Chapter 9 interrogates ways in which violin culture meshed with ideologies of nation, whether the political territory of Britain or any of its constituent countries (England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales). The first of four case studies analyzes how journalism sustained an imagined sense of a string-playing community across Britain. The second suggests that during World War I violin culture contributed to the idea of a united Britain through efforts to supply stringed instruments to troops for recreational use and an advertising campaign that encouraged the purchase of British-made violins at home. The third section unpacks overlaps and fusions between violin culture and traditional fiddle playing, before discussing how traditional tunes from the Four Nations were appropriated by violin culture for domestic consumption and pedagogical benefit. The final section foregrounds the repertoire of newly composed classical works for string orchestra that were conceived as expressions of national identities. Arguing that this creativity was a by-product of violin culture’s growing vitality, the chapter demonstrates how suited stringed instruments were for raising consciousness of nation(s). (172)

Schoenberg’s years in Berlin (1901–3, 1911–15, 1926–33) can be written on the city as an evolving network of people, places and institutions that shifted from the margins to the centres of cultural life, only to be erased when he left for the last time in 1933. These three periods were marked by profound changes in his life and works, mirroring the cataclysmic transformations of Berlin and Germany as a whole. This chapter sketches out the story of Schoenberg’s three Berlins, using a map for each period to chart the changing locales of his life in the city as well as the dramatically expanding artistic and cultural spheres in which he operated. While Schoenberg often embraced the image of an isolated, misunderstood prophet, the reality was a person deeply engaged with the people and places around him.

Tarai was a landmass running along an east-west axis just to the south of the Himalayan ranges and was a part of Himalayan Kumaun ecology. At the stroke of independence, the colonialists had made plans to clear the Tarai and settle it with Indian soldiers returning from World War II. The task of actual clearing fell on the sovereign Indian government as the pressure to settle refugees piled on top of the plan to settle soldiers. With the nation struggling to meet its food requirements a new vision was born to turn the Tarai into a “granary” for the province. Under these contingencies, the Tarai became a landmass wherein new settlers were encouraged to perfect the art of productive agriculture. The post-colonial developmentalist state set up a model state farm to propagate such practices. To the outside developer and modernizer, Tarai came across as empty though, in fact, it was inhabited by a limited number of hill communities and villages. As Tarai was turned into a farming land with settlers from beyond, a local democratic movement for autonomy erupted in the region that called into question the method of land settlement and transformation.

The United States, virtually alone in the capitalist world, never used labor courts during the Interwar period; existing accounts incompletely explain why US labor policy design diverged here. In the early 1920s, the weak labor policy and incoherent labor law of the United States was a widely recognized, urgent problem. The US government was newly strong and economically interventionist. There was ideological consensus on the basic features of an acceptable labor policy, but owing in part to political support for several plausible models, and unsettled partisan and intellectual alignments, the US did not make progress on labor policy in these first post-War years. Controversy over the KCIR, founded as a provocation in this debate, helps make sense of these patterns. The intellectual, legal, and political effects of the KCIR’s failure extinguished American interest in labor courts generally. Position-taking, especially reaction against the KCIR, reveals the emerging alignments that were to be crucial to the design and political realization of the unique labor policy of the New Deal.

The creation of the KCIR has often been deemed a hasty reaction to coal strikes in late 1919. Although the KCIR was proposed, debated, and brought into operation in mere weeks, it was carefully designed. Drawing from archival evidence, this chapter shows that the leading judges and attorneys in Kansas had a substantial private role in drafting the KICA. Their guidance maximized the KCIR’s overall powers of compulsion, achieved symmetry in the court’s power over labor and capital, and assured that the KCIR would pass muster in the state’s courts and weather inevitable federal litigation. This design, long on legal power but short on economic expertise, closely reflected three political beliefs shared by its designers: industrial conflict was a form of extralegal violence that a sufficiently strong government was obliged to suppress; the socially evolutionary quality of the common law made courts superior to administrative agencies in solving major policy problems; and labor unions, as a form of collective self-defense under conditions of industrial anarchy, could be superseded by a system of civil industrial justice if courts were made sufficiently accessible, fast, and inexpensive.

