The creation of exhibits and exhibit-going have been part of popular culture for centuries and have long been hallmarks of outreach to new audiences for archival services. With the explosion of digital technologies there are many new and exciting avenues for archivists to create exhibitions to display their collections and engage with their users. Websites such as Facebook, Instagram, Tumbler and Flickr as well as increasingly diverse website functionalities have greatly contributed to a new understanding of visual literacy both within and outside the archival profession. Web 2.0 technologies and web analytics have opened up opportunities for archives to curate their records in many different ways for much larger audiences. This study will examine how visual records, specifically the archival photographs from the Lewis B. Foote fonds at the Archives of Manitoba, could be used to commemorate the First World War and shape our understanding of it. During the centennial anniversary of the war it is important to study how such images relating to this conflict might be used today to create specific narratives for understanding it through archival outreach activities such as exhibitions. This can help us rethink the aims and characteristics of archival exhibitions, thereby shedding greater light on the role of archives in creating public memory and enhancing societal understanding of archives and their relevance to important public interests. / October 2015

Horatio Lord Nelson, Britain's most famous naval figure, revolutionized what victory meant to the British Royal Navy and the British populace at the turn of the nineteenth century. But his legacy continued after his death in 1805, and a century after his untimely passing Nelson meant as much or more to Britain than he did during his lifetime. This thesis utilizes primary sources from the British Royal Navy and the general British public to explore what the cultural memory of Horatio Nelson's life and achievements meant to Britain throughout the Edwardian era and to the dawn of the First World War. An introductory literature review provides a thorough explanation of how Nelson's legacy has been perceived by past historians and how this legacy will be examined throughout the thesis. The manner in which Nelson was viewed by both his naval contemporaries and the general British public during his lifetime is then surveyed, with a specific focus on the outpouring of national grief that followed Nelson's death at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. A major portion of the thesis explores how Nelson's legacy developed throughout the century following his death. Separate studies of Nelson's professional memory among his Royal Navy successors and his cultural memory in British society as it became ever more focused on naval concerns follow; these take the thesis chronologically up through the final decades of the nineteenth century and are then combined in a discussion of the degree to which Nelson's legacy permeated all Britons, regardless of profession, in the early years of the twentieth century. The thesis concludes with a brief discussion of the impact Nelson's legacy had on Britain during the early months of the First World War and a broader analysis of how the cultural and professional memory of Horatio Nelson's naval achievements in 1805 created an atmosphere in which a naval victory decisive enough to satisfy all aspects of British society was impossible in 1914.

The orthodox narrative of the First World War, which maintains that the conflict was futile, unnecessary and wasteful, continues to dominate historical representations of the war. Attempts by revisionist historians to dispute this interpretation have made little impact on Britain’s collective memory of the conflict. The Christmas truce has come to represent the frustration and anger that soldiers felt towards the meaningless war they had been trapped into fighting. However, the Christmas truce, which at the time it occurred was seen as an event of minimal importance, was not an act of defiance, but one which arose from the unprecedented conditions of static trench warfare and the adaptation of the soldiers to that environment. An examination of contemporaneous accounts of the truce demonstrates that it was viewed by the soldiers involved as merely a brief holiday, and that British army commanders generally ignored or tolerated the truce, eventually releasing orders preventing its continuation or reoccurrence but taking no steps to punish any of the men who took part in it. A review of the letters and diaries of truce participants sheds light on the event itself, while simultaneously challenging the orthodox narrative of the First World War.

The history of the Great War has been dominated by accounts that view the War as an international conflict between nations and soldiers that contributed to the consolidation of Canadian cultural and political independence and identity. In many cases, the War has assumed a foundational—even mythic—status as integral to the building of a mature state and people. Since the 1970s, however, there has been an efflorescence of Canadian plays that have problematized traditional representations of the War. Many of these plays are set on the home front and explore the ways in which the War, in the form of disease, disaster, and intra-communal in-fighting and suspicion, invaded Canadian home space. What they suggest is that the War was not simply launched against an external enemy but that the War invaded Canadian communities and households. This dissertation examines five of these plays: Kevin Kerr’s Unity (1918), Guy Vanderhaeghe’s Dancock’s Dance, Trina Davies’ Shatter, Jean Provencher and Gilles Lachance’s Québec, Printemps 1918, and Wendy Lill’s The Fighting Days, all of which were written and published after 1970. Ultimately, it demonstrates that these plays, by relocating the War to Canadian terrain, undertake an important and radical critique; they suggest that the understanding of the War should not be restricted to overseas conflicts or Canadian national self-definition but that it should be expanded to encompass a diversity of people and experiences in domestic and international settings. At the same time, this thesis recognizes these plays as part of an emergent, bourgeoning Canadian dramatic genre, one which attests to Canadians’ continued preoccupation with the War past.

