The Ephemera of Remembrance in the Wake of War and Disaster, c.1899–1939

Foster, Ann-Marie (2019) The Ephemera of Remembrance in the Wake of War and Disaster, c.1899–1939. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

In the wake of war and disaster families wanted to mourn their dead. Public memorials to those who died in the First World War were influenced by governmental, local, and elite agents. The families of the dead participated in wider Remembrance Day initiatives, but they found memorial agency in the construction of grief on a private, familial, level. While historians of the First World War have acknowledged the importance of family memorial practices, none have yet tackled the subject in a sustained study. This split between public and private, between individuals and the nation state, is where this doctoral study of family memorialisation lies. After the First World War, families did not have access to a body, had little authority over how their loved one’s grave looked, and were not allowed to shape memorial services on Remembrance Sunday. So too, the families of those who lost a loved one in a mining disaster were given limited autonomy over burial practices. Therefore, the experiences of those who lost a loved one in the war are compared to those who had been bereaved through a mining disaster in order to contextualise wartime loss. Behind closed doors and in liminal spaces, families enacted memorial agency over the dead and attempted to provide points of memory to remember them by. This thesis focuses on the small, the ephemeral, and the physical to access this hidden world of family mourning in the first four decades of the twentieth century.

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