Era Of Great War Research Articles

Struggles for Recognition: Melodrama and Visibility in Latin American Silent Film

Hollywood's growing influence in Latin America in the early twentieth century coincided and intermingled with an expanding US economic and military presence in the region. Yet at the same time, a nascent silent film industry challenged US hegemony and made visible the diverse political, cultural, and social characteristics of the region. Juan Sebastián Ospina León's Struggles for Recognition: Melodrama and Visibility in Latin American Silent Film is an ambitious, South-to-North hemispheric look at the intersections of silent cinema, melodrama, and modernity in the 1910s and 1920s. In addition to representing a significant contribution to the still-understudied topic of early cinema in Latin America, Struggles for Recognition enriches our understanding of modernity, gender, and political culture in places as distinct as Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico during this era.Researching silent film presents significant challenges in terms of sources and compels scholars to grapple with the techniques and politics of film preservation and restoration. Many of these early films have been fully or partially lost, while others have been reconstructed in ways that may not have been fully faithful to the originals. Contemporary film magazines provide insight into how films were promoted and received and on the way that local film production, distribution, and promotion were structured. We learn, for example, that the early Argentine film business favored films of US origin, while their Colombian counterparts' orientation and connections meant that European (especially Italian) films were the dominant fare in early cinema there. Finally, surviving print materials related to a film's production may speak to what the film looked like or how it was made.Following an introduction discussing the main themes and elaborating the links between melodrama and Latin America's “multiple modernities,” the first chapter sets the stage for silent cinema during the Great War era, with an emphasis on Argentina and Colombia. The pair of chapters that follow, which focus on these two countries respectively, are the strongest of the book. We are first introduced to “cinedrama porteño,” with roots in the melodrama of Argentine tango and sainete and typically set in popular locales like the conventillo, the cabaret, and the department store. In keeping with melodramatic templates, a good deal of attention is given to the strivings, debasement, and exploitation of workingwomen (including prostitutes). In contrast and reflecting the “Conservative Hegemony” that marked Colombian politics during this era as well as a very different relationship with the United States, the chapter on Colombian silents provides a fascinating discussion of breakout films in which Catholicism and local elites were visible in abundance and of a film industry that was more anti–United States than Argentina's.The next pair of chapters look at examples of silent cinema in Orizaba, Mexico, and two films made in or focused on the United States. The Mexican films, centered on subjects such as a train robbery and drug abuse, reflected the disruptions of the Mexican Revolution and a shared border with the United States, presenting a very different kind of melodramatic subject matter. The Mexico chapter also devotes some attention to the important topic of film restoration and reconstruction and the challenges of the silent film archive. This is an important and relevant discussion, but the link with wider themes of melodrama and modernity is not so clearly delineated. In the final chapter we are introduced to Charge of the Gauchos (Una nueva y gloriosa nación), a 1928 film written and produced in the United States by a Spanish Argentine filmmaker, a less-than-successful effort to rework a gaucho-centered tale of Argentina's history for US tastes. The chapter also discusses Garras de oro (1926), a Colombian film so highly critical of the US role in wresting the Panamanian isthmus from Colombia that the US government sought to squelch its circulation in the region.For all its notable strengths in research and analysis, it is noteworthy that a book with a thematic focus on visibilities and invisibilities in Latin American silent cinema has very little to say about representations of race and ethnicity in the films discussed. There is a brief analysis of Orientalism as it is deployed in the Mexican film El puño de hierro (1927) and some mention of the ways that Latin American silent cinema partly developed in reaction against racist depictions of Mexicans in Hollywood cinema. But one wonders, for example, to what degree whiteness was one of the visible dimensions of civilized respectability that many of these films sought to portray. All in all, however, this is a solid and enlightening piece of scholarship that makes an important contribution to film studies and the history of twentieth-century Latin America more broadly.

On Skye and the Promised Land, 1914–2014: Personal History and Highland Land Politics

This article is a hybrid of various forms of prose, conventional historical narrative, memoir, and family history. It links World War I land agitation in the Scottish Highlands with later imaginings and rememberings of the region's land use politics, and with their enduring significance. At its heart is one small croft on the Isle of Skye and one Skye family. These are anchored in one of the many land raids of the Great War era and through it they connect with other crofting families, with the longer history of the region's land politics, and with the Highland Diaspora.

