A detailed study of the NWAC's activities, propaganda and reception. It demonstrates the significant role played by the NWAC in British society after July 1917, illuminating the local network of agents and committees which conducted its operations and the party political motivations behind these.
This book is the first comprehensive investigation of the National War Aims Committee, providing detailed discussion of the establishment, activities and reception of the British domestic propaganda organisation, together with a careful and extensive analysis of the patriotic content of its propaganda.
Essays by Jay Winter, Jeffrey T. Schnapp, Jennifer D. Keene, and others reveal the centrality of visual media, particularly the poster, within the specific national contexts of Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States during World War I.℗¡Ultimately, posters were not merely representations of popular understanding of the war, but instruments influencing the.
Historians and heritage professionals assess the First World War's centenary in parts of the former British empire. Did commemoration become celebration? Did the centenary serve social and political functions, create new knowledge, recover marginalised voices, confirm existing clichés? Can its lessons inform future commemorative events?
This book offers a new interpretation of the Conservative party’s revival and adaptation to democratic politics in the early twentieth century. We cannot appreciate the Conservatives’ unique success in British politics without exploring the dramatic cultural transformation which occurred within the party during the early decades of the century. This was a seminal period in which key features of the modern Conservative party emerged: a mass women’s organisation, a focus on addressing the voter as a consumer, targeted electioneering strategies, and the use of modern media to speak to a mass audience. This book provides the first substantial attempt to assess the Conservatives’ adaptation to democracy across the early twentieth century from a cultural perspective and will appeal to academics and students with an interest in the history of political communication, gender and class in modern Britain.
With so much at stake and so much already lost, why did World War I end with a whimper-an arrangement between two weary opponents to suspend hostilities? After more than four years of desperate fighting, with victories sometimes measured in feet and inches, why did the Allies reject the option of advancing into Germany in 1918 and taking Berlin? Most histories of the Great War focus on the avoidability of its beginning. This book brings a laser-like focus to its ominous end-the Allies' incomplete victory, and the tragic ramifications for world peace just two decades later. In the most comprehensive account to date of the conflict's endgame, David Stevenson approaches the events of 1918 from a truly international perspective, examining the positions and perspectives of combatants on both sides, as well as the impact of the Russian Revolution. Stevenson pays close attention to America's effort in its first twentieth-century war, including its naval and military contribution, army recruitment, industrial mobilization, and home-front politics. Alongside military and political developments, he adds new information about the crucial role of economics and logistics. The Allies' eventual success, Stevenson shows, was due to new organizational methods of managing men and materiel and to increased combat effectiveness resulting partly from technological innovation. These factors, combined with Germany's disastrous military offensive in spring 1918, ensured an Allied victory-but not a conclusive German defeat.
World War I and Propaganda offers a new look at a familiar subject. The contributions to this volume demonstrate that the traditional view of propaganda as top-down manipulation is no longer plausible. Drawing from a variety of sources, scholars examine the complex negotiations involved in propaganda within the British Empire, in occupied territories, in neutral nations, and how war should be conducted. Propaganda was tailored to meet local circumstances and integrated into a larger narrative in which the war was not always the most important issue. Issues centering on local politics, national identity, preservation of tradition, or hopes of a brighter future all played a role in different forms of propaganda. Contributors are Christopher Barthel, Donata Blobaum, Robert Blobaum, Mourad Djebabla, Christopher Fischer, Andrew T. Jarboe, Elli Lemonidou, David Monger, Javier Pounce,Catriona Pennell, Anne Samson, Richard Smith, Kenneth Andrew Steuer, María Inés Tato, and Lisa Todd.
Endurance was an inherent part of the First World War. The chapters in this collection explore the concept in New Zealand and Australia. Researchers from a range of backgrounds and disciplines address what it meant for New Zealanders and Australians to endure the First World War, and how the war endured through the Twentieth Century. Soldiers and civilians alike endured hardship, discomfort, fears and anxieties during the war. Officials and organisations faced unprecedented demands on their time and resources, while Maori, Australian Aborigines, Anglo-Indian New Zealanders and children sought their own ways to contribute and be acknowledged. Family-members in Australia and New Zealand endured uncertainty about their loved ones’ fates on distant shores. Once the war ended, different forms of endurance emerged as responses, memories, myths and memorials quickly took shape and influenced the ways in which New Zealanders and Australians understood the conflict. The collection is divided into the themes of Institutional Endurance, Home Front Endurance, Battlefield Endurance, Race and Endurance, and Memorials.
The First World War required the mobilisation of entire societies, regardless of age or gender. The phrase 'home front' was itself a product of the war with parts of Britain literally a war front, coming under enemy attack from the sea and increasingly the air. However, the home front also conveyed the war's impact on almost every aspect of British life, economic, social and domestic. In the fullest account to-date, leading historians show how the war blurred the division between what was military and not, and how it made many conscious of their national identities for the first time. They reveal how its impact changed Britain for ever, transforming the monarchy, promoting systematic cabinet government, and prompting state intervention in a country which prided itself on its liberalism and its support for free trade. In many respects we still live with the consequences.