore, good in itself, but not for man who experienced the taste of it. Augustine of Hippo, City of God, Book XIII, Chapter 21, p. 287 In the sweat of our brow We should eat our bread? Good doctors don't allow Eating when in a sweat Dog Star twinkles now. Of what is this a sign? In the sweat of our brow We should drink our wine! Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science, Section 39, of Joke, Cunning and Revenge: Prelude in German Rhymes Because citizens so harkened to the voice of the state, even as Adam hearkened unto his wife, victory gardens remain one of the most compelling memories of domestic participation in the Second World War. Victory gardens, planted by individuals and families in surplus space to offset food sent to Europe, reveal elements of the relationship between the nation and individualism during the war, including the recuperationas an element of state powerof one of the most powerful metaphors of an earlier notion of freedom: familiar self-sufficiency. Citizens were encouraged to become self-sufficient to benefit the state. Furthermore, gardening addressed concerns of a perceived loss of order in a world at war. Gardeners looked to their plots for conformation of a physical order in the world, and one added to domestic life through the increased introduction of efficient management and production methods. Finally, victory gardening was one of the earliest elaborations of the significant postwar configuration of citizenship as a function of consumption-often the function of mothers, wives, and daughters-to encourage efficient production. Planting a victory garden encouraged thrift through consumption. With no apologies to St. Augustine, there is no reason, then, for anyone forbidding us to see in the garden, symbolically, the life of the blessed.1 Government term victory garden originated with the conclusion of World War I. During that war, the nation-state encouraged citizens to grow War Gardens. Following Armistice Day, the government continued to encourage civilian production but suggested a name change to Victory Gardens.2 The War Garden was the chrysalis. Victory Garden is the butterfly, rhapsodized Charles Lathrop Pack, president of the National War Garden Commission in its 1919 pamphlet, Victory Gardens Feed the Hungry, Needs of Peace Demand the Increased Production of Food in America's Victory Gardens (6). While there was no National War Garden Commission in World War II, the American nation-state did extensively promote the personal (and familial) production of food. Most of this national promotion occurred under the aegis of the Department of Agriculture. department printed and distributed information for the victory gardener, including plans, schemes, timetables, and guides to ordering seeds (Authentic Guide 9, 11, 48, 49). …

Double Sorrow: Proleptic Elegy and the End of Arcadianism in 1930s Britain

Yes, we are going to suffer, now; sky Throbs like a feverish forehead; pain is real; groping searchlights suddenly reveal little natures that will make us cry, Who never quite believed they could exist, Not where we were. They take us by surprise Like ugly long-forgotten memories ... --W. H. Auden, Time of War, 1938 (English Auden 256) Hands of longed, withheld tomorrow Fold on hands of yesterday In double sorrow. --Stephen Spender, The Separation, 1939 For countless citizens in Britain in late 1930s, looming confrontation with Hitler produced an uneasy sense of deja vu. Premonitions of commingled with memories of endured in Great War. Faces were lit with conscience past or future / Of men gone, eyes filled with tears of twenty-four years (Hendry). (1) At Armistice Day services and military exercises, Britons watched who [were] about to die try out their paces alongside ghosts of Gallipoli and Flanders (MacNeice 39). (2) Coming to terms with this prospect ofdouble sorrow was a great and linguistic challenge, as poets and politicians struggled to enroll words of for a second round of suffering. I would like to propose a term for texts that voice this Janus-faced on and for wider cultural syndrome of which they were a part. I define as consolatory writing produced in anticipation of sorrow, where expected loss is of a familiar kind. Its occasion is need for psychological rearmament in face of a threat, its opening strategy pragmatic one of marshaling resources already known to be useful in of mourning. It records and responds imaginatively to anticipatory grief (Woodward 88). (3) commingling of remembered and anticipated is hardly unique to this period (indeed, Jacques Derrida has located a measure of grieving at heart of all human friendship (4)), but there is evidence to suggest that it was especially prevalent in Britain during late 1930s. Those who had fought in trenches, or who had loved and lost those who had, greatly feared the repetition of salutes (Skelton 185). (5) For them, prospect of enduring of war again so soon produced both intense anxiety and what Fredric Jameson, discussing roots of utopian impulse, has called a glacial perspective (122) on consolatory narratives: a cold distance enabling them to weigh both their validity and their efficacy. It put extraordinary pressure on hearts, minds, and language of Britons, pressure so great that many familiar consolatory strategies could not withstand it. works from which I derive my generalizations are written by men too young to fight in Great War but whose fathers and older brothers and friends died in trenches. They include also works by women, of a range of ages, who lost sons, loves, brothers, and husbands in that conflict. Though I shall derive defining characteristics, in first instance, from poetry, I shall extend category of proleptic elegy to fiction and, eventually, to political polemic. texts I shall consider are fascinating in themselves, but they also contribute to our understanding of modern in general. It has become a truism about modern that it is typically antielegy: it expresses a refusal to mourn (6) or rejects what Freud called therapeutic work of (Mourning 245). Because it cannot accept traditional religious and ethical certainties, it disowns the ... propensity of [elegiac] genre to translate into consolation (Zeiger 15). (7) It rejects valuation of mourning that would see the obliteration of dead by socioeconomic laws of exchange, equivalence, and progress . …

