Over the last fifty years, the previously dominant military interpretations of the First World War have increasingly lost their ascendancy, and understandings of this event have been broadened through the addition of social, economic and cultural scholarship of the conflict. These have frequently sought to locate and retrieve the missing voices and unheard stories of groups and individuals, and to assess the long and short-term consequences of the War. Yet such attempts can be considered to be fundamentally flawed, for they fail to recognise that the aim of clarifying the national experience of war cannot be achieved without recognition that the conflict was also experienced diversely as a regional conflict, and that responses to it were therefore shaped by a regional identity. This oversight has resulted from the establishment of a hierarchy in the social sciences in which 'the national' and 'national identities' have been elevated as an area for research whilst conversely the concepts of 'the region' an.d 'regional identities' have largely remained stagnant. This study therefore initially explores the significance, complexities and contradictions of the concept of regional identity within historical research through taking an interdisciplinary approach to create a methodology for its exploration. This methodology is then applied in an analysis of the region and spatial identities of Hull in East Yorkshire in the period prior to the outbreak of the First World War and subsequently during the voluntary recruitment campaigns of 1914 to 1916. This research reveals that, rather than the response to war being dominated by a national spatial identity, the sense of regional identity was of far greater significance in shaping the organisation and rhetoric of recruitment campaigns than current scholarship on the First World War would suggest.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:487559 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Townsley, Helen |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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