THE SHOCK OF THE RISKY(QUÉ) FEMALE: FEMININITY AND THE TRAUMA OF THE GREAT WAR ERA IN THE DANCING OF MAUD ALLAN AND ANNA PAVLOVA

What role did the figure of the dancing female play in negotiating cultural anxieties in the Great War era? I explore this question by looking at the female performer Maud Allan who was famous for her danced interpretations of Salomé in pre-War London and cause of a sensational libel suit in 1918 bring together deviant female sexuality and wartime espionage. I juxtapose Allan with ballerina Anna Pavlova, a contemporary, and role model par excellence for proper femininity. These two examples offer a rich comparison from which to discuss how dancing and femininity was the grounds for inciting and palliating the profound cultural trauma of the Great War era. KeywordsDance. Femininity. Cultural Trauma. Great War Era.

A “splendid flying field” in Indianapolis: Aviation and Speedway Spectacles in the Great War Era

A “splendid flying field” in IndianapolisAviation and Speedway Spectacles in the Great War Era Brian M. Ingrassia (bio) In 1917, Carl Graham Fisher offered the facilities of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway to the United States federal government for the training of military aviators and the building of aircraft. He asserted that the Speedway, constructed nearly a decade earlier in 1909, was the best place in America to carry out such work. The government partly took Fisher up on his offer, and the 328-acre facility became a focal point for World War I aviation. By autumn of that year, Fisher was mapping and marking cross-country flying routes throughout the lower Great Lakes region; he even began imagining aerial routes along the transcontinental highways he had spearheaded earlier in the decade, especially the east-west Lincoln Highway. In so doing, Fisher seemed to lay the foundation for an aviation network centered on Indianapolis. The war’s aftermath, however, saw the Speedway turn in a different direction. In May 1919, racing returned to Indianapolis in a form made more dangerous than ever before by wartime technological developments. And although there was serious discussion of turning the raceway into an airport in the mid-1920s, the track’s owners chose spectacle over commercial or military utility, cementing the facility’s identity as a site for thrilling motor sports. The story of Great War aviation at Indianapolis, which remains obscured in standard narratives, has a threefold significance.1 First, as historian Mark Foster implies in his brief treatment of the subject, the Speedway’s wartime service was part of Carl Fisher’s project of developing transportation infrastructures connecting early-1900s people and cities.2 Second, it shows that the Midwest, as historian Kristin Hoganson has perceptively argued, was not disconnected from global currents; rather, the region contributed to larger projects of nationalism and imperialism.3 Third, the story hints [End Page 109] at how Midwesterners adopted and adapted transportation technologies for innovative purposes not limited to utilitarian movement of people or goods. Scholar Jason Weems contends that aircraft helped Midwesterners comprehend their region, a former frontier based on a seemingly “infinite notion of the future.” By the twentieth century, though, the “very grid that had once led settlers to a manifest destiny now appeared to lock them in place.”4 Settled in the middle, they turned to modern technologies and cultural spectacles. After World War I, Fisher and his fellow racing moguls had an opportunity to transform the Hoosier track into a regional aviation hub, but instead they doubled down on popular culture, maintaining the IMS grounds as a place for racing before then selling the facility to famed Great War aviator Eddie Rickenbacker right as the postwar economy peaked in 1927. Airplanes may have offered early-1900s Americans a near-utopian “instrument of reform, regeneration, and salvation,” yet motor sport impresarios ultimately chose the racing spectacle.5 The Speedway became a place where Midwesterners fashioned a modernity based on culture as much as upon commerce. The central figure in this story, Carl Fisher, was the guiding spirit behind Indianapolis’s speedway, which itself was modeled on the Brooklands automotive and aerial facility built in Surrey, England, in 1907. Fisher, who made a fortune through a headlamp company called Prest-O-Lite, used his wealth to promote automotive travel, pop-culture spectacles, and real-estate ventures in Miami Beach, Florida, and Montauk Point, Long Island. Fisher was like a playful version of Henry Ford, shaping American landscapes and mobility in his own distinctive way. He and three other Hoosier industrialists—James Allison, Arthur Newby, and Frank Wheeler—built Indianapolis’s famous speedway as a tar-and-gravel track in early 1909 and then, after a series of deadly crashes that summer, repaved it with three million vitrified bricks later that year. In its early years, Indianapolis’s speedway held both auto races and aviation contests, making the regional metropolis a focal point for transportation-based spectacle. By 1911, the 2.5-mile oval held its first 500-mile race, which marked its claim to global fame. When the U.S. entered the Great War, aviation was still an important part of the...

