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‘Exploring black people’s involvement in the First World War’: Free workshop reviewed

By: jsiblon
12-12-2016
British Empire, Colonial troops, Commonwealth, First World War, IWM, IWM London, Outreach, Remembrance
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John Siblon, ‘Between Hierarchy and Memory: Commemoration of African and Caribbean Servicemen after the First World War’. Photo: ©IWM

I was invited to speak at a workshop on 15 October at the Imperial War Museum, London, on black people’s involvement in the First World War. I was honoured to be part of a panel where the work of each speaker complemented one another. I was asked to present my findings on research into the commemoration of African and Caribbean servicemen after the war ended. I was also asked to give my thoughts, along with the panellist Anna Maguire, one of IWM’s PhD students, on photos from the IWM’s collection on soldiers from the British West Indies Regiment, the South African Native Labour Corps, and the Nigeria Regiment, and finally a session with questions to the panel. 

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Dirty Wars: A Century of Counterinsurgency

By: Simon Robbins
12-12-2016
IWM, Research
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Dirty Wars: A Century of Counterinsurgency by Simon Innes-Robbins ©IWM

Dirty Wars: A Century of Counterinsurgency by Simon Innes-Robbins ©IWM

It was with great delight and pleasure that I received copies of my book, Dirty Wars: A Century of Counterinsurgency, which was published by The History Press on 6 October and will be published in North America in February 2017. This is the first book written for IWM by a member of staff to fully explore the origins and continuing importance and relevance of counterinsurgency.

‘Who is the enemy?’ This is the question most asked in modern warfare; gone are the set-piece conventional battles of the past. Once seen as secondary to more traditional conflicts, irregular warfare (as modified and refashioned since the 1990s) now presents a major challenge to the state and the bureaucratic institutions which have ruled the twentieth century, and to the politicians and civil servants who formulate policy.

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Clare Carolin visits Limerick to see Still (the) Barbarians: EVA International the Irish Biennale, curated by Koyo Kouoh

By: ccarolin
03-10-2016
Art, Exhibition, Film, Ireland, Museums, Photography, Research
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EVA16_TomFlanagan and Megs Morley_A History of Stone ,Origin and Myth_2016_HD Video, Colour ,Sound Image courtesy of Tom Flanagan & Megs Morley_Photo courtesy of Tom Flanagan & Megs Morley_2 edit 2

A History of Stone, Origin and Myth (2016), Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley, Photo courtesy of Tom Flanagan and Megs Morley

‘I grew up with that border and I wouldn’t want it back again…’ intones the septuagenarian taxi driver taking me from Shannon Airport to Limerick. He is speaking of the boundary separating British-governed Ulster in the north from the Republic of Ireland, which since 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement, abolished border controls, symbolically softening an 800 year-long conflict. Now, in the aftermath of June’s referendum, the border’s return seems inevitable:  a clear indicator of the disruption to the Irish peace process resulting from Brexit.

I am visiting EVA Interantional, Ireland’s biennale of contemporary art, coinciding this year with the centenary of 1916 Easter Rising, a calamitous event, which definitively swung popular opinion against the British Administration leading to the War of Independence and the constitutional division of the country.

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Working Lives and Memories of the Home Front

By: Jessica Douthwaite
27-04-2016
1940s, Conference, Home Front, Second World War, Uncategorized
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War generates unique and unexpected experiences in civilians’ ordinary lives. But war can also exist as a surprisingly uneventful setting for everyday working lives. At the European Social Sciences and History Conference three talks encouraged me to consider ways in which war work impacted civilians’ ordinary lives through memories that reclaim, forget and negotiate popular experiences of the Second World War.

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Resistance to the First World War Conference

By: Sabine Grimshaw
15-04-2016
Collaborative Doctoral Awards, Conference, Exhibition, Film, First World War, Home Front, IWM, Literature, Medicine, Museums, Outreach, Research, Uncategorized
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 Over the weekend of 18-20 March an international conference took place in Leeds, focusing on resistance to the First World War. The conference, which I helped to organise, brought together academics, community groups, poets and storytellers from across the globe, including delegates who had travelled from Australia and the USA. The conference was envisaged following the suggestion that the prominent narratives during the First World War Centenary were limited to stories of those who had actively participated in the war effort. Stories of resistance to the war were missing from dominant narratives of remembrance and the conference sought to question what war resistance was, how acts of resistance were undertaken, and the significance of war resistance today. The presence of both academic and community focused research on resistance worked particularly well in addressing the many different facets of resistance; including the theoretical underpinnings of pacifism, international and transnational movements for peace, individual acts of conscious and unconscious resistance as well as national and local networks of resistance.

