Jay Winter

War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century: Setting the framework

Collective remembrance Collective remembrance is public recollection. It is the act of gathering bits and pieces of the past, and joining them together in public. The ‘public’ is the group that produces, expresses, and consumes it. What they create is not a cluster of individual memories; the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Collective memory is constructed through the action of groups and individuals in the light of day. Passive memory – understood as the personal recollections of a silent individual – is not collective memory, though the way we talk about our own memories is socially bounded. When people enter the public domain, and comment about the past – their own personal past, their family past, their national past, and so on – they bring with them images and gestures derived from their broader social experience. As Maurice Halbwachs put it, their memory is ‘socially framed’. When people come together to remember, they enter a domain beyond that of individual memory. The upheavals of this century have tended to separate individual memories from politically and socially sanctioned official versions of the past. All political leaders massage the past for their own benefit, but over the last ninety years many of those in power have done more: they have massacred it. Milan Kundera tells the story of a photograph of the political leadership of the Czech socialist republic in 1948. One man in the photo was later purged.

Britain's ‘Lost generation’ of the First World War

Summary The demographic consequences of British war losses in the Great War varied by class. Since casualty rates among officers were higher than those among men in the ranks, the social elites from which officers were largely recruited suffered disproportionately heavy losses. Working-class casualties were more numerous, but they were lighter proportionately, because many workers were excluded from the army and navy to work in war industries. In addition, once in uniform, workers were less likely than their social superiors to be passed fit for combat duty, and until late in the war were excluded from the officer corps. As a result, the most severely depleted social groups in the 1914–18 war were the most privileged, whose marriage patterns in the immediate post-war period were distorted by the absence of marriageable men. The concept of a ‘lost generation’ of social elites who fell in the war is, therefore, not a myth, but rather a legend which had a basis in fact, but which took on a life of its own in...

America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915

Introduction: Witness to genocide Jay Winter Part I. The Framework: 1. Twentieth-century genocides Sir Martin Gilbert 2. Genocide in the perspective of total war Jay Winter 3. The Armenian genocide: an interpretation Vahakn N. Dadrian Part II. During the Catastrophe: 4. A friend in power? Woodrow Wilson and Armenia John Milton Cooper 5. Wilsonian diplomacy and Armenia: the limits of power and ideology Lloyd E. Ambrosius 6. American diplomatic correspondence in the age of mass murder: documents of the Armenian Genocide in the U.S. Archives Rouben Paul Adalian 7. The Armenian genocide and American missionary relief efforts Suzanne Moranian 8. Mary Louise Graffam: witness to genocide Susan Billington Harper 9. From Ezra Pound to Theodore Roosevelt: American intellectual and cultural responses to the Armenian genocide Peter Balakian Part III. After the Catastrophe: 10. The Armenian genocide and US postwar commissions Richard G. Hovannisian 11. Congress confronts the Armenian genocide Donald A. Ritchie 12. When news is not enough: American media and Armenian deaths Thomas C. Leonard.

The Great War and the Twentieth Century

A discussion of the causes, character and legacy of World War I, providing a framework for understanding the whole 20th century. The contributors show that World War I meant not only the dissolution of four defeated empires but also the collapse of the optimistic assumption of progress.

The Algerian War in French collective memory

From November 1954 to March 1962 French troops fought in Algeria, in order to keep Algeria a part of France. This was a conflict which, in France, was not officially termed a war at all. The end result was the independence of Algeria under the control of the FLN (National Liberation Front), and the departure for France of 1 million French people who thought life would be impossible in Algeria under the new regime. This war was arguably the longest war of decolonization, and although French forces undoubtedly were better equipped and more numerous than the Algerian fellaghas , it still cost 35,000 French soldiers their lives. However, it has disappeared from collective memory. No agency of remembrance did work to commemorate the memories of this war. Jean-Pierre Rioux pointed out this fact effectively in a paper published in 1990: ‘Since 1962’, he wrote, ‘there is no French national memory of the Algerian conflict; this un-named war never received the honours of memory.’ This chapter deals with the reasons why in France there is no public memory of the Algerian War. The Algerian War Algeria was an integral part of France. During the Second World War, de Gaulles provisional government moved from London to Algiers, where it was on French territory. It was divided into three departements and had roughly the same administration as others in metropolitan France. When needed, bureaucrats and teachers were appointed to Algerian selection boards and schools as well as to metropolitan ones by committees in the central administration. Many civil servants began their career there and later went back to France.

