This study explores how young people's engagement with history outside of the classroom shapes the development of their historical consciousness. Drawing on public discourses around the First World War (WW1), I address the implications of this engagement for history teachers and young peoples' learning. Recognising the active and dynamic construction of memory and meaning by young people, I develop the concept of social remembering. Building on socio-cultural perspectives, I examine the 'lived experience' of young people's memory work. Using WW1 as a context, and adopting an innovative mixed methods approach, the research was conducted over two stages. The first stage of the research used a quiz and survey to explore the extent and nature of young people's social remembering. In the second stage of the study I examined young people's memory work outside the classroom. I worked with several small groups of students to construct their own ethnographic accounts of societal and familial remembering and their emerging historical consciousness, fashioning these into ethnographic portraits. The research highlights the role that social remembering plays in young people's identities, including the ways in which they value and use history, attribute historical significance to events and orientate themselves in time. It shows how different forms of social remembering can both include or exclude young people and impact positively or negatively on young people's historical consciousness. An understanding of social remembering outside the classroom can support history teachers in the development of pedagogies that build on students' meaning making associated with public events such as commemorations. I argue that teachers can use the intersections between social remembering and disciplinary history to engage and support students in their study of history. Although the study originated within the context of history education, it has wider value, offering a ground breaking methodological approach to exploring young people's understandings of the past and in contributing to the historiography of historical memory.

In terms of the British Army in the Great War, the study of whether or how the army learned has become the dominant historiographical theme in the past thirty years. Previous studies have often viewed learning and institutional change through the lens of the 'learning curve', a concept which emphasises that the high command of the British Army learned to win the war through a combination of trial and error in battle planning, and through careful consideration of their collective and individual experiences. This thesis demonstrates that in order to understand the complexities of institutional change in the Great War, we must look beyond ill-defined concepts such as the learning curve and adopt a more rigid framework. This thesis examines institutional change in the British First Army in the 1915 campaign on the western front. It applies concepts more commonly found in business studies, such as organisational culture, knowledge management and organisational memory, to understand how the First Army developed as an institution in 1915. It presents a five-stage model - termed the Organisational Development Model - which demonstrates how the high command of the First Army considered their experiences and changed their operational practices in response. This thesis finds that the 'war managers' decision-making was affected by a number of institutional and personal 'inputs' which shaped their approach to understanding warfare. This thesis examines the manner in which new knowledge was created and collated in the immediate post-battle period, before studying how the war managers considered new information, disseminated it across the force and institutionalised it in the organisation's formal practices, structures and routines. In a broad sense, this thesis does three things. First, by examining how the army learned it moves beyond standard narratives of learning in the British Army in the Great War and highlights the complex interplay between personal and institutional learning processes. Second, by focusing on institutional change in the 1915 campaign, it sheds new light on an understudied yet crucial part of the British war experience. Finally, in creating the Organisational Development Model, it provides a robust platform on which future research can be built.

This thesis – ‘Cinema on the Front Line: A History of Military Cinema Exhibition and Soldier Spectatorship during the First World War’ - provides an overview and examination of an element of British cinema history that remains largely undocumented within the disciplines of Film Studies and military history. Built upon highly original and extensive research, the thesis documents how the cinema intersected with the lives of British and dominion soldiers at practically every stage of their military career: from recruitment drives to the front line and, finally, in the convalescent hospitals and camps that attempted to rehabilitate an entire generation. By bringing this largely unknown history to light, the thesis dismantles many previously held assumptions regarding British cinema exhibition during the First World War, documenting how a significant percentage of the cinema-going public – British soldiers – still engaged with cinema entertainment outside of the commercial theatrical venue. As a study of historical exhibition, it documents the scale and orchestration of the British Expeditionary Force’s implementation of cinema entertainment on the Western front between 1914 and 1918. Significantly, it is also argued that, as a historically specific demographic, British soldiers represented an actively discerning and uniquely positioned body of wartime spectators, particularly in relation to the output of topical films and newsreels which purported to document the realities of the conflict. Accounting for this hidden history of wartime film spectatorship within extraordinary and unconventional sites of exhibition, the thesis challenges established ideas regarding the practices and concerns of film exhibitors, the behaviour and preferences of wartime audiences, and the significance and impact of the material conditions in which films were exhibited.

