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The article discusses the dean from Tolmin, Monsignor Ivan Rojec (1866- 1928), who was distinguished for his work during the First World War the archdiocesan commissioner or delegate for refugees from Goriška. Despite the fact that his work was hindered and frequently misunderstood, both from the side of the state as well as the Church authorities, Dean Rojec proved himself in a time of difficult trials. He strived to lessen the misery, loneliness, and deprivation among the numerous refugees from Goriška and elsewhere who were scattered all across the Habsburg Monarchy's interior. Regardless of the fact that since the middle of 1916 he officially no longer held the above-stated function, he still visited the displaced refugees, cared for them, and tried to ease their everyday problems. He reported frequently on his work to the Ljubljana newspaper Slovenec. After the war he returned to ravaged Tolmin and took care of the restoration of the parish church, which was demolished in the war, and helped numerous locals in the process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accepted narrative of British press conduct during the First World War is highly negative. Commentators overwhelmingly agree that newspapers downplayed the horror of life in the trenches and afterwards were found to have published fabricated atrocity stories to encourage hatred of “the Hun” on a grand scale. Scholarly assessment of news coverage of women's involvement in war work is also predominantly negative, highlighting patronising and unrealistic portrayals of munitions workers and others. These narratives, however compelling, ignore sections of newspapers and other current affairs journals devoted to helping readers trying to feed families on restricted budgets with scant food, who were grieving for or caring for sons and husbands, and who were adjusting to bewildering disruptions to family life. The dominant historical narratives ignore the development of a previously unexamined form of “lifestyle” journalism and a genre of vivid features journalism focusing on lives on the “Home Front” and which helped undermine traditional boundaries between the domestic and public realms. This article asks whether “soft” genres of journalism actually better reflected the realities of wartime readers' lives, and better satisfied their need for information than propaganda-driven news pages. Assessing readers' responses to these different genres of journalism helps explain why readers can simultaneously mistrust and also enjoy their news media. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article will focus on the wartime cinema facilities provided by the philanthropic association the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). At the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, the YMCA turned its attention to supporting troops fighting for Britain and her Empire. YMCA huts were built to provide soldiers with food and a place to rest on the frontline, or at home in military camps and railway stations. Alongside the arrangements for entertainments made by the Army at Divisional level, the YMCA had a central role in providing morale-boosting entertainment and moral-strengthening education to British soldiers. Films became a central mode of entertainment for British servicemen serving on the Western Front and the Mediterranean. Cinema shows were the most popular part of the concert party programme, with many cinema halls also acting as theatres. The YMCA had 77 cinema plants, the majority of which were portable units providing free showings to men in forward positions. There were 20 specially constructed cinema theatres in principal Base Camps, each with a capacity of up to 1500 men, and towards the end of the war, the organisation estimated that it had shown films to 35,000 men for every night of the conflict. This article will show how valuable the medium of film became to the British Army in terms of morale and discipline. An effective ‘counter-attraction’ to less wholesome forms of recreation, the cinema was an essential element of wartime life for British troops serving in the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The creation of the Central Laboratory immediately after the United Alkali Company (UAC) was formed in 1890, by amalgamating the Leblanc alkali works in Britain, brought high expectations of repositioning the company by replacing its obsolete Leblanc process plant and expanding its range of chemical products. By 1914, UAC had struggled with few exceptions to adopt new technologies and processes and was still reliant on the Leblanc process. From 1914, the Government would rely heavily on its contribution to the war effort. As a major heavy-chemical manufacturer, UAC produced chemicals for explosives and warfare gases, while also trying to maintain production of many essential chemicals including fertilisers for homeland consumption. UAC's wartime effort was led by the Central Laboratory, working closely with the recently established Engineer's Department to develop new process pathways, build new plant, adapt existing plant, and produce the contracted quantities, all as quickly as possible to meet the changing battlefield demands. This article explores how wartime conditions and demands provided the stimulus for the Central Laboratory's crucial R&D work during World War One. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia is the property of Historical Association of South Africa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article discusses the role of Russian patriotic volunteer societies in Moscow and Petrograd, Russia in civilian mobilization campaigns during World War I including the Vol’noe Ekonomicheskoe Obshchestvo economic society, the Moskovskoe avtomobil’noe obshchestvo automotive society, and the Moskovskoe obshchestvo sel’skogo khoziaistva agricutlural society. The alleged necessity of patriotism in waging total war is emphasized, historiographic sources on volunteer societies including periodicals, archives, and private correspondence are analyzed, and the encouragement of patriotism by Russian political leaders is described, Information is offered on Russian government persecution of German landholder "enemy aliens" .

