The war in History and the History of war (original) (raw)
War Culture in the First World War: on the Portuguese Participation Presentation
e.Journal of Portuguese History, 2013
In Penser la Grande Guerre, Antoine Prost and Jay Winter produced a substantial analysis of World War I historiography. Seeking to go beyond national boundaries and outline the general changes in this historiographical process, the authors condensed this fluid movement into three major configurations, “The first ... explains the history of decisions by the actors, and the second by the issue of social forces; the latter makes culture the driving force of history and finds in it its own explanations. Representations determine actions”. After the 1960s, when war began mainly to be analyzed by social perspectives, rather than by the narrower approach of political and military history that had prevailed until then, the 1980s brought some important research into the history of war culture and war memories. In this transition, George L. Mosse proclaimed that “[t]he time has come to go beyond the study of [...] elitist groups to a more thorough investigation of popular practices and sentim...
The First World Empire. Portugal, War and Military Revolution
Routledge, 2021
This book offers a comprehensive overview of the early modern military history of Portugal and its possessions in Africa, America, and Asia from the perspective of the Military Revolution historiographical debate. The existence of a military revolution in the early modern period has been much debated within international historiography and this volume fills a significant gap in its relation to the history of Portugal and its overseas empire. It examines different forms of military change in specifically Portuguese case studies, but also adopts a global perspective through the analysis of different contexts and episodes in Africa, America, and Asia. Contributors explore whether there is evidence of what could be defined as aspects of a military revolution, or, alternatively, whether other explanatory models are needed to account for different forms of military change. As such, it offers the reader a variety of perspectives that contribute to the debate over the applicability of the Military Revolution concept to Portugal and its empire during the early modern period. Broken down into four thematic parts and broad in both chronological and geographical scope, the book deepens our understanding of the art of warfare in Portugal and its empire and demonstrates how the Military Revolution debate can be used to examine military change in a global perspective. This is an essential text for scholars and students of military history, military architecture, global history, Asian history and the history of Iberian empires.
A Past that Will Not Go Away. The Colonial War in Portuguese Postmemory
Lusotopie, 2018
The article discusses the concept of postmemory, demonstrating its productivity through an analysis of the memorialization of the Colonial War in the contemporary Portuguese context. Drawing on the results of two research projects carried out at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra, different aspects of the production of postmemory by members of the second generation are presented, with particular, but not exclusive, emphasis on the domain of the arts.
Brief History of Portugal during World War-1
The paper explores Portugal's often overlooked role in World War I, despite its significant historical impact. It discusses Portugal's position as a European maritime power lacking military resources, and the political upheaval that led to its entry into the war. It analyzes Portugal's contributions, particularly through the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps, and the challenges faced. Additionally, it examines the post-war consequences for Portugal, including economic and social effects, political instability, and the rise of authoritarianism. Through primary sources, it offers a thorough understanding of Portugal's World War I experience and its enduring repercussions.
History of Historiography and National Memory in Portugal
History Compass, 2012
This article aims to make a critical assessment and periodization of the studies undertaken in the field of the history of historiography in Portugal, taking into account the aims and concepts used by historians since the 19th century, and to suggest new lines of research. Up to the middle of the 20th century this was a quite marginal area of historical studies in Portugal. However, accounts of historians, and of their work, have always aroused interest. What guiding principles can we find in their self-reflexive exercises? What concepts do they employ? Work within the field has been constantly evolving (often under French influence), from fragmentary interpretations of historical thought to more recent prosopographical research and perspectives on national memory, not forgetting the institutions to which these historians were attached. But in contrast to other areas of historical studies, there were no great debates. While there were Portuguese historians gifted with a sharp critical sense, they rarely entered into polemics with their colleagues. How can we explain this absence of public debate? It can be argued that it is due to the small number of 'institutional' historians, and their connections with institutions and networks that were more or less closed.