Indian Summer

It was Veteran's Day, the day once observed as Armistice Day--the eleventh hour, the eleventh day, the eleventh month. Specifically, it was Veteran's Day 1962. The nation was in great spirits because President Kennedy had just the week before backed the Russians down in Cuba. The country was in a happy mood. "The Twist" and "Locomotion" were playing on radios; sixteen-year-old Darla Banks had just been crowned the new Miss Teenage America. In my hometown of Charles City, Iowa, people were extra happy because for the past few days we had been enjoying a wonderful spell of Indian summer.

An Autobiographical Note

In 1946 I frequently published essays in various periodicals and journals. Among these, two brought me great satisfaction. One, in New Masses, February 12, 1946, was entitled Integration among Combat Troops in World War II. This detailed employment of black-white mixed combat infantry companies during closing weeks of war. This was not of major military consequence; it demonstrated also how quickly racism could be overcome if reality of joint black-white struggle came into existence. The second essay, Literacy, Afro-American, and World War II, appeared in Journal of Negro Education, Fall 1946. It described tests in learning and comprehension administered by army to scores of thousands of black and white troops. This resulted in slightly better achievements by black men than white-a smashing blow to ideas of black inferiority that then were dominant and still are not overcome. Major-General Edward Witsell, of War Department, asked me, in a letter dated August 17, 1948, for permission to reprint that article for distribution among officers in his command. Permission was granted; general thanked me for this in a letter dated September 3; he added that editor of Journal of Negro Education also had granted permission. Enclosed were two copies of this offprint. Two years later I received a three-page single-spaced letter from another army officer, C. A. Beall Jr. This communication, dated November 6, 1950, was marked Confidential. I received it on Armistice Day. It was addressed to Major Herbert Aptheker, A.U.S. Here it is reproduced, in full. Its imbecility is startling. Note, as examples, charge s, where allegedly I state that Communist party is only champion of Negro race which is fighting for their emancipation from tentacles of masses. This lunacy is matched by charge t, where I am alleged to have said-and this is put with quotation marks-the way defects in our government could be remedied was by an armed conspiracy. Noteworthy is emphasis upon my connection with the Negro-this reflects, I think, racism then openly expounded by Washington and especially by fanatical J. Edgar Hoover.

3 The Approach of War: November 1938 to August 1939

Friday 11 November 1938 Armistice Day — and what a world today after those strenuous years of war. How little one thought that all that expenditure of blood and treasure would have so little result — that 20 years after we shall be, to all appearances, on the brink of another war. How helpless and hopeless we have all been since 1918 — in my heart of hearts during the war I always felt that we should learn nothing from our experiences — that as soon as peace came the cranks and fools would again obtain control — and they did — they shrieked for disarmament and pinned their faith in the League of Nations. They shut their eyes to the inevitable — and now here we are again vis à vis with Germany as we were in 1914 — only today our position is infinitely more dangerous as a result of air warfare — God knows what may be in store for us — pray that yet again he will see that England is preserved despite her follies and her thoughtlessness.