Chapter 1 examines the origins of the relationship between American foreign relations and the public relations industry through an examination of the promotion of World War I. Key to this is an examination of the wartime government propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information. In particular, the chapter highlights five key individuals who went on to play significant roles in connecting the public relations industry to international affairs over the next half century: Edward Bernays, Carl Byoir, John Price Jones, Ivy Lee, and Arthur Page.

This chapter examines Henry Stimson’s career and his rise to the pinnacle of the US government until his resignation as secretary of state in March 1933. It analyzes his background, the formation of his political views, and the creation of his foreign policy ideas as a committed member of the Republican Party. Specifically, it explores his tortuous relationship with the American empire and how he became an unbridled internationalist.

This chapter provides readers with an overview of the book, as well as its major argument. It argues that, while historians have traditionally treated war and military issues as temporary issues that affected American society only during wartime and had little impact on society during peacetime, the issues were, in fact, fundamental to political and cultural changes in American society during the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter also outlines how the remainder of the book will support this argument by focusing on how the relationship formed during this time between national security, education, and the cultural conception of “youth” strongly influenced young people’s educational experiences and had significant social consequences that still exist today.

This chapter examines the debates in American society surrounding the conscription of young men, particularly those under the age of majority (age twenty-one), for World War I. Before the war, men under the age of twenty-one had served in the U.S. armed services, but mainly as volunteers. The necessity to establish a selective draft system in 1917 sparked an intense debate in American society about whether minors should be drafted into the military. This chapter also explores how military training programs for soldiers were established on civilian college campuses during the war, most notably the Student Army Training Corps, and how the educational elite played an active role in doing so and established educational institutions as military training sites during wartime.

The article studies the war artifacts and military symbols, particularly bullets and tattoos, in Héctor Tobar’s novel about the Guatemalan civil war, The Tattooed Soldier (1998) and Salomón de la Selva’s testimonial poetry about World War I, El soldado desconocido (1922). Although the texts were written more than seven decades apart, the two authors’ treatments of these objects demonstrate ligatures between soldiering, disability, and the frailty of the Global North’s patriotism in Latinx narratives. They depict the effects of war on vulnerable bodies as well as the central value of the figure of the soldier. In his novel, Tobar builds on de la Selva’s poetic explorations, from the soldiers in the European trenches to the soldier turned immigrant. Their narratives capture how soldiers in global and local conflicts look for a sense of masculinity and patriotism, but instead expose the atomization and dark side of contemporary American cultures across borders. For both authors, war creates physical and psychological wounds that go unrecognized and for which the US is never held responsible. Tobar and de la Selva reveal war artifacts and militaristic symbols as original, tangible sites that expose this reality.

On the face of it, total war would seem to be fundamentally and entirely at odds with the very notion of individual freedom. Yet the relationship between the two was more complicated than that. From the beginning of World War I, much propagandistic effort went into stressing the voluntariness of military or quasi-military service. At the same time, imposing discipline on complex societies triggered major tensions, unintended effects, and subversive behaviors, allowing for some unexpected gains in personal independence. In general, military conflicts exacerbated disputes about the very meaning of freedom – both while they were being fought and when they were being anticipated or commemorated. This chapter discusses three issues: the extent to which military mobilization and enemy occupation created room for female independence, the ways in which contemporaries understood conscription and soldiers coped with it, and the various means by which Europeans endeavored to free themselves from military conflict, from muddling through to principled resistance under Nazi occupation or during the Cold War.

The Epilogue draws together the book’s various concerns by examining James’s wartime fundraising efforts on behalf of the American Volunteer Motor-Ambulance Corps, a project that demonstrates his interest in the relational and testimonial uses for transport.