The working class in modern British history : essays in honour of Henry Pelling

Part I. The working class in British politics: 1. The social democratic theory of the class struggle Peter Clarke 2. Keir Hardie and the Labour Leader, 1893-1903 Fred Reid 3. Winston Churchill and the working class, 1900-14 Paul Addison 4. Expectations born to death: local Labour party expansion in the 1920s Christopher Howard 5. Post-war reconstruction in Wales, 1918 and 1945 Kenneth O. Morgan 6. Imperialism and the Labour government of 1945-51 Partha Sarathi Gupta Part II. The working class in British society: 7. Work and hobbies in Britain, 1880-1950 Ross McKibbin 8. Credit and thrift and the British working class, 1870-1939 Paul Johnson 9. Intelligent artisans and aristocrats of labour: the essays of Thomas Wright Alastair Reid 10. Anglo-Marxism and working-class education Chushichi Tsuzuki 11. Did British workers want the welfare state? G. D. H. Coles Survey of 1942 Jose Harris 12. Images of the working class since 1930 Arthur Marwick 13. Unemployment, nutrition and infant mortality in Britain, 1920-50 Jay Winter.

Some aspects of the demographic consequences of the First World War in Britain.

Summary The demographic consequences of the First World War in Britain have never been fully assessed partly on account of the lack of reliable mortality data on soldiers and civilians in the years 1914–18. In this paper, the extent of British military losses is determined and estimates of their age structure are given on the basis of the mortality experience in 1913–17 of the approximately five million men whose lives were insured by the Prudential Assurance Company. An examination of male mortality at ages 16–49 of this primarily working-class population shows both the age-incidence of war-related deaths and an improvement in life expectation for men too old for active service or combat. This latter phenomenon is related to a rising standard of living for the working class during the 1914–18 war.

Notes on the Memory Boom

Memory is in the ascendancy these days. In virtually every corner of intellectual life, there is evidence of a sea change in focus, a movement towards the analysis of memory as the organizing principle of scholarly or artistic work. Whereas race, gender and social class were foci of earlier waves of scholarship, now the emphasis is on a set of issues at the intersection of cultural history, literary studies, architecture, cognitive psychology, psychoanalysis and many other disciplines besides. What they have in common is a focus on memory.

R. H. Tawney's Commonplace Book

Richard Henry Tawney was a man of deep Christian beliefs and powerful emotions, and nowhere can we gain as full a view of his mind and temperament, of the limitations of his ideas as well as their strengths, as in the Commonplace Book or diary which he kept at Manchester from 1912 to 1914. This document is a unique record of the assumptions which supported Tawneys life long work as a socialist and as a scholar. The pattern of his historical interests and, in embryonic form, the outline of many of the arguments which he later developed in his three most influential books, The Acquisitive Society (1921), Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926), and Equality (1931), clearly emerge from the pages of this pre-war diary. He appears therein as a man engaged in the exploration of the internal world of his Christian beliefs; and also vigorously seeking to relate them to social and economic life. Though written sixty years ago, this private diary of a remarkable man of powerful moral convictions is no less pertinent today than it was then.

Socialism, Social Democracy, and Population Questions in Western Europe: 1870-1950

Winter explores the convergence of conservative and socialist views in Western Europe on population questions and discusses the gradual adoption of a similar language and similar proposals linking the socialist the center-left and nonsocialist discourse. By the late 1930s and following WWII population policy was largely a matter of family policy on whose broad outlines most political factions could agree. Most Western European socialists responded to an unprecedented demographic trend - the secular decline in fertility in all European countries starting in the 1870s and continuing up to and following WWII. Some welcomed this trend though most did not and attempted to reverse it through arguments and policies. Winter explains the strength of left-wing pronatalism through discussions of socialist politics esthetics and theory.