Review of “Material Traces of War: Stories of Canadian Women and Conflict, 1914- 1945” by Stacey Barker, Krista Cooke and Molly McCullough

Review of Material Traces of War: Stories of Canadian Women and Conflict, 1914- 1945 by Stacey Barker, Krista Cooke and Molly McCullough

The Memory-Keeping Daughter: Exploring Object Stories and Family Legacies From America\u27s Modern Wars

This essay demonstrates how wartime objects can have a special resonance in families as keepers of memory, and it especially explores the role of daughters of military participants in preserving the artifacts of their veteran fathers. Using several case studies from a recent public history project collecting objects and object stories in the American southwest, it argues that a focus on daughters as caretakers of family military history offers a new way to engage with descendants\u27 histories by showing how the work of such women can contribute to our understanding of modern war and its legacies

Belonging to the Imperial Nation: Rethinking the History of the First World War in Britain and Its Empire

In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the First World War in 2014–18, the British government set aside funds for a range of commemorative activities. These included a number of “engagement centres” that aimed to bring together academics and local community members in addition to providing separate arts-related programming.1 The Imperial War Museum reworked its main First World War galleries, which opened with great fanfare at the centenary’s start. This denotes a kind of publicly sanctioned interest in a war that Britain had won, after all, but that popular memory had enshrined as something quite different, something that required solemn reflection about the costs of war and reckoning of sacrifices rather than celebrations of victory and service.

Fall 2013 Newsletter of the Sarah Isom Center

The official newsletter of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies.https://egrove.olemiss.edu/isom_report/1010/thumbnail.jp

‘The Invisible Chain by Which All Are Bound to Each Other’: Civil Defence Magazines and the Development of Community During the Second World War

This article uses local collaboratively produced civil defence magazines to examine how community spirit was developed and represented within the civil defence services during the Second World War. It highlights the range of functions which the magazines performed, as well as the strategies employed by civil defence communities to manage their emotions in order to keep morale high and distract personnel from the fear and boredom experienced while on duty. The article also discusses silences in the magazines — especially around the experience of air raids — and argues that this too reflects group emotional management strategies. The significance of local social groups in developing narratives about civil defence and their workplace communities is demonstrated, and the article shows how personnel were able to engage with and refashion dominant cultural narratives of the ‘people’s war’ in order to assert their own status within the war effort

A broken silence? Mass Observation, Armistice Day and ‘everyday life’ in Britain 1937–1941

Between 1937 and 1941 the social survey organization Mass Observation collected material on the ways that the British people experienced and thought about the commemorative practices that marked the anniversary of the Armistice of 1918. What they found was that while people were largely united in their observation of the rituals of remembrance, their thoughts and feelings about these practices were diverse. For some, the acts of commemoration were a fitting way to pay tribute to both the dead and the bereaved. For others, these acts were hypocritical in a nation preparing for war. This article draws on the Mass Observation material to trace some of the diverse ways that remembrance was embodied in everyday life, practised, experienced and understood by the British people as the nation moved once again from peace to war, arguing that studies of the practices of remembrance alone tell us little about how they have been understood by participants

Comment by John Grayzel

There is no question that pandemics can shake up a seemingly stable set of circumstances and, in that way, affect history