During wartime, the Constitution requires the president to lead the nation as commander-in-chief. But what about first ladies? As wives, mothers, and co-equal partners, these “first ladies-in-chief” have found themselves serving as field companion to the commander-in-chief, mother-in-chief to sons on combat duty, steward of national resources, and caretakers to the nation’s wounded. This chapter considers six prominent first ladies during major American conflicts: Martha Washington and the Revolutionary War, Dolley Madison and the War of 1812, Mary Todd Lincoln and the Civil War, Edith Wilson and World War I, Eleanor Roosevelt and World War II, Lady Bird Johnson and Vietnam, and Barbara and Laura Bush during the first and second Gulf Wars. Taken together, they paint the first lady as a vital contributor to the nation’s military efforts who deserve our recognition and respect.

The chapter examines the crisis of the First World War, battlefield action, the war’s impact on patterns of domestic conflict, and the reasons for Germany’s defeat.

The chapter surveys critiques of glory. We begin with the argument that cultures of honor are deadly. This argument gives rise to theories which explain the early rise of capitalism as an attempt to swap the pursuit of fame with the (safer) pursuit of money. We also review the argument that it is grotesque to speak of glorious fighting or glorious death in the age of industrial warfare. Other critiques of glory touch on the nature of asymmetrical warfare, the actual attitudes soldiers display towards each other in battle, and the rise of drone warfare. How is it that in spite of all of these powerful critiques, the idea of glory still permeates public discourse? We suggest that the key to thinking about this puzzle might be a tendency to run together the Achillean (personal) and Periclean (political) varieties of glory.

This chapter assesses the rise of democratic constitutional rule after 1918. It covers a range of societies, but focuses on Germany, Poland and Spain. In different ways, it shows how constitutions created at this time were designed to move government away from imperialist models. However, constitutions remained enduringly attached to military organizations, and most were unsettled by military violence. Distinctively, constitutions of this period tended to weaken the partition between the sovereign nation state and the global military environment, and they resulted in governments that declared war on sections of their own populations. In such cases, governments patterned their own societies on colonial systems of organization.

This chapter explores how Britain’s indirect rule policy was adapted to suit the preference of the colonial administrators and the specific circumstances of different Nigerian societies. It argues that the reasons that account for this adaptation were because Indigenous Nigerians had solid precolonial administrative and governance systems. When the British attempted to implement radical changes, they encountered massive resistance from the local people, resulting in an attempt to solve what the British described as the “Native Question.” It further discusses how Lord Lugard proposed an indirect rule system developed from the principle of the Dual Mandate as a response to the Native Question. However, it recognizes that the indirect rule system was not unique to the British, but was also implemented elsewhere by the Portuguese in Mozambique, the French in Tunisia and Algeria, and the Belgians in Rwanda and Burundi. By implementing the indirect rule system, Britain sought to forge cooperation between the native administration and colonial government. It further traces the history of native administration which back dates to 9000 BC and demonstrates the complexities of the precolonial states (such as the Oyo Empire and Sokoto Caliphate), and their centralized and decentralized administrative systems.

The work of modernist poet and visual artist David Jones provides a retrospective vantage of the central claims of Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Jones saw the nineteenth century as a moment of breakage with the past. This rupture, according to Jones, threatens the work of the artist by depleting the sacramental meaning of reality – that is, the ability of concrete things to signify unseen spiritual depths. In both a dramatic biographical encounter with the Mass during his time on the front lines of World War I and in his subsequent art and poetry, Jones turns to liturgical forms to confront the breakage that began in the nineteenth century. Viewed from Jones’s perspective, the Romantic and Victorian interest in liturgy takes on new significance for the overarching genealogy of modernity and secularization. These liturgical fascinations intervene in – and resist – the long story of modernity’s separation of the material and spiritual, the natural and supernatural.