Moving Beyond the Military Revolution: The Portuguese Case
Jeremy Black (ed) - Global Military Transformations: Change and Continuity, 1450-1800, 2023
This article discusses recent historiographical trends regarding the evolution of warfare in Portugal and its overseas empire in the early modern period. It presents a reassessment of the state of art on the Portuguese case in the early modern world (in the kingdom of Portugal in Europe and its overseas empire), followed by some contributions for an ongoing research agenda. It is divided in three parts, presenting overviews of the situation in Europe, overseas and at sea. It concludes that it is difficult to sustain that the Portuguese case supports the case for a link between an alleged military revolution and unilinear state-formation or Western military exceptionalism
CORREIA, Sílvia. Death and Politics: The Unknown Warrior at the Center of the Political Memory of the First World War in Portugal. e-Journal of Portuguese History, v. 11, p. 7-29, 2013, 2013
In George L. Mosse's words, the modern war's most essential experience was the mass murder endorsed by the State (1990). The extent of the conflict and its path of destruction would affect not only the combatants, but society as a whole. Going beyond the veterans' individual or group memory, death ended up being a structural element in the construction of the political memory of the First World War. This analysis focuses not only on the impact death had on individual combatants or the soldiers as a group, but mainly on the way in which it was appropriated by society and political powers through processes specifically designed to disguise death. The aim of States was to erase the destabilizing impact that casualties had on public opinion, neutralizing it into new and old environmental and architectural structures, thereby creating a new lexicon for death. The idea was to avoid a revolt over the mass sacrifice. The government wanted to use death cult rituals to create a consensual pride in the name of the nation, an idyllic and metaphorical attempt to reevaluate death in a religious, political and ideological sense, trying to surpass the physicality of mass death on the battlefield. Taking into account the deeply funereal nature of the Great War remembrance processes in Portugal, this article will highlight the integration of Portuguese memorial rites into the European war culture and will enable an understanding of the central role of death in the Great War remembrance process. This text will also seek to describe the treatment of the dead and the delineation of places of memory, mostly focusing on the Portuguese Unknown Soldiers, as a way of understanding the nature and the main questions surrounding the official memory of the First World War in Portugal between 1918 and 1933.
From Memory to Reality: Remembering the Great War in Portugal and Gender Perspectives
L' Homme, 2018
Similar to many other countries, there has been a growing popular, scholarly and media interest in Portugal in gaining a deeper understanding of the history of the Great War. From 2014, and even more so from 2016 onwards (the year that marked the centenary of the country's official entry into this global conflict), the initiatives designed to remember the years of the war and its consequences on a social, political, cultural and military level have multiplied. At the time of writing this article -in November 2017 -, exhibitions and conferences have been and continue to be held, Collection Days are being promoted, academic and journalistic articles, monographs and fiction books are being published, memoirs and diaries reprinted, new research topics pursued in universities, documentaries broadcasted on radio and TV. However, despite this unprecedented dynamic, the emphasis of the remembrance of the Great War in terms of gender has mainly focused on male perspectives. Contrary to what might be expected, Portuguese historiography continues to be more interested in the politico-diplomatic, military and economic context of the war than its impact on civil society. The main focus is placed on politico-diplomatic aspects that led to Portugal's entrance into the war, on how the expeditionary troops were prepared for participating in the conflict and on the question of whether and to what extent the war contributed to the deterioration of the country's economy. The historical narrative mainly focuses on the soldier who went to the war front, who put his life at risk, who suffered the hardships of captivity, who died in the battlefield or returned home maimed. Thus, apart from some exceptions, women's contributions to the war effort and changes of women's status in family and society as a result of the conflict are still uncharted territory. As Michelle Perrot has highlighted years ago, "[i]n the theatre of memory, women are tenuous shadows. The traditional historical narrative does not leave them much space, specifically insofar as it favours the public arena -politics, war -where they barely seem to appear." 2 In Portugal's case, the theatre of memory of the Great War is mainly dominated by male voices and perspectives representing the remembrance of 1914-1918 in academic publications and events. In this article, we examine how and to what extent gender perspectives have been taken into consideration in the context of the remembrance of the Great War in Portugal. We will focus on those activities promoted since 2014 which include women, 3 because soldiers' and veterans' masculinities and sexualities have been completely forgotten in commemorative activities. Then, we will attempt to give possible reasons for the marginalisation of gender aspects by Portuguese historiography. Finally, we will discuss potential topics for further research.
2015
The Jews in the Russian Pale of Settlement suffered from the consequences of the Great War from many points of view: the Russian military measures produced a great flow of refugees, the repeated occupations of German and Russian armies impoverished these communities and created big damages to the Jewish populations, especially in Poland and Lithuania. This particular reality became the center of the activities of many organizations, in Russia, Europe, and also in the United States: here the Joint Distribution Committee, created for the relief of the Jews in Palestine, decided to enlarge its action and to include also the relief of Eastern Jewish groups. The help first came through the American Embassy in Holland and only later direct emissaries of the Joint Distribution Committee started to visit the regions of Eastern Europe and to be directly interested in this activity. The documents of the Joint Distribution Committee, therefore, could be very helpful to have a firsthand description of many Eastern European cities and of the reality in which many Jewish communities were living. In particular, this paper is focused on the reports drafted in the first months of 1918 by A. van Raalte, a representative of the JDC who travelled to Poland and Lithuania and underlined the needs and the misery of Jews in many villages and cities.