A War Generation?: The Radcliffe College Community in the Great War Era, 1914–1926

AbstractOver 2,000 Radcliffe College students, administrators, and alumnae irregularly involved themselves in World War I (WWI) activism. While most matriculating and matriculated Radcliffe members collectively contributed to war work, their individual records illuminate peculiar paradoxes that challenge historical concepts of America's WWI culture. Radcliffe females generally assumed war tasks untethered to their professional experiences and political aspirations. Many undergraduates and graduates contended that they chose, circumscribed and concluded war-connected work at their discretion—not Radcliffe's and/or America's. Moreover, domestic efforts designed to awaken Americans' war patriotism and activity encountered a decidedly dormant and indulgent Cambridge college compound. Not until fall 1918—over a year into U.S. belligerency—did Radcliffe's campus completely mobilize for ‘selfless' war service. Radcliffe's WWI-related chronicles—including its members’ post-hostilities humanitarian activity—suggest that “coercive voluntarism” and “complete citizenship” were not ubiquitous forces in WWI America.

Archives and trails from the First World War: repurposing imperial records of North African and Indian soldiers in Palestine and Syria, 1917-1923

ABSTRACT First World War scholars more or less agree on the limitations imposed by archival sources on the study of North African and Indian troops. Conventional methods to find ‘the voice’ of the soldier do not apply in this case and the scarcity of records partly explains why so little is written. So, what opportunities are there in such an endeavour? This article argues for the need to decolonise military archives from the Great War era. That is to say, to use information that was originally gathered to serve narrow military interests as a means to understand the war experiences of the colonial soldiers. These sources, largely official records, bearing stamps of the past regimes, cannot be separated from the context or intent of their production. Nonetheless, they must not be overlooked as new historiographical demands make it necessary to read colonial archives for evidence of their context. Failing to draw from, and reflect upon, colonial era records on the Great War, despite their shortcomings, is tantamount to condemning valuable aspects of global history to oblivion. In turn, acknowledging these shortcomings, paradoxically, lends greater value to such sources as the colonial context in which they were produced becomes observable.

Nationalizing international relief: Romanian responses to American aid for children in the Great War era

ABSTRACT This article examines the interactions between American humanitarian agendas and initiatives and domestic efforts for child relief in Romania in the aftermath of the Great War. While focusing on the presence of the European Children’s Fund (ECF) in post-war Romania, the article traces the domestic organization of relief, the Romanian elites’ turn to American humanitarian assistance, and their active responses to this external aid on behalf of war-suffering children. The article argues that Romanian leadership of child welfare initiatives nationalized American humanitarian aid by integrating ECF’s institutional efforts into domestically established philanthropic associations. This nationalization was sustained in three key ways: (1) American humanitarians’ own engagement of local channels in aid diffusion; (2) the growing network of national associations of child welfare in post-war Romania; (3) the competing political agendas of both donors and recipients. The case of Romanian responses to American aid for children, and its eventual domestic institutionalization, challenges the seemingly unequal relationship between Western donors and East-Central European recipients during a period of post-war reconstruction and sociopolitical transformation. It sheds light on the transnational dimension of the humanitarian process, driven by the dual agency of foreign humanitarians and domestic interlocutors in the country of aid reception.

