The Great War, Memory and Ritual: Commemoration in the City and East London, 1916-1939 (Royal Historical Society Studies in History New Series) (Volume 23) - Hardcover

Connelly, Mark

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0861932536 ISBN 13: 9780861932535

Publisher: Royal Historical Society, 2001

Synopsis

The modern idea that the Great War was regarded as a futile waste of life by British society in the disillusioned 1920s and 1930s is here called into question by Mark Connelly. Through a detailed local study of a district containing a wide variety of religious, economic and social variations, he shows how both the survivors and the bereaved came to terms with the losses and implications of the Great War. His study illustrates the ways in which communities as diverse as the Irish Catholics of Wapping, the Jews of Stepney and the Presbyterian ex-patriate Scots of Ilford, thanks to the actions of the local agents of authority and influence - clergymen, rabbis, councillors, teachers and employers - shaped the memory of their dead and created a very definite history of the war. Close focus on the planning of, fund-raising for, and erection of war memorials expands to a wider examination of how those memorials became a focus for a continuing need to remember, particularly each year on Armistice Day. Dr MARK CONNELLY is Reuters Lecturer in Media History, University of Kent.

About this title

About the Author:

Professor of Modern British Military History, University of Kent

Review:

A very good and very readable detailed case study. ARMCHAIR AUCTIONS The war memorials of the 1914-1918 war are to be found everywhere in the British Isles (.) Through the meticulous scholarship of Mark Connelly, we can once again hear the voices of those who created them. ENGLISH HISTORICAL REVIEW A deep knowledge of memoirs, newspaper files, and local archives enables Connelly to show the communitarian codes that underlay the war memorial movement as well as the conflicts and divisions these activities occasioned. ALBION

About this edition

• Publisher: Royal Historical Society
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0861932536
• ISBN 13: 9780861932535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 271