HY332      One Unit
Interwar worlds: the cultural consequences of the First World War

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

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A political catastrophe of global proportions, the First World War had a transformative impact on cultural life worldwide. Trench coats, jazz, shellshock, avantgarde, aerial photography, radio news, spotlights – such fashions and cultural practices were the consequence of wartime developments or technologies which had become widespread as the conflict evolved. The interwar period also transformed political life and the economy, seeing a crisis of socialist internationalism and the rise of fascism, the Great Depression, and the emergence of new but precarious democracies. This course will examine how technological, social, and political changes brought about cultural change in postwar societies, principally focusing on the transnational and global circulation of commodities, ideas, population groups, and cultural fashions between Europe and the world. Technological advancements spurned by military needs, such as radio, telephony, and photography, became available to postwar populations on a new scale. The representation of war atrocities and their impact on the human psyche created a need for new, hybrid, multilingual, and multimedia communication. Wartime disruption and change to education continued to have an impact on schools and universities in the postwar years, intensifying the global circulation of ideas. The increase in contact between previously disconnected communities, mediated as well as direct in places like prisoner of war camps, increased the exposure to different ideas, sights and sound, leading to the emergence of increasingly global cultural fashions such as jazz. Nonetheless, this globalisation of culture also went hand in hand with the growth of new forms of racist caricature and the drawing of new frontiers. The role of international and humanitarian organisations such as the Red Cross or YMCA in wartime changed the relationship between states and societies by introducing a transnational dimension to cultural provision, yet it is noteworthy that this new internationalism was neither disinterested nor did it lie ‘beyond’ ideology.

Did the war create a new, hybrid global culture? Or did it increase the global hegemony of European culture? How did America’s entry into the war affect the place of American culture in the postwar period? To what extent did the war give greater resonance to previously marginal cultural movements? How did gender norms change as a result of the permeation of military culture into what used to be the home front? Interwar culture is often associated with urban and metropolitan communities, but how did it develop in rural or distant settings? How did the new exposure to previously unfamiliar populations change political alignments and ideologies? What was the response of established parties and political institutions to the new challenges and opportunities offered by the postwar situation? Which earlier myths or historical memories were mobilised in order to cope with the war experience? The course will be organised around the close reading and interpretation of key artefacts, ideas, or works of intellectual history, whose analysis will facilitate a nuanced understanding both of the scale and the depth of cultural change brought about by the war.

20 hours of seminars in the Winter Term.
20 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn and Winter Term.

Recording of a book discussion in the AT.

Draft of a source analysis in the AT.

Annotated research bibliography in the WT.

https://encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net/search/?fq%5Bquery%5D=culture

‘From 1919 to 2019: Pivotal lessons from Versailles’, panel discussion at LSE with Margaret MacMillan, David Stevenson and Linda Yueh

http://www.lse.ac.uk/lse-player?id=4790

recording here:

http://www.lse.ac.uk/lse-player?id=4790

Documentary film series about the interwar period, Impossible Peace (dir. Michael Cove, 2019) – available online

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-lKM_PpJ3M&list=PL5CrdLrkFeV90g9cQoTchaaw6pXCCk9tr

Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring. The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston and New York, 1989)

Atina Grossman, ‘The New Woman’ (2016), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LcovM4OqR0&list=RDCMUChrvkZPNMeC6nwMzoD6Gj6w&start_radio=1&t=0

Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissariat of Enlightenment. Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky, October 1917–1921 (Cambridge, 2002)

Not available online, but as an alternative, please see Sheila Fitzpatrick’s PhD thesis on this subject, available here: https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:bd51b71a-3f9b-4498-91b1-ded6a08d66e8

Book reviews of Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923 (London, 2016)

Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, 2019)

Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed, Publishing in the First World War. Essays in Book History (Basingstoke, 2007)

Talbot C. Imlay, The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914-1960. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Book reviews of Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain and the Crisis of Civilisation [1919 - 1939] (London, 2010). See also Richard Overy’s contributions to Impossible Peace

Michael Seidman, Transatlantic Antifascisms. 1st ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

David Stevenson, 1914 - 1918: The History of the First World War (London: Penguin Books, 2012).

Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. s.l: The New Press, 2014.

Adam J. Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of Global Order, 1916-1931 (New York: Viking, 2014).

Theo Williams, Making the Revolution Global: Black Radicalism and the British Socialist Movement before Decolonisation (London ; New York: Verso, 2022).

Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Course participation (20%)

Essay (50%, 4000 words)

Literature review (15%)

Source analysis (15%)