During the Great War many European armies (most notably the Russian) collapsed due to major disciplinary problems. However, the British Expeditionary Force avoided these problems up until the Armistice of November 1918. This thesis examines how the discipline and morale of the RE.F. survived the war, by using a case-study of the Irish regiments. In 1914 with Ireland on the brink of a civil war, serious questions had been raised relating to the loyalty of the Irish regiments, particularly in the aftermath of the Curragh Incident. Indeed, intelligence reports prepared for Irish Command suggested that some reserve units would defect en masse to the U.V.F. if hostilities broke out in Ireland. As the Great War progressed, the rise of Sinn Fein produced further concern about the loyalty of Irish troops, seen most vividly in the decisions not to reform the 16th. (Irish) Division following the German Spring Offensive of 1918 and to remove Irish reserve units from Ireland in 1917-18. Nevertheless, a detailed study of courts martial (studied comprehensively in a database project) recently released by the P.R.O., demonstrates that many of the fears relating to Irish troops were groundless. Certainly Irish courts martial rates tended to be high, however, these figures were inflated by cases of drunkenness and absence, not disobedience. Likewise, while a number of mutinies did occur in Irish regiments during the war, this study has revealed that mutinies were much more common in the B.E.F. as a whole, than has been previously believed. This study has also considered the discipline and morale problems caused by the rapid expansion of the British army in 1914 and the appointment of many officers, especially in the 36th. (Ulster) Division, on the basis of their political allegiances rather than professional knowledge. Nevertheless, in general it appears that the discipline and morale of the Irish units in the B.E.F. was very good. Incidents of indiscipline appear to have been caused by the practical problems facing units during training and on active service rather than by the growth of the Sinn Fein movement in Ireland.

This thesis is about the use of trees for commemoration and the memory that they have anchored in the landscape. There has been little written on the use of trees for commemorative purposes despite its symbolic resonance over the last 150 years. To determine the extent to which commemorative trees have been employed, the social practice and context in which the trees were planted, field and archival work was undertaken in New Zealand and Australia. This has been supported with some comparative work using examples from Britain and the United States of America. The research also utilizes the new availabilities of records on-line and the community interests that placed historical and contemporary material on-line. The commemorative tree has been a popular commemorative marker for royal events, the marking of place and as memorial for war dead. It has been as effective an anchor of memory in the landscape as any other form. The memory ascribed to these trees must be understood in terms of the era in which the tree was planted and not just from a distance. Over time the memory represented by the trees and its prescribed meanings, has changed. For all its power and fragility, memory is not permanent but nor is it so ephemeral as to exhibit no robustness at all. Instead memory exists in a state of instability that leaves it open to challenge and to constant reassessment based on the needs of the viewing generation. This instability also allows the memory, and thus the tree, to fade and become part of the domestic landscape of treescape memories (Cloke and Pawson, 2008). However, in some circumstances trees are retrieved and reinscribed with specific memory and made relevant for a new generation. The landscape created by commemorative trees is, therefore, multifunctional, in which social relations support memory, remembrance, forgetting, silences, erasures, and memory slippage.

The scope of this thesis falls under the title, “Woodrow Wilson, World War I and the Rise of Poland”. The author’s intention in selecting this topic is to examine the national and political re-emergence of Poland in the early twentieth century from a predominantly American perspective, as no other Western nation had played as great a hand in this “rebirth”. Covering the better part of a decade and more that begins by tracing Woodrow Wilson’s ascension to the United States presidency, the examination centres upon the extent of and reasoning behind this Wilson-led influence as wielded through the channels of foreign diplomacy with and regarding Poland. Underlining America’s first substantial foray into internal European diplomatic affairs, the study analyses, in turn, American involvement and interest in the Poles’ burgeoning drive towards self-determination and national sovereignty leading into and throughout the First World War; Poland’s weighty part in the American government’s documented preparations for peace in Europe; and Wilson’s significant personal response to the ultimately successful course of the Polish independence movement, among other European developments leading up to the war’s close. Research conducted in this exercise comprises an analysis of primarily American foreign diplomatic and domestic political sources (including considerable emphasis upon the personal papers and documents of Woodrow Wilson himself), as well as of similar Polish sources where they pertain to American interest. Furthermore, scrutiny of the diplomatic records of other nations necessarily involved in this arena of “Great Power” politics, such as Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Western Powers, adds to the inspection. The author believes that such investigation exposes the unlikely dimensions of America’s, and especially Wilson’s, critical involvement within this particular East European historical setting. In this light, Wilson’s triumphant crusading on behalf of the rights of small nations – and equally his ensuing reversal of fortunes over the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations Charter – can be seen to be embodied within the momentous revival of Poland’s independence and the subsequently rocky path of the “new” nation’s fledgling statehood.

The Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission (IWGC), founded during the 1917 Imperial War Conference, was the institution responsible for the British Empire’s war dead from the First World War. This thesis reveals Canada’s limited influence in establishing the IWGC and also during its early deliberations. This is in sharp contrast to standard historical views of Canada’s apparent national affirmation at home and abroad during the war. This thesis argues that despite Canada’s initiatives for increased autonomy over military and political matters during the First World War, this desire for independence of action was absent when exploring the case study of the IWGC. Each Dominion had a delegate in the IWGC’s governing body and the cost of the care and maintenance of the Empire’s war graves was shared between Britain and the Dominions, proportionally to their number of war dead. Canada’s share was the largest amongst the Dominions. However, the innovative imperial structure reflected in the IWGC’s organization did not translate into any equality in decision-making regarding IWGC policies. British representatives preferred a unified imperial approach, suppressing Dominion voices, and Canada’s representative rarely objected. Given the importance of the subject of military burials for bereaved families, the Canadian government’s general lack of advocacy on their behalf demonstrates Canada’s imperial mindset, which in this case overshadowed burgeoning national assertion.

In a cultural context, the First World War has come to occupy an unusual existential point half-way between history and art. Modris Eksteins has described it as being “more a matter of art than of history;” Samuel Hynes calls it “a gap in history;” Paul Fussell has exclaimed “Oh what a literary war!” and placed it outside of the bounds of conventional history. The primary artistic mode through which the war continues to be encountered and remembered is that of literature—and yet the war is also a fact of history, an event, a happening. Because of this complex and often confounding mixture of history and literature, the joint roles of historiography and literary scholarship in understanding both the war and the literature it occasioned demand to be acknowledged. Novels, poems, and memoirs may be understood as engagements with and accounts of history as much as they may be understood as literary artifacts; the war and its culture have in turn generated an idiosyncratic poetics. It has conventionally been argued that the dawn of the war's modern literary scholarship and historiography can be traced back to the late 1960s and early 1970s—a period which the cultural historian Jay Winter has described as the “Vietnam Generation” of scholarship. This period was marked by an emphatic turn away from the records of cultural elites and towards an oral history preserved and delivered by those who fought the war “on the ground,” so to speak. Adrian Gregory has affirmed this period's status as the originating point for the war's modern historiography, while James Campbell similarly has placed the origins of the war's literary scholarship around the same time. I argue instead that this “turn” to the oral and the subaltern is in fact somewhat overstated, and that the fully recognizable origins of what we would consider a “modern” approach to the war can be found being developed both during the war and in its aftermath. Authors writing on the home front developed an effective language of “war writing” that then inspired the reaction of the “War Books Boom” of 1922-1939, and this boom in turn provided the tropes and concerns that have so animated modern scholarship. Through it all, from 1914 to the current era, there has been a consistent recognition of both the literariness of the war's history and the historiographical quality of its literature; this has helped shape an unbroken line of scholarship—and of literary production—from the war's earliest days to the present day.

Historically, nationalism has been most apparent during times of conflict and struggle. During the First World War, every nation involved attempted to mobilize both industry and manpower towards the war effort. Unlike the other Belligerent Powers, Britain was encumbered by a tradition of voluntary enlistment until the introduction of conscription in 1916. This meant that the government had to convince the men of their nation to join the military. Many scholars have studied the role of recruitment posters in this historical endeavor as well as the role played by society in persuading young men to join the military. This Thesis couples both lines of historiography in order to better understand how the British government targeted a man's masculinity in order to recruit him. Victorian middle-class gendered concepts of public service, private/public spheres, fraternal obligations and ethnicity were all depicted on the surfaces of British recruitment posters. Thus this Thesis argues that the presence of these masculine markers within British recruitment propaganda suggests the British government attempted to mobilize masculinity towards winning the First World War. It also presses for a gendered view of nationalism in the historiography concerned with understanding British nationalist sentiment during the early twentieth-century. By integrating gender and nationalism into a visual analysis of various British war posters, it offers a new perspective on the government's recruitment strategies employed during the first two years of the First World War.