This dissertation examines how progressive era social scientists thought about African American workers and their place in the nation’s industrial past, present, and future.Progressives across the color line drew on a common discourse of industrial evolution that linked racial development with labor fitness. Evolutionary science merged with scientific management to create new taxonomies of racial labor fitness. I chart this process from turn of the century actuarial science which defined African Americans as a dying race, to wartime mental and physical testing that acknowledged the Negro as a vital -albeit inferior- part of the nation’s industrial workforce. During this period, African Americans struggled to prove their worth on the shop-floor, the battlefield, and the academy. This thesis contends that the modern Negro type- African Americans as objects of social scientific inquiry- which came of age in the post-World War Two era, was born in the draft boards, factories, trenches, hospitals, and university classrooms of the Progressive Era.

There is an abundance of historical and anecdotal material relating to the experiences of the Australian soldier during World War 1. These soldiers were conscious both during and after the war that their contribution was important and that it was recognised as such by Australian society at large. Conversely there is an almost total absence of historical or anecdotal material about the role of the Australian nurse who served during this same conflict. Whether these nurses had the same degree of consciousness, either during or after the war, that their contributions were valued or seen as important by Australian society remains, largely, unknown. This thesis attempts to redress, in part, this absence by telling the story of a nurse, Jessie Tomlins, who served in the Australian Army Nursing Service during this period. At the same time specific aspects of the historical events surrounding World War One will be explored. Jessie Tomlins served, first as a Staff Nurse and later as a Sister, in the 14th Australian General Hospital in Egypt during 1916. At the same time her brother, Fred Tomlins, was already serving in the 1st Australian Light Horse Regiment and spent the entire four years of World War 1 in Palestine and Egypt. At the end of 1916 their younger brother, Will Tomlins, also joined the Army and became a member of the Anzac Mounted Division. The letters, postcards and photographs that Jessie, Fred and Will sent home to their mother and family, as well as Fred's fourteen diaries, form the foundation of this thesis. This thesis provides a meaningful snapshot of one woman from rural Australia who completed her nurse training during the war and then served her country during one of the most brutal periods of humankind. Her own words clearly tell the story of her war time experiences whilst, at the same time, conveying her expectations, prior to, during and after, this event. The development of the Australian Army Nursing Service, as it affected Jessie, over this period is also considered. It will be demonstrated that whilst ordinary men, soldiers, were at the military front line so too were ordinary women, nurses. The thesis will provide support for the contention that the contribution of Australian nurses in World War One, especially that of the ordinary nurse caring for the ordinary soldier, has been poorly recorded and as a result remains under-valued.

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.

This study compares Erik Goos’s memories of World War I to what two Swedish school books in history, Historia 1b and Möt historien 1b, write about the war. Erik was born in Germany in the year of 1900 but moved with his family to Sweden as a young boy. At the age of 15, Erik got an apprenticeship at a German clothesdealer in Rödding. 1918 was the year Erik got summoned to the military service which meant he never really got out to war until the war was over. What he did experience was the November Revolution in Germany towards the end of the war. The text books used in Swedish high school describe the events of the war chronologically in a way that is easy to survey. Because of the limited space in the school books there is less focus on the individual person and more of an overview of the whole war and its consequenses. Möt historien 1b is slightly more nuanced in its contents than Historia 1b. Möt historien 1b includes material from several different sources, for example letters from individuals who fought in the war. A story as the one told by Erik is a great example of a source that the Swedish curriculum would do well to integrate into their history lessons.

In this dissertation, I study three key aspects related to the causes and consequences of the onset of the Age of the Masses. I do so by drawing evidence from historical natural experiments and historical data from the early Twentieth Century from the United States and Italy. In the first chapter, I leverage the expansion of radio networks in the United States to identify the impact of access to mass media on cultural homogenization. Exploiting exogenous variation in radio signal reception induced by soil characteristics and stations' tower growth over time, I provide evidence that network access homogenized American culture. Homogenization occurred through the assimilation of white immigrant and black households towards mainstream white native culture. Focusing on names from baseball players, I suggest that aspirational naming is a key mechanism to explain certain features of the results. In the second chapter, I study the impact of World War I on Mussolini's electoral success. I collect military fatalities for the universe of Italian municipalities, which is matched to municipal level voting in the 1924 election. I find that a higher share of fatalities increased the vote share for Fascism. I decompose the effect of the fatalities rate by its intensity to show that the number of fatalities interacted positively with the number of veterans back from the frontline. I interpret this as evidence that Fascist support was driven by municipalities where the high number of fatalities was matched by veterans scarred by the war experience. The last chapter looks at the role of child labor legislation (CLL) in lowering child labor rates in the United States. Turning to the newly-digitized complete count census data from 1880 to 1930, we find large effects of CLLs on child labor. While the laws reduced labor of boys and girls equally, the laws did had differential effects, binding in urban areas and especially in the largest cities and more for the children of foreign-born parents. Children with parents working in manufacturing and textiles were especially affected by the labor restrictions. CLLs had limited effects on the odds of African American boys or girls working.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, American culture has experienced a renewed interest in pandemic events, including the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918-1919. Based on research carried out in cemeteries and monuments in Salt Lake City, Utah, this paper compares commemoration practices relating to the Spanish Influenza pandemic and the simultaneous events of First World War within the city. Such research provides evidence that warfare enjoys a greater presence in places of social memory than does disease, suggesting an inequality in the cultural value placed on different causes of death. This outcome is the result of numerous factors and continues to impact the relationship between memory, disease, and American society today.

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The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the interplay between the technology, tactics and organisation of the First AIF. Warfare in the twentieth warfare is characterised by the presence of certain technologies that give it a distinctive nature and which first appeared in the Great War. It was in the Great War that the highly dispersed form of tactics that we know today emerged. Thus, it is a natural starting point not only for the examination of warfare in the era of technology but for considering the nature of technological change itself. My Australian perspective enabled issues to be looked at to a depth that would not be possible in a work of this length with a broader view. I have argued that the Great War was characterised by the problem of trench warfare, and I have traced the progress of tactical, technological and organisational developments that ultimately supplied the solutions. I have also shown how the Great War was not only a war of technology in which new technologies were introduced and developed, but also one which saw the spread of new ways of thinking about military technology. In preparing this thesis, I have inspected the actual battlefields in France, Belgium and Turkey. I have drawn on a broad range of published material, but the thesis is largely based upon the primary documents found in the Australian War Memorial and Australian National Archives.