Tammy M. Proctor - Böcker

An Englishwoman of no particular fame living in World War I Brussels started a secret diary in September 1916. Aware that her thoughts could put her in danger with German authorities, she never wrote her name on the diary and ran to hide it every time the "Boches" came to inspect the house. The diary survived the war and ended up in a Belgian archive, forgotten for nearly a century until historians Sophie De Schaepdrijver and Tammy M. Proctor discovered it and the remarkable woman who wrote it: Mary Thorp, a middle-aged English governess working for a wealthy Belgian-Russian family in Brussels.As a foreigner and a woman, Mary Thorp offers a unique window into life under German occupation in Brussels (the largest occupied city of World War I) and in the uncertain early days of the peace. Her diary describes the roar of cannons in the middle of the night, queues for food and supplies in the shops, her work for a wartime charity, news from an interned godson in Germany, along with elegant dinners with powerful diplomats and the educational progress of her beloved charges.Mary Thorp's sharp and bittersweet reflections testify to the daily strains of living under enemy occupation, comment on the events of the war as they unfolded, and ultimately serve up a personal story of self-reliance and endurance. De Schaepdrijver and Proctor's in-depth commentary situate this extraordinary woman in her complex political, social, and cultural context, thus providing an unusual chance to engage with the Great War on an intimate and personal level.

The centenary of the First World War in 2014-18 offers an opportunity to reflect upon the role of gender history in shaping our understanding of this pivotal international event. From the moment of its outbreak, the gendered experiences of the war have been seen by contemporary observers and postwar commentators and scholars as being especially significant for shaping how the war can and must be understood. The negotiating of ideas about gender by women and men across vast reaches of the globe characterizes this modern, instrumental conflict. Over the past twenty-five years, as the scholarship on gender and this war has grown, there has never been a forum such as the one presented here that placed so many of the varying threads of this complex historiography into conversation with one another in a manner that is at once accessible and provocative. Given the vast literature on the war itself, scholarship on gender and various themes and topics provides students as well as scholars with a chance to think not only about the subject of the war but also the methodological implications of how historians have approached it. While many studies have addressed the national or transnational narrative of women in the war, none address both femininity and masculinity, and the experiences of both women and men across the same geographic scope as the studies presented in this volume.

The centenary of the First World War in 2014-18 offers an opportunity to reflect upon the role of gender history in shaping our understanding of this pivotal international event. From the moment of its outbreak, the gendered experiences of the war have been seen by contemporary observers and postwar commentators and scholars as being especially significant for shaping how the war can and must be understood. The negotiating of ideas about gender by women and men across vast reaches of the globe characterizes this modern, instrumental conflict. Over the past twenty-five years, as the scholarship on gender and this war has grown, there has never been a forum such as the one presented here that placed so many of the varying threads of this complex historiography into conversation with one another in a manner that is at once accessible and provocative. Given the vast literature on the war itself, scholarship on gender and various themes and topics provides students as well as scholars with a chance to think not only about the subject of the war but also the methodological implications of how historians have approached it. While many studies have addressed the national or transnational narrative of women in the war, none address both femininity and masculinity, and the experiences of both women and men across the same geographic scope as the studies presented in this volume.

An Englishwoman living in World War I Brussels started a secret diary in September 1916. The diary, which survived the war and whose author remained anonymous, ended up in a Belgian archive. This book brings to light both the diary and the story of the woman who wrote it: a middle-aged English governess working for a Belgian-Russian family in German-occupied Brussels. Mary Thorp (1864 -1945) grew up in London and in Bruges. Like many educated young women of impoverished middle-class backgrounds, she worked as a governess. Neither a servant nor a member of the upper classes that employed her, she harbored a sturdy middle-class outlook stressing self-reliance and responsibility for others -- the very attitude that underlay societies' resilience in the face of war. Her diary expresses this attitude but also the strains on it as the war wore on. Thorp did not only crossed classes; she crossed national borders as well. Her diary's perspective is transnational. She followed the wartime fate of her widely dispersed friends and family. She tracked military news from theaters both far-flung and nearby. And, because of her privileged access to diplomats from Spain, the Netherlands, the US, Persia, and Japan, she tallied wider war news - on peace overtures, the Russian Revolution, and discontent in Germany. At the same time, Thorp remained attuned to local dynamics in Brussels, the First World War's largest occupied city. Alert to both structural constraints and individual stories, she showed how the occupying army sought to exploit Belgium, but also how this rebutted some in the German military. Uniquely, her diary also documents the Armistice and its immediate aftermath, for she kept it up until January 1919. In this volume, Tammy M. Proctor and Sophie De Schaepdrijver provide a biographical introduction on Thorp, an overview of the war in occupied Belgium, and detailed annotations to the diary.

"First we crushed our enemy, then saved him from starvation," Walter Cronkite intoned in a 1963 episode of the CBS television series The Twentieth Century. Designed to commemorate the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of US aid to Europe during World War I, the episode explained that the American military had "crushed" other nations in both world wars, a violence described as a necessary corrective in order to subsequently unleash "the spirit of the American people." This humanitarian "spirit" manifested as material relief not only to friend but also to former foe. With only a small commentary on the ingratitude of some recipients, the documentary emphasized for Americans their unique role in global peacekeeping and prosperity, functioning as a global patriarch, bearing both carrots and sticks.Saving Europe offers a transnational history of American aid and intervention in Europe between 1914 and 1924, a period when the US simultaneously tightened its borders and expanded its reach. In that crucial decade after the outbreak of World War I, Americans saw themselves in a novel role as protectors of European cultural heritage and as rescuers of vulnerable populations, making them worthy successors to earlier global powers. Saving Europe shines a light on how the US wielded "soft" power in the interwar period through food, dollars, and reconstruction projects. In case studies of Belgium, France, Austria, Germany, and Poland, it traces the development of American views of their role in the wider world as well as European responses to this intervention, providing valuable context for later US global aid and development regimes after World War II.

This volume examines scouting—the largest voluntary movement for girls—in its first century of existence, seeking to understand how the organization has lasted and how it has changed.Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts is the first global history of Girl Scouting and Guiding that addresses