The Construction Of Memory In Interwar France

The contrast between battlefield and home front, soldier and civilian was the basis for memory and collective gratitude. Postwar commemoration, however, also grew directly out of the long and agonized search for the remains of hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers, and the sometimes contentious debates over where to bury them. For this reason, the local monument, with its inscribed list of names and its functional resemblance to tombstones, emerged as the focal point of commemorative practice. Sherman traces every step in the process of monument building as he analyzes commemoration's competing goals--to pay tribute to the dead, to console the bereaved, and to incorporate mourners' individual memories into a larger political discourse."--Pub. description.

The contrast between battlefield and home front, soldier and civilian was the basis for memory and collective gratitude. Postwar commemoration, however, also grew directly out of the long and agonized search for the remains of hundreds of thousands of missing soldiers, and the sometimes contentious debates over where to bury them. For this reason, the local monument, with its inscribed list of names and its functional resemblance to tombstones, emerged as the focal point of commemorative practice. Sherman traces every step in the process of monument building as he analyzes commemoration's competing goals--to pay tribute to the dead, to console the bereaved, and to incorporate mourners' individual memories into a larger political discourse."--Pub. description.

In The Crisis from Within, Nigel Raab explores weaknesses that emerge when using interdisciplinary theories in historical analysis. With chapters that focus on knowledge, language, memory, imagining and inventing, and civil society, the analysis reveals how theoretical applications can be the source of interpretive confusion. By drawing from a global range of historical works, Nigel Raab demonstrates how this problem concerns all historical sub-fields. From science in the seventeenth century to communism in the twentieth century, theories often overdetermine analysis in a way the historian never intended. After the enthusiastic reception of theory for over a generation, The Crisis from Within argues that the time has come to pause and think seriously about how we wish to proceed with theory.

Fewer Americans were captured or missing during the Vietnam War than in any previous major military conflict in U.S. history. Yet despite their small numbers, American POWs inspired an outpouring of concern that slowly eroded support for the war. Michael J. Allen reveals how wartime loss transformed U.S. politics well before, and long after, the war's official end. Throughout the war's last years and in the decades since, Allen argues, the effort to recover lost warriors was as much a means to establish responsibility for their loss as it was a search for answers about their fate. Though millions of Americans and Vietnamese took part in that effort, POW and MIA families and activists dominated it. Insisting that the war was not over "until the last man comes home," this small, determined group turned the unprecedented accounting effort against those they blamed for their suffering. Allen demonstrates that POW/MIA activism prolonged the hostility between the United States and Vietnam even as the search for the missing became the basis for closer ties between the two countries in the 1990s. Equally important, he explains, POW/MIA families' disdain for the antiwar left and contempt for federal authority fueled the conservative ascendancy after 1968. Mixing political, cultural, and diplomatic history, Until the Last Man Comes Home presents the full and lasting impact of the Vietnam War in ways that are both familiar and surprising.

Inspired by the theoretical insights of Patrick Hutton, Roland Barthes and Maurice Halbwachs, this volume examines the relationship between myths and memory and the ways in which the narratives (and the mythologies) of wars play a central role in constructing modern identities. The scholarly examination of war narratives shows how the political elite became eagerly engaged in the process of mythmaking. The collection opens with a preface by Patrick Hutton, the leading historian in the field o ...

In the years between the world wars, French intellectuals, politicians, and military leaders came to see certain encounters-between human and machine, organic and artificial, national and international culture-as premonitions of a future that was alternately unsettling and utopian. Skyscrapers, airplanes, and gas masks were seen as traces in the present of a future world, its technologies, and its possible transformations. In Future Tense, Roxanne Panchasi illuminates both the anxieties and the hopes of a period when many French people-traumatized by what their country had already suffered-seemed determined to anticipate and shape the future.Future Tense, which features many compelling illustrations, depicts experts proposing the prosthetic enhancement of the nation's bodies and homes; architects discussing whether skyscrapers should be banned from Paris; military strategists creating a massive fortification network, the Maginot Line; and French delegates to the League of Nations declaring their opposition to the artificial international language Esperanto.Drawing on a wide range of sources, Panchasi explores representations of the body, the city, and territorial security, as well as changing understandings of a French civilization many believed to be threatened by Americanization. Panchasi makes clear that memories of the past-and even nostalgia for what might be lost in the future-were crucial features of the culture of anticipation that emerged in the interwar period.

World War I utterly transformed the lives of Jews around the world: it allowed them to display their patriotism, to dispel antisemitic myths about Jewish cowardice, and to fight for Jewish rights. Yet Jews also suffered as refugees and deportees, at times catastrophically. And in the aftermath of the war, the replacement of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Russian and Ottoman Empires with a system of nation-states confronted Jews with a new set of challenges. This book provides a fascinating survey of the ways in which Jewish communities participated in and were changed by the Great War, focusing on the dramatic circumstances they faced in Europe, North America, and the Middle East during and after the conflict.

This book examines a diverse set of civic war memorials in North East England commemorating three clusters of conflicts: the Crimean War and Indian Rebellion in the 1850s; the ‘small wars’ of the 1880s; and the Boer War from 1899 to 1902. Encompassing a protracted timeframe and embracing disparate social, political and cultural contexts, it analyses how and why war memorials and commemorative practices changed during this key period of social transition and imperial expansion. In assessing the motivations of the memorial organisers and the narratives they sought to convey, the author argues that developments in war commemoration were primarily influenced by – and reflected – broader socio-economic and political transformations occurring in nineteenth-century and early-twentieth century Britain.