abstract: In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, Britain developed and deployed the first military tanks on a battlefield, signifying a huge step forward in the combination of mechanization and the military. Tanks represented progress in technical and mechanical terms, but their introduction to military goals and military environments required the men involved to develop immaterial meanings for the tanks. Tactically, tanks required investment from tank commanders and non-tank commanders alike, and incorporating tanks into the everyday routine of the battlefront required men to accommodate these machines into their experiences and perspectives. Reporting the actions of the tanks impelled newspapers and reporters to find ways of presenting the tanks to a civilian audience, tying them to British perspectives on war and granting them positive associations. This thesis sought to identify major concepts and ideas as applied to the British tanks deployed on the Western Front in the First World War, and to better understand how British audiences, both military and civilian, understood and adopted the tank into their understanding of the war. Different audiences had different expectations of the tank, shaped by the environment in which they understood it, and the reaction of those audiences laid the foundation for further development of the tank. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis History 2018

The Church of England was at a crossroads in 1914 as the First World War began. The war was seen as an opportunity to revitalize it and return it to its role of prominence in society. In comparison to other areas of study, the role of the Church of England during this time period is inadequately examined. Primary sources including letters, diaries, contemporary newspaper accounts and pastors' sermons were used. Also secondary sources provided background and analysis about the people, events and movements of the time. A handful of papers and journal articles that specifically dealt with a particular aspect of the research provided some analysis. This thesis examines the Anglican Church as the war began and during the war both domestically and at the front in order to judge the response it made to the war.

130,000 Canadian soldiers were wounded or made ill in the First World War and this is reflected in Canadian fiction of the interwar years. The portrayal of wounded servicemen in fiction went beyond the usual stereotypes of the disabled as either victims or monsters. The First World War is often claimed as the defining moment of English-speaking Canadian history. The country’s national myth asserts that Canadians’ toil and sacrifice in the fields of Flanders commanded international respect, promoted patriotic pride and assured its status as an independent country. Both the men who gave up their health for the attainment of these goals, and the literature that documented those events have been given short shrift in literary analysis. This thesis hopes to partially redress that imbalance. The impact of enlistment, trauma, moral and physical danger and civilian disability affected wounded soldiers’ identity formation. The disabled soldier’s body challenged the construction of masculinity, heroism and male and female roles at a period in history when gender relations were perceived as intensely changeable. Authors used disabled soldiers to express the struggle to construct a national identity while Canada was caught between “mother” England and “big brother” United States. Representations of disability exposed exclusionary attitudes to non-white immigrants and indigenous populations. Despite the racist attitudes of the Anglo-Saxon elite, that same group claimed nationhood and moral authority based upon Canada’s treatment of the returned soldier. Myths of Canadian landscape informed the portrayal of the healing powers of the bush, reinforcing notions of Canada as wilderness. Just as Canadian citizens in the postwar years were confronted with limping, coughing, blinded or even paralyzed young men in the streets of their cities, Canadian authors exposed these same injuries in the pages of their novels. For a period in Canadian literature, the experiences of the disabled were imagined, again and again. While such imaginings were not always progressive or enlightened, they nonetheless gave a prominent role to disabled people and generally portrayed them in a positive, if not a heroic, light.

This dissertation addresses early British intelligence activities and Anglo-Ottoman relations by viewing the activities of army officers and private individuals as a collective pursuit to safeguard British imperial interests. It offers a new understanding of the relationships between intelligence, grand strategy, and diplomacy before the Great War. It also examines the role that pre-1914 intelligence played in that conflict. The Boer War had shown that the geographic expanse of the British Empire was a source of strategic danger as well as a foundation of global power. The revelation of weakness propelled Britain to begin collecting intelligence on possible sources of conflict in preparation for the next war. A 1906 border incident between Egypt and Turkey marked turning points in Anglo-Ottoman relations and British intelligence efforts. Intelligence began to focus on railways that threatened Britain’s commercial position, on the disposition of Arab tribes who might revolt against Turkish authority, on the state of the Turkish army, and on the extent of European activity in Turkey. In 1914, British policy in the Middle East was unco-ordinated. Needing an effective means of combatting the Turco-German Jihad proclaimed in 1915, London created the Arab Bureau as an advisory organ based in Cairo. It became the central repository for much of the intelligence gathered before 1914. Officials in Cairo and London created new maps, compiled route reports, and assembled intelligence handbooks for distribution. Once the Arab Revolt began in 1916, intelligence helped marshal Britain’s resources effectively in pursuit of victory. Placing pre-1914 intelligence in the context of British imperial concerns extends our understanding of Anglo-Ottoman relations by considering strategic and diplomatic issues within a single frame. It demonstrates the influence of the Boer War in initiating intelligence-gathering missions in the Ottoman Empire, showing that even those undertaken before the establishment of a professional intelligence service in 1909, although lacking organization, were surprisingly modern, and ultimately successful. Analysis of under-utilized sources, such as the handbooks created by the Arab Bureau and the Royal Geographical Society, demonstrates the value of pre-war intelligence in detailed ways. It deepens understanding of the role British intelligence played in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and shows how one nation’s intelligence, military, and diplomatic bodies operated separately and collectively in an era that presented them with unprecedented challenges and opportunities.

