Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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Item CARRY ON: AMERICAN WOMEN AND THE VETERANIST-COMMEMORATION OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR, 1917-1945(2015) Finkelstein, Allison Sarah; Giovacchini, Saverio; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The commemoration of the First World War deeply impacted American culture between 1917 and 1945, and incited a contentious debate about the best forms of military memorialization. All kinds of American women participated in commemorations alongside men, the government, veterans, and the military. Even more frequently, they took part in predominantly female memorialization projects, many of which aided veterans. Organizations composed of American women who believed they served or sacrificed during the First World War defined community service and veterans advocacy as forms of commemoration that they pursued in addition to, or sometimes instead of, more permanent forms of commemoration. In keeping with women's contributions to the war effort and their Progressive era service and reform activities, many American women pursued service-based commemorative projects to serve the nation in ways normally prohibited to them because of gender-based restrictions on their citizenship. This dissertation investigates how American women who served during the First World War commemorated the conflict during the interwar period and through the end of World War Two. It employs the term "veteranist-commemorations" to describe the service-based memorialization projects these women advocated, and designates these women as female "veteranist-commemorators." Rejecting traditional monuments, female veteranist-commemorators placed the plight of male and female veterans at the center of their memorialization efforts. Women's veteranist-commemorations did not solely address veterans of strictly defined military service, but included anyone who sacrificed during the war. Female veteranist-commemorators pioneered a new form of commemoration that revolutionized American memorial practices. Their actions forced Americans to re-think their commemorative practices and provided a new way to conceptualize the definition of a memorial. Through their outspoken support of veteranist-commemorations, these women promoted a type of commemoration that included intangible actions, human bodies, and ephemeral activities as crucial, defined parts of the memorialization process. In doing so, female veteranist-commemorators changed the course of American military commemoration, even though their memorialization methods did not gain as widespread acceptance as they hoped.Item Making Meaning Together: Information, Rumor, and Propaganda in British Literature of the First World War(2012) Borden, Rebecca; Mallios, Peter L; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Through an examination of fiction by H.G. Wells, Joseph Conrad, and John Buchan, this dissertation examines information as a category as it exists under conditions of modernity, and how the contours of and changes in definitions and understandings of modern information become more visible, and are likely accelerated by, the complex information challenges brought about by the disruptions of the First World War. Given that "information" is a key building-block in understanding systems of knowledge in modernity, this dissertation incorporates theoretical constructs describing information drawn from a variety of disciplines, all of which circle around the problems and concerns of the increasingly saturated, complex, and untethered nature of information as experienced by an individual in modern life. This project also highlights the role that rumor plays in modernity. The war years bring an expansion of government-directed information control, both in the form of actively produced propaganda and in the form of censorship, disrupting the conduits along which information travels under normal conditions. Rumor, generally considered a pre-modern form of communication, remains a part of modern information systems and provides a mechanism for making meaning when other sources of information begin to fail. This dissertation also considers how "wartime" fiction, as a category distinct from pre-war and post-war fiction, is a revealing domain of literature in its own right, and one that has been overlooked in scholarship on literature of the First World War. This project focuses on once popular but long understudied wartime fiction by Wells, Conrad, and Buchan. It also compares the wartime fiction of these authors to their own pre-war fiction in order to trace how the category of information was a concern for these writers from the beginning of their careers. Further, this project explores how wartime texts contain significant elements that can be understood as pre-modern, as modern (and modernist), and as incipiently post-modern, which highlights the existence of both residual and of emerging forms and ideas during the war years, disrupting a dominant understanding of the First World War as a period of cultural and intellectual rupture.