Clichés of Unity: History and Memory in Postwar French Film

Cliches of Unity: History and Memory in Postwar French Film Marc Siegel The final scene of Claude Autant-Lara's 1947 film, Le diable au corps, takes place at Marthe's funeral. As the pallbearers carry her coffin down bells the church steps, they hear the bells, raise their heads, and smile. ring out peace, the Armistice, thus the The end of World War I. But is for Frangois, Marthe's lover, rejoicing. who hovers in the background, the funeral not a day for Go hang your flags! he shouts as he retreats into the darkness is of the church. His personal grief, however, joy. In the no match for the pallbearers' light foreground of the image, they continue walking into the of the country's future?), while Fran9ois, with in the of day (the brightness his memo- shadows behind them. commemorative events, Marthe's funeral and Armistice Day, this overdetermined image can serve as a starting point for a consideration of the complex relationship between history and memory in postwar French film. After World War II, French society was divided by internal conflicts stemming from competing opin- ries of Marthe, remains its With juxtaposition of two different orders of ions about the war, the Occupation, Vichy, and the Resistance. to According Henry Rousso, the bitter experiences under the Nazi Occupation and the Vichy Regime resuscitated a history of ideological differences among the French people dating as far back as the Revolution. Of these various guerrels]franco-frangaise[sJ the Occupation has remained the most di- visive, as a result largely, though not exclusively, of the significance of the notes, civil wars home-grown Vichy regime. As Rousso the hardest to deal with afterward, for in a foreign have always been war the enemy goes home when hostilities end in a civil war the 'enemy' remains (8). itself insufficient De Gaulle's triumphant return to France in 1944 was in cause for the the unification of the country after such a hostile civil war. Whence emer- gence and importance of what Rousso calls the Gaullist a unifying vision for the country with the resistancialist myth, unavowed objective [of present- ing] an interpretation of the past in light of the urgent needs of the present This myth served in part to subsume the bitter personal differences, the French beneath the among image of an eternal France united is in resis- tance to external enemies. Made soon writers Jean after De Gaulle's return, Le diable au corps is an adaptation of Raymond Radiguet's 1923 novel by the prolific tradition of quality screen- Aurenche and Pierre Bost. The novel a remembrance of the

England, Britain and the Audit of War (The Prothero Lecture)

THE award of the Booker Prize for 1995 to Pat Barker'sGhost Roaddid more than pay tribute to the latest powerful novel in the author's ‘Regeneration Cycle’. It also emphasised once again how much the historical and cultural consciousness of twentieth-century Britain is dominated by images of war. With the obvious exception of Northern Ireland, Great Britain has been an unusually peaceful and stable country in a century marked by revolution and upheaval. Yet our national experience has been shaped, almost obsessed, by two world wars in a way true of few, if any, other countries. Memories of 1914 and 1939 tower over us like Lutyens's massive monument at Thiepval. The war leaders, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, are commonly thought of as our two greatest prime ministers in modern times (though another, more recent, prime minister, victorious in the Falklands, still has her champions). Armistice day, Remembrance Sunday and the wearing of poppies retain their potency as all-powerful national symbols of sacrifice. The British Legion remains an influential pressure group. The eightieth anniversary of the battle of the Somme in July 1996 emphasised anew the enduring impact of the tragedies of the first world war. More generally, the fiftieth anniversaries of VE Day and VJ Day the previous year were nationwide ceremonies of remembrance for the sacrifices of the second. Almost every episode in current history, especially where Europe is involved, is commonly linked with memories of earlier conflict. Even the 1996 crisis in Anglo-German relations, such as it was, arising from ‘mad cow disease’ evoked comparison with 1939.

