A local history workshop organised by BALH and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London.
We are connected to the First World War through our family and community histories, and through the war’s impact on British and other societies. The war provided opportunities to go to new places, engage in different activities and meet people not encountered in peacetime. What were people’s experiences of different places, living under different conditions, and how did they engage with different cultures?
This is an introduction to researching war experience and its legacy: individual, family and community perspectives through the prism of the local, national and international.
- how did local communities interact with colonial and Dominion troops?
- in what ways did racial issues impact on local community relations during the war, and in its
- aftermath?
- what relationships evolved between communities, hospitals where colonial/Dominion troops
- were treated and individual soldiers?
- how might the war’s legacy be informed by ethnic minority histories?
- during the war years, and after, how was the idea of Empire experienced, understood and
- imagined by people in British localities?
- to what extent did war change European colonial victors’ views of their extended Empires?
Themes will be illustrated by reference to sources such as newspapers, local authority records, diaries, correspondence, Imperial War Museum archives, The National Archives and websites.
To view the full programme, please click here.
In collaboration with
the British Association for Local History (BALH).