Although the outbreak of the First World War caused economic hardship for Britain’s professional musicians, they were still often asked to perform for free in the service of charity. The public debate about the morality of asking financially vulnerable musicians to perform without the expectation of payment led to some attempts to address these difficulties, with new programs founded expressly to help musicians in wartime Britain. Two principal organizations—the Music in War-Time Committee and the War Emergency Entertainments—proved successful in providing work for struggling musicians, either in public concerts or private performances for hospitalized soldiers, and in the process produced benefits far more complex, valuable, and far-reaching—in terms of both those employed to give the concerts and the effect on those who received them—than merely the monetary value of the sums involved. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Danubius is the property of Danubius and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In First-World-War Britain, women's ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women's Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they obtained sufficient popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike 'front' as warriors and women to the peaceful 'home' as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both 'home' and 'front' for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers' efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the Niagara Frontier Defense League (NFDL) and its effort at combating labor at the Curtiss Aeroplane & Motor Company during the Great War. Initially formed by Buffalo businessmen to monitor the region's sizeable German population, by Fall 1917, the NFDL turned its attention to tackling the region's labor problems, developing an array of covert mechanisms designed to stop unionization and regain control over Buffalo's wartime labor market. Yet, as NFDL activities at the Curtiss Aeroplane show, the League failed to accomplish its objectives and actually worked to the detriment of the company. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Alliances between American mathematics and the military were not well defined when the United States entered World War I in April of 1917. Although academic mathematicians – like other American faculty members and students – were among the strongest supporters of the cause, it took time to identify how and where to utilize their technical training in the war effort. This paper investigates the case of Alice Bach Gould, one of E H Moore's mathematics graduate students at the University of Chicago, and her efforts to support US military endeavors with her scientific expertise. Although Gould's substantial research accomplishments in Spanish archives eventually surpassed her mathematical achievements, her quest for war work in 1917 nonetheless illustrates the difficulty of contributing mathematical training to patriotic service in the United States during World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the nations that comprised the British Empire, the First World War has generally either been forgotten, as in India, as irrelevant to the achievement of political independence, or remembered, as in Canada, as the catalyst for developing a separate national identity. This article argues that both these historical interpretations ignore the extent to which the First World War was a shared British Empire experience. The article examines the establishment of the War Munitions Supply Company of Western Australia as an example of the popular movement to make artillery ammunition that swept many parts of the British Empire in 1915. The munitions movement provided an outlet for the patriotic surge that occurred in April–May 1915 in reaction to the German use of poison gas and the sinking of the Lusitania. It was also an attempt to overcome wartime economic disruption by creating a new local industry. The practicalities of cost and shipping meant that by 1917 artillery ammunition production was continued only in Britain, Ireland, and Canada, but in 1915 the Western Australian company was part of an Empire-wide movement to make munitions and support the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early twentieth-century Britain, trade unions seeking to recruit women workers to their ranks were aware of the important role that social events could play in the campaign to attract and retain members. This study examines the attempts made by two general unions, the all-female National Federation of Women Workers and the mixed-sex Workers’ Union to encourage women’s participation in trade unionism through programmes of events that might appeal to all ages and to married as well as single women. The challenge for organizers lay in ensuring that activities not only united local branches but that they deepened the roots of trade unionism amongst those women who had as yet gained little experience of the labour movement. The article considers the two unions’ approaches to the ‘social’ both before and during the First World War and questions the extent to which organizers were able to use them to encourage long-lasting union solidarity. As women sought to incorporate trade unionism into their lives, investigation into the organization and the nature of social events informs understanding of the gendered nature of work and leisure as well as of the labour movement in this period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses family history and service in the British Army during the First World War. The author reflects on his great-uncle George Eaton and his recruitment to the Territorial Force in 1910, discharge in 1914, and employment as a railway carter during the war. Other topics include conscription, reserved occupations, and trade union pressure for protected occupations.