Forging Identity: Beethoven's "Ode" as European Anthem

Previous articleNext article No AccessForging Identity: Beethoven's "Ode" as European AnthemCaryl ClarkCaryl Clark Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 23, Number 4Summer, 1997 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/448854 Views: 105Total views on this site Citations: 17Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1997 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Stanley D. Brunn Reading and Mapping the Worldviews of Island States through National Anthems: Celebrating Deity, Identity, Landscapes and Unity, Miscellanea Geographica 0, no.00 (May 2022).https://doi.org/10.2478/mgrsd-2022-0005Stanley Waterman National Anthems and National Symbolism: Singing the Nation, (Oct 2019): 2603–2618.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02438-3_102Manuel Reyes Enverga Meme-ing Europe: examining the Europeanization of humorous discourse in an online meme community, Journal of Contemporary European Studies 27, no.33 (Jun 2019): 317–342.https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2019.1624510George Corbett Annunciations, (May 2019).https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0172Stanley Waterman National Anthems and National Symbolism: Singing the Nation, (Mar 2019): 1–16.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73400-2_102-1Giorgio Resta Beethoven’s Ninth and the Quest for a European Identity: A Law and Music Perspective, (Feb 2018): 361–375.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-68649-3_24Naomi Winstone, Kirsty Witherspoon ‘It’s all about our great Queen’: The British National Anthem and national identity in 8–10-year-old children, Psychology of Music 44, no.22 (Mar 2016): 263–277.https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735614565831Alfonso Del Percio On the social life of a city anthem: semiotic objects, ideologies of belonging, and the reproduction of sociocultural difference, Social Semiotics 25, no.44 (Aug 2015): 517–531.https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2015.1059577NICOLE SCICLUNA When Failure isn't Failure: European Union Constitutionalism after the Lisbon Treaty*, JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 50, no.33 (Jan 2012): 441–456.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2011.02239.xNECATI POLAT European integration as colonial discourse, Review of International Studies 37, no.0303 (Jul 2010): 1255–1272.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210510000495Peter Höyng Ambiguities of Violence in Beethoven's Ninth through the Eyes of Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, The German Quarterly 84, no.22 (Apr 2011): 159–176.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1756-1183.2011.00109.xRachel Cowgill Canonizing remembrance: music for Armistice Day at the BBC, 1922–7, First World War Studies 2, no.11 (Mar 2011): 75–107.https://doi.org/10.1080/19475020.2011.555499Shana L. Redmond Citizens of sound: negotiations of race and diaspora in the anthems of the UNIA and NAACP, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 4, no.11 (Jan 2011): 19–39.https://doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2011.533875Kathleen R McNamara Constructing Europe: Insights from historical sociology, Comparative European Politics 8, no.11 (Apr 2010): 127–142.https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2010.8Avi Gilboa, Ehud Bodner What are your thoughts when the national anthem is playing? An empirical exploration, Psychology of Music 37, no.44 (Oct 2009): 459–484.https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735608097249François Foret Bibliographie, (Aug 2008): 271–290.https://doi.org/10.3917/scpo.foret.2008.01.0271Michael Th. Greven Mitgliedschaft, Grenzen und politischer Raum: Problemdimensionen der Demokratisierung der Europäischen Union, (Jan 1998): 249–270.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-663-01337-2_11

The Problem of the Color Line: Segregation, Politics, and Historical Writing

Tr he legal mechanisms of race hierarchy in United States which would come to define twentieth-century segregationism were one aspect of what Ellis Hawley has described as the search for a modern order commonly associated with Progressive state-making project (1). But if laws and Supreme Court rulings such as Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) permitted race separation to substitute for equality under Constitution, it was newly transformed cultural and intellectual marketplaces that translated segregation into social practice. As African American poet Langston Hughes described emergence of public segregation in Cleveland in 1918 in his autobiography, on Armistice Day,

Commemorating the Second World War in Britain: Problems of Definition

Day, November 11th, lay ahead when in the autumn of 1945 the British Home Office turned its mind to the commemoration of the World War, just ended. Armistice Day was the day on which the significance of the Great War of 1914-1918 had annually been remembered in Britain in remembrance ceremonies up and down the country, from the Cenotaph in Whitehall to the humble village memorial.' The issue before the Home Office was clear: should the Second World War be simply bolted on to the well-established ceremonies, though these had been in abeyance since 1939, or was it important to find a new day and thus signify, in whatever manner might be appropriate, that this people's war had a different order of meaning? In the event, though as will be seen not without consideration of alternatives, no separate day was identified. On Remembrance Sunday it has been the national custom ever since to reflect on the sacrifice made by the dead in two world wars. Such a public emphasis has had its enduring historiographical accompaniment. It is well-known that by the 1930s, if not earlier, British historians had largely turned away from that eager willingness to pin

Review: Language of sacrifice. Adrian Gregory. The silence of memory: Armistice Day 1919-1946