The Internationalization of Portuguese Historiography and its Discontents
2003
Portugal has long been a peripheral country. The hard facts of geography ‐ both size and location ‐ have coalesced with lasting economic, political, and cultural structures to keep the country away from the forefront of historical change. Chances for national improvement and for the integration in the ever widening international community have been accordingly slim. In such a context, academic research, which was for a long time regarded by consecutive governments as an extravagant luxury, could hardly keep pace with the developments occurring elsewhere in the world. The laggardness and seclusion of Portuguese academic endeavours have been commonplace, in almost every field of knowledge. Only recently have the want of innovation, the backwardness of the scientific system, and the poverty of its internationalization come to be understood as problems that must be addressed. With the help of newly available European funds, the promotion of research and development has been steadily pur...
Post-war Political Consequences (Portugal) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1)
2017
This article will address the key political features in the post-war years of the Portuguese First Republic (1919-1926). Although the strategy of participation in the First World War opened a significant political crisis that extended its consequences into the last years of the republican regime, in this period, alongside political questions inherit from the pre-war times, there were new agents in play and new political dynamics at work. This period brought different solutions and new approaches to economic, social, and cultural problems in the new world partly forged by war.
The First World War in Portuguese East Africa: Civilian and Military Encounters in the Indian Ocean
E-Journal of Portuguese History , 2017
The Great War witnessed the most important military operation carried out by Portuguese troops outside the country's borders during the first half of the twentieth Century. Portugal was the only country involved in the conflict which, between 1914 and 1916, was able to preserve a position of undeclared neutrality in Europe and, simultaneously, wage war against Germany in Africa. The defense of the Portuguese colonial empire's integrity has often been signaled by historians as one of the factors which justified the declaration of war against Germany in March 1916 and Portugal's participation in the European theatre of operations alongside its ally, Great Britain, from early 1917 onwards. This article seeks to analyze the way in which the Great War was considered by the colonies, especially Mozambique, by discussing the Portuguese military intervention and the way it was understood and witnessed by civilian and military figures alike. A Grande Guerra foi a maior operação militar no exterior em que participaram tropas portuguesas durante a primeira metade do século XX. Portugal foi o único país envolvido no conflito que, entre 1914 e 1916, conseguiu manter uma posição de neutralidade não declarada na Europa e travar, simultaneamente, uma guerra em África contra a Alemanha. A defesa da integridade do império colonial português, tem sido apontada pela historiografia como um dos factores apresentados para justificar a declaração de guerra à Alemanha, em Março de 1916, e a participação portuguesa no teatro de guerra europeu, ao lado da aliada Grã-Bretanha, no início de 1917. Este artigo procura analisar o modo como a Grande Guerra foi encarada pelas colónias, nomeadamente, por Moçambique, discutindo a intervenção militar portuguesa e a forma como esta foi entendida e acompanhada por civis e militares.
From Flanders to Pernambuco: Battleground Perceptions in the Portuguese Early Modern Atlantic World
War in History, 2019
This article addresses the way the Portuguese experience in the seventeenth-century battlefields of Flanders, during the Iberian Union (1580–1640), reshaped Portuguese military thought and culture. It argues that their traditional martial perceptions – almost exclusively based in imperial experiences, especially against the Muslims in North Africa and in India – were transformed by the direct exposure to Spanish military endeavours in Europe. It also argues that the experience in Flanders resurfaced in the South Atlantic, in all its religious and political dimensions, transforming the prestige of Brazil as a battlefield. Finally, the article revisits the way the Flanders experience poisoned Spanish–Portuguese relations.
Portuguese Propaganda 1914-1940: the Birth of a Nationalistic History
2019
During the twentieth century, the world saw the development of new, devastatingly effective weapons including the tank, the missile and the nuclear bomb. One such weapon that is often overlooked is propaganda, which in many countries underwent institutionalization and a nation-wide debut throughout the Great War (1914-18). During and following this period, propaganda was used worldwide to evoke nationalistic sentiments within their population in order to further their governments’ causes and, in the most extreme cases as was seen during the Third Reich, to obscure the truth or brainwash. Portugal, being at the forefront of these developments, was not exempt from producing propaganda of their own as national historical icons, such as Camões and Vasco de Gama were revived by the new Republican government to support intervention in the war and increase their popularity . Following the war, the Estado Novo (New State), António Salazar’s dictatorial government, created the Secretariado da Propaganda Nacional (National Propaganda Secretariat) to capitalise on the success of propaganda, eventually mastering the manipulation of history in generating nationalistic and patriotic sentiments . This essay, through a historiographical analysis of Portugal’s propagandandistic-tapestry during the early twentieth century, will determine how history was created and nationalised.