This research examines the relationship between masculinity and recruitment at the University of Toronto during the Great War. Through a gendered framework established by historians such as Judith Butler, masculinity is approached as a constructed process that encompasses a variety of complex relationships between the individual subject and social processes. The following questions are explored: What motivated the administration the University to instate policies that first encouraged, and then forced, male students to enter active service? How did dominant discourses of masculinity influence recruitment efforts and the subsequent movement towards mandatory military training? The research reveals that gendered understandings of war and recruitment on campus presented active service as the defining moment of manhood. Enlisting, then, was understood as more than a willingness to take up arms; it publicly signified that a man was committed to the defense of democracy and to securing the freedom of generations to come.

This thesis outlines the development of Royal Flying Corpss (RFC) training programme from 1912 to 1918. It is based largely on archival sources from the National Archives and Imperial War Museum (London) and the Bundesarchiv (Freiburg, Germany). It considers the changes to the theoretical, practical and in-flight instruction methods used by the Royal Flying Corps. Within this discussion it analyzes the difficulties encountered by the RFC while attempting to train their aviators. It argues that initially the training programme was a detriment to British war effort in the air, as many pilots entered combat without sufficient training. This, however, was not the result of a flawed training regimen. Actually, the RFC training programme remained in tune with the realities of the war over the Western Front. The problems encountered by the RFC were largely the result of the circumvention or ignorance of the training programme by instructors. Nevertheless, British pilot training improved as the war went on both theoretically and practically and ultimately became more efficient than the training programmes in France and Germany. It pays special attention to the use of dual-control aircraft for the purposes of training and the positive effects these changes had on the British war effort. It also touches on some thematic issues such as gender, individuality, modernity and technology.

The allotments scheme was a complex and diverse social, political, and economic movement that provided the labouring classes with small plots of land, usually no larger than one-eighth of an acre, on which to grow vegetables. From the late nineteenth century to the end of the First World War in 1918, the East End of London experienced an overwhelming increase in allotment cultivation and provision. Working-class men in the boroughs of Hackney, Poplar, East Ham, and West Ham participated in the allotments scheme for a variety of reasons. Allotments were places in which a working man could grow his own food with his familys help to supplement low, casual or seasonal wages, and his gardening kept him out of the pub and on the land. During the war period, food prices increased to intolerable levels in the East End so that the allotment was one of the few ways to reasonably feed the family, especially for the casual dockers. East Enders maintained personal and collective connections to the land that they had lost both through the Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the urban sprawl of the early twentieth century. Finally, allotment gardening provided the healthy leisure activities of exercise, horticultural education, and civic participation. </p><p>The allotment was embedded in a social ethic that espoused industriousness, sobriety, respectability, and independence and in this way was a middle class solution to a working class problem. Yet, working men adopted the scheme as their own with enthusiasm and dedication and created natural spaces in the degraded landscape of the East End. By 1916, with the passage of the Cultivation of Lands Order, the East End boasted thousands of allotments growing vegetables on Londons vacant lots largely due to the persistent demands of residents on their local borough councils. The allotment association provided East End men with an unparalleled opportunity for grassroots political participation and gave way to a marked increase in working-class political awareness during the period. East Enders gained a foothold in local, regional, metropolitan, and later national politics for the first time in decades. The allotment in the East End also significantly changed the environment in which it was situated. The green space improved the esthetic of the area, adding to the general well-being of all of the boroughs citizens. East End allotments brought life to an area that many believed was lifeless. Not only did working men prove they could bring their sooty surroundings to life, but that they could also bring back to life the long-latent self-sufficiency of their ancestors. They were attracted to the scheme at a higher rate than many of the other 28 London boroughs because of their poverty, their maintained connection to green space, their cultural and political interest in land, and their profound sense of the loss of the land and the independence it brought.