Journal Article Review: Language of sacrifice. Adrian Gregory. The silence of memory: Armistice Day 1919-1946 Get access L Noakes L Noakes Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar History Workshop Journal, Volume 41, Issue 1, SPRING 1996, Pages 294–296, https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/1996.41.294 Published: 01 January 1996

On Re‐Reading The Maltese Falcon

Dashiell Hammett is commonly known by his third and most famous novel, The Maltese Falcon, uniquely featuring the detective hero, Sam Spade. A 1941 film version of the book, which had been published in 1929, was a box-office hit starring Humphrey Bogart. This partly accounts for the recognition Hammett and Spade continue to enjoy, but we measure the endurance of the author and his fictional creation by more than popularity, or the devotion of the Bogart cult. Together they established the fictional detective as a fully fledged social observer and critic. A close reading of the novel in the context of contemporary events shows that the author was working out the controversial 'lessons' of World War I, as they applied to the politics of peace and disarmament of the 1920s. To accomplish this, Hammett, an anarchist and an anti-fascist, created a character to mock bourgeois pretensions of law, order, and progress, which inspired the rhetoric of international relations during that decade. How much did these motives account for Spade's original qualities and for his subsequent influence? To begin to answer these questions and to understand the vehicle Hammett fashioned for American detective fiction, a brief review of American politics and diplomacy during the 1920s and an exploration of their relation to certain features of political and literary thought is required. Beginning in 1917, with the revelation of the secret European diplomacy that had preceded World War I, a stream of published documents and high-level memoirs refuted official versions of the war's origins and purposes (Fay 1-49 passim). For the horrendous expenditure of the war, which governments had justified in terms of 'freedom,' 'democracy,' and 'civilization,' society obtained little but death and disorder, it seemed. As facts demolished the idealistic picture painted by Allied wartime propaganda, Armistice Day ceremonies became solemn observations of needless sacrifices made to the failed god of nationalism. The doctrine of German war guilt enshrined in the Treaty of Versailles (1919) was also a casualty of revision, indicating the responsibility of Britain and France, states that had benefited from the Treaty's harsh peace terms to make appropriate adjustments in their relations with Germany. This British, French, and German diplomats cautiously attempted with the Locarno Treaty (1925), which provided for the admission of Germany to the League of Nations, thus ending German isolation. The Treaty signaled the end of French predominance in Europe, giving Britain, France's ally, decisive influence over the continental balance of power. But it neither significantly altered the terms of the Treaty of Versailles nor eliminated Allied fears of German revanchism. To insure against this eventuality, the French foreign minister Aristide Briand approached the American government with a non-aggression alliance in April 1927, the anniversary of the American declaration of war for the defense of France and Great Britain in World War I. Evading this politically risky entanglement, the Republicans in Washington offered the internationally minded a harmless revised version that appealed to the sovereign states of the world to take a rhetorical stand against aggression. This was known as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, a so-called Peace Pact history texts often describe as one of the diplomatic triumphs of President Calvin Coolidge's administration. For Dashiell Hammett, working out his new novel based on the subject, glossing over realpolitik maneuvering with high sounding rhetoric was a characteristically insincere operation of the international state system. In fact, Britain and France together, contrary to disarmament agreements, planned to revise the standards of general military and naval forces in their favor. The French agreed the Admiralty could abandon the naval limitations of the Washington Conference (1922) pertaining to light cruisers.(1) In turn, the British government would approve a larger effective French army than allowed by the Treaty of Versailles. …

PRONIC 88

For those arriving in Paris the weekend before Pronic, what could almost be described as a holiday atmosphere prevailed. The visit by the Prince and Princess of Wales had left its mark in the proliferation of front‐page features of ‘Lady Di’ displayed on news stands. The Champs Elysées looked elegant and resplendent with a profusion of French tricolours marking the royal visit combined with commemoration of Armistice Day. Autumn sunshine—and green leaves still on the trees—brought throngs of Parisians onto the streets. At present the Arc de Triomphe is closed to the public for cleaning and restoration, but on 11 November there was the unique opportunity, taken by lengthy queues of people, to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior and view the floral wreaths laid there during the commemorative ceremony.