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Fighting Extremes: From Ebola to ISIS

By: mbrosnan
19-02-2016
Exhibition, Film, IWM, IWM London, Medicine, Photography, Terrorism
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Image of British Army Personnel in Sierra Leone

Since 2009 IWM has been running a project to collect the experiences of British military personnel serving in contemporary conflicts. Until last year, the dominant experience was the war in Afghanistan. But as this conflict began to draw down, British forces were deployed to help with other pressing concerns.

The latest IWM display, the fourth in the Contemporary Conflicts Programme, focuses on two different, concurrent deployments. Operation Gritrock was the British military’s contribution to the Ebola crisis in Sierra Leone. Operation Shader is the British element of the fight against ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham), the Islamic extremist group, in the Middle East.

As with the previous displays, Fighting Extremes utilises material gathered directly from personnel who have served on these operations. The IWM team has conducted interviews and gathered film footage, photographs and other artefacts at locations ranging from Cyprus to Belfast. A selection of this material forms the basis of the new display.

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‘The Day After’ 1983: real and imagined nuclear attack in the Cold War

By: jbulgin
11-02-2016
Art, Cold War, Film, Literature, Post-War, Research
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On the evening of November 20 1983, 100 million Americans settled down to watch Nicholas Meyer’s made-for-TV film The Day After. The film’s focus was a familiarly normal community in rural Eastern Kansas in the lead up to, and aftermath of, nuclear war. It is shocking and arrestingly bleak viewing; moreover it was, and remained for years afterwards, the most highly rated TV film in US broadcast history. Its importance however, lies less in its status as a landmark media event than in what it demonstrates about the cultural imagination in the 1980s. The deterioration in relations between NATO and the Warsaw Pact raised for a new generation the meaningful prospect of nuclear apocalypse. The Day After is only one example of a notable manifestation of a contemporaneous burgeoning – and now largely forgotten – paranoia in the popular culture of the time. It’s my conviction – and the focus for my PhD research – that such fictional responses don’t just reflect the paranoia that was a product of the period, but that that they ultimately made a necessary and significant contribution to the eventual outcome.

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The Imperial War Museum Sound Collection

By: arichards
06-01-2016
British Empire, Cold War, IWM, Post-War, Research, Uncategorized
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As we look forward to the New Year and begin to plan the various projects which will keep us busy over 2016, it is always useful to take a step back and consider the progress already made.  For over forty years, IWM has preserved one of the most important sound archives of its kind in the world.  Established in 1972, the Department of Sound Records, as it was then called, was an offspring of the museum’s Library which at that point included a handful of gramophone records.  The following decades saw the collection grow in size until, following a major restructuring in 2010, it was merged with the Department of Documents to form the Documents and Sound Section, with myself appointed as the new Section Head.

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Remembering Far East Captivity and the Aftermath: 70 Years On

By: Lizzie Oliver
17-10-2015
1940s, British Empire, Collaborative Doctoral Awards, Conference, Memorials, Project, Remembrance, Research, Second World War
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Former POWs, Internees and the widows of POWs.

Special guests at June’s conference: former POWs (from bottom right: George Reynolds, Tom Boardman and Bob Hucklesby); FEPOW widow (Merle Hesp); and former internees (from top left: internees Els and Connie Suverkropp, Romee Hindle, and Olga Henderson). Courtesy of LSTM/Brian Roberts.

2015 has been a poignant year. Seventy years after the end of the Second World War, veterans and their families came together throughout the summer to reflect, remember and renew their commitment to sharing the stories of wartime.

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Popular History, Publicity and Film at IWM

By: Rebecca Coll
09-10-2015
Film, Film Festival, First World War, IWM, IWM London, Second World War
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In a frame from the film THE TRUE GLORY, a British Army Film and Photographic Unit cameraman and photographer, Sgt Mike Lewis, is caught on camera as he films the burial of the dead following the liberation of the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. (c) IWM FLM 1232

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, staff at IWM engaged with popular forms of history in order to publicise its collections, exhibitions and research facilities. In particular, the use of film in understanding history was increasingly significant in attracting public audiences, and as a subject for debate in universities.

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