The demotic tongue of mateship in Australian Great War literature: The vernacular humourist

This paper looks at the demotic tongue of mateship in Australian Great War Literature as a theme of cognition and understanding in the literary texts and texts of culture. The language, like the Australian, was filled with character and a sense of the larrikin. It seemed irreverent at times, even rude in some circles, but it was much more than its immediate sound or inference; it was the natural verbal essence of the Australian mind – honest, loyal, dutiful and humorous. These characteristics are cornerstones of Australian mateship, a type of friendship that would be there beyond the bitter end, rival the love of a woman and even the protection of one’s own life. For some Australians, poetry was merely an extension of this language, as language was merely an extension of friendship. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the Australian use of humour and language in the setting of Great War poetry. It looks at the demotic tongue of mateship, specifically what is known as the Great Australian Adjective (bloody), along with several other examples of vernacular language, in Australian Great War Literature, and considers this by referring to the common language of the Australian poet from the time. It will consider the notion that Australian writers of the Great War era may have been misunderstood as a result of their language, leading to critical mistakes about a poem’s literary worth, a poet’s seriousness as a poet and a nation’s literary value.

Revolution and Emotions: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Political Events of 1914–1917

V.P. Buldakov explores the emotional overheating in the Russian Empire, but also of the entire European cultural milieu during the era of Great War, Revolution, Civil War and beyond. Exploring a wide range of sources, archival, philosophical, literary, journalism, epistolary, memoirs and diaries, he calls for a new (socio)-psychological history of the Russian Revolution that integrates the irrational, the energy of negation, impulsiveness, atavisms and aggression and the importance of myth and rumor- in other words the full panoply of the emotions as manifested in social movements and politics.

Karine V. Walther. Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921.

There are few if any topics fitting under the broad rubric of “the United States and the world” that are more in need of scholarly attention than the history of the encounters between the U.S. and Islamic societies in the long nineteenth century. Despite the obvious contemporary importance of the topic, the historiography remains surprisingly sparse, though part of the explanation for this can be found in the quality of those works that do exist on the topic, by historians such as James A. Field, Ussama Samir Makdisi, Barbara Reeves-Ellington, and Heather J. Sharkey. Karine V. Walther enters this field with a wide-ranging work that will inspire further scholarship. The scope of the book’s argument is ambitious: Walther suggests that such was the continuity in U.S. attitudes toward Islamic societies in different places and in different times that it is appropriate to speak of an invented “Islamic world” within U.S. discourse and policymaking. Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921 is based on a series of case studies of U.S. involvement in and reactions toward the revolutions in Greece and Crete, the colonial administration of the Moro population in the Philippines, the massacres in Armenia, and the geopolitics of the Great War era. In a section somewhat awkwardly wedged between those topics, there is an exploration of Jewish American activism in Morocco in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. Though Walther might have more fully explained the rationale for the selection of these episodes (as well as their running order—the chapter on the Armenian massacres occurs out of sequence), the author should be applauded for seeking to explore the connections and common denominators between such a broad range of topics.

Taming Total War: Great War-Era American Humanitarianism and its Legacies

This essay examines the history of American humanitarianism in the First World War and its aftermath. It analyzes both the diplomatic and cultural significance of humanitarianism to U.S. foreign affairs. It also considers the legacies of Great War-era relief.

The disaster of war: American understandings of catastrophe, conflict and relief

This article explores how US humanitarian aid workers in Great War era Europe understood the war, their relief work and its significance. It argues that contemporary ideas about disaster and disaster assistance, formed in the decades before the war began, fundamentally shaped the way that Americans conceived of their wartime humanitarian aid and its significance. Through an interrogation of both the metaphorical and the material links between early twentieth century American ideas of war and natural disaster – and, by extension, war relief and disaster relief – this essay advances novel insights about the intellectual and cultural history of US humanitarian aid efforts for European civilians during the Great War era.

Great Expectations: African Americans and the Great War Era

Great Expectations: African Americans and the Great War Era

Borrowed Halos: Canadian Teachers as Voluntary Aid Detachment Nurses during the Great War

Teaching and nursing were frequent career choices for unmarried, middle-class women in the Great War era, but only nurses were eligible for active service in Canadian military hospitals overseas. Teachers were expected to remain at home, volunteering for patriotic projects like other women. This role proved too passive for some, who relinquished their careers to become, temporarily, Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses (VADs); many served in British military hospitals overseas. The history of this unique group offers new insights into societal expectations for Canadian women’s professional work in the early twentieth century. The transformation of teachers into nurses during the crisis of war was legitimized by the substitution of gender and class attributes for specialized training, allowing women teachers the otherwise unattainable opportunity for active service abroad. Their experience raises important issues regarding the meaning of “professional identity” in traditional women’s occupations, and professional development later in the century.