The article discusses the relief and aid work of the Dual-Episcopal War Victims Relief Committee organized by the Bishop of Cracow, Adam Stefan Sapieha, during the First World War in Poland. The author reflects on the provisions of services related to housing, orphan care, distribution of clothing and shoes, and food relief. Relief agencies based in the communities Tarnów, Przemyśl, and Lwów are considered. Other topics include the promotion of self-help, assistance for refugees and displaced persons, and hardship for the victims of war.

This article argues that the refusal of the British authorities to explore tear gas use in the 1920s was a result of public relations fears, growing out of British abhorrence for lethal gas use in the trenches during the First World War. Despite continuing strong advocacy from individuals scattered throughout the civil and military hierarchies, and evidence of the efficacy of tear gas emanating from the United States, the British resisted the introduction and technical development of tear gas until the mid-1930s. By this time they had fallen so far behind, technically speaking, that it proved impossible to introduce a viable, British-based tear gas industry, and the British were left to introduce tear gas in tiny, hesitant, incremental steps, using equipment from the United States. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on Great Britain's Red Cross volunteers in World War I. Difficulties in explaining what drew women to offer their labor; Benedict Anderson's theory of `imagined communities'; Experiences of the women in `Voluntary Aid Detachments' (VAD); Social aspects of VADs.

Reexamines the war aims of Russia during the First World War. Enumeration of a list of specific war aims by Foreign Minister Sergei D. Sazonov; Ratification of the war aims by Emperor Nicholas II; Authenticity of Sazonov's thirteen-point program.

The article reports on the consequences of the military mobilization of the German economy between 1914 and 1916. The author states that German industrialists often clashed with the German War Ministry over issues such as manpower, steel allocations and compensation rates for materials provided to the military. The author notes that German industrialists systematically secured their own profits at the expense of national interests, ultimately crippling the war effort and contributing to Germany's defeat.

The article discusses the construction of ships, particularly wooden ships, in the Pacific Northwest during World War I. It comments on the involvement of the Emergency Fleet Corporation (EFC) and the United States Shipping Board (USSB) in ship construction. The author considers shipyards and the impact of shipbuilding on cities in the region, including Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington. The involvement of the shipbuilding company Grant Smith-Porter in the EFC wooden ship program is also addressed.

The article discusses the effect of World War I on the employment of women, and on Victorian middle class notions of feminine respectability, in England. Women's employment in prewar England, mainly as unskilled laborers, is discussed, as is the more skilled war work they performed, and their large-scale departure from the labor force after the war. Also discussed are labor statistics from 1921 indicating a small but significant expansion of employment opportunities for British women, in such areas as clerical work, the clothing trade, and domestic occupations.

The article focuses on the method of checking the escalation of international conflicts. It takes in to study account of earlier conflicts to process the method. The relations of states may be studied from the viewpoint of the world as a whole by locating states in an analytic field of which the coordinates indicate their values and their capabilities. Conflict is a particular relationship between states and may exist at all levels and in varied degrees. Conflict in a narrow sense refers to a situation in which the parties are taking action against each other. The intent of the study is to provide a rough measure of the probable motivations of the parties which induce them to escalate a given conflict, to urge a cease-fire, or to negotiate at a given stage and to test the formula which relates these motivations by applying it to estimates of the magnitude of the variables at successive stages of 45 conflicts beginning with the World War I. The study suggests that factors promoting escalation of international conflicts are perceptions of vital national interests by both parties.

The article provides a historical overview of the support and work of the Australian Red Cross and Australian Comforts Fund for the Australian troops during the World War I. It says that these organizations were formed for the benefit of the Australian troops by providing services and relief to the wounded soldiers and prisoners of war and distributing parcels to the troops. It also presents an excerpt from the book "A Woman's War," which features women on the home front during the war.