Special Issue "War/Wars and Society"
QuicklinksA special issue of Societies (ISSN 2075-4698).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 June 2012
Special Issue Editor
Guest Editor
Dr. Michael H. Creswell
Department of History, 401 Bellamy Building, 113 Collegiate Loop, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306-2200, USA
E-Mail: mcreswell@fsu.edu
Phone: +1 850 644 9532
Fax: +1 850 644 6402
Interests: Cold War; diplomatic history; military history; strategy
Special Issue Information
War has been with humankind even before recorded history. Over the centuries, conflict has touched all corners of the globe, while its scope and regularity have continued even after the advent of civil society. During this time, we have come to understand that the effects of war extend beyond the battlefield. Indeed, we now know that war affects each of us, sometimes in unique personal ways, other times in a shared experience. At a mass level, war shapes our educational systems, our industries, our entertainment, our medical services, our gender structures, and our politics. It is also associated with poverty, colonization, genocide, and systematic exploitation. At the individual level, war has touched millions, including combatants who bear physical, emotional, and psychological wounds, as well as their friends and families who seek to care for them. The cost of war is incalculable, as there is no way to put a price on loss and suffering. One of our collective goals ought to be to try to better understand the nexus of war and society before we embark upon new wars and to better adapt to past and current conflicts. This special issue offers a critical insight into war and society and how each one has affected the other in both the past and the present. Contributors will examine various aspects of war and society, including art, memory, and perceptions of femininity and masculinity, in ways that will enlighten us all.
Professor Michael H. Creswell
Guest Editor
Submission
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Societies is an international peer-reviewed Open Access quarterly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. For the first couple of issues the Article Processing Charge (APC) will be waived for well-prepared manuscripts. English correction and/or formatting fees of 250 CHF (Swiss Francs) will be charged in certain cases for those articles accepted for publication that require extensive additional formatting and/or English corrections.
Keywords
- War and Society
- Civil-Military Relations
- War Refugees
- Racial, Ethnic, and Gender Integration of Armed Forces
- Wartime Propaganda and Censorship
- War Memorials and Remembrance
- The Home front
- Domestic Mobilization
- Security and Civil Rights
Published Papers
Planned Papers
Title: Circuits of Memory: War Commemoration in Western Australia
Author: John Stephens
Affiliation: Department of Architecture and Interior Architecture, School of Built Environment Humanities, Curtin University; E-Mail: j.stephens@curtin.edu.au
Abstract: Some academic circles in the 1980s felt that as the numbers of soldiers of the world wars diminished over time so would the observance of Anzac Day in Australia. Declining attendances at war remembrance ceremonies on Anzac Day and interest in war commemoration echoed this. Contrary to expectations there has been a steady rise in eagerness for war memory in Australia over the past three decades manifest in media on war and increasing attendances at Anzac Day services. Rather than dying out, ‘Anzac’ is being reinvented for new generations. Emerging from this phenomenon has been a concomitant rise in war memorial and commemorative landscape building across Australia fuelled by government funding and our relentless search for a national story. Many more memorial landscapes have been built in Western Australia over the past thirty years than at the end of either of the World Wars, a trend set to peak in 2014 with the Commemoration of the Anzac Centenary that is largely driven by the federal government. This paper examines the origins and progress of this boom in memorial building in Western Australia and argues that these new memorial settings establish ‘circuits of memory’ which ultimately re-enchant and reinforce the Anzac renaissance.
Title: Vocalizing the Angels of Mons: Audio Dramas as Propaganda in the Great War of 1914 to 1918
Author: Tim Crook
Affiliation: Department of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; E-Mail: t.crook@gold.ac.uk
Abstract: Audio drama narrative, playwriting, performance and production prior to the onset of the ‘Radio Age’ underwent a pioneering development in its technology and aesthetics during the Great War in the service of propaganda. Entertaining story telling through dramatic performance in front of the early microphones was mobilized for the purposes of producing recruitment and patriotic endorsement records, primarily produced in Great Britain and USA, but also in Germany.
This represents one of the first key phases of pre-recorded sound propaganda and generates a discourse on the links between dramatic story telling, music, mythology, and military and political objectives that include: making military service for the nation, particularly in Great Britain, aspirational and spiritually empowering through original mythologizing, and heroic rather than horrific.
The paper identifies some of the creators, producers, writers and performers; hitherto lost to history. Some had no apparent dramatic and aesthetic connections with contemporary theatre, film and media, but the propagandist opportunity in the new technology of sound war manifested itself in sophisticated development of audio drama writing, directing and production techniques that would be mirrored, reflected and developed by the BBC after 1922.
78 inch records fanned, ventilated and extended the propagandist myth of the Angels of Mons through drama and song. It is argued by scholars that the legend was primarily a mass newspaper propagandist invention to transform the potential perception of defeat and retreat from Mons in 1914 into resistance, victory, and proof that God and Christianity were on the side of Great Britain and France. Other recordings recognized the need for changing social attitudes to war to recognize the shift in the morality and technology of conflict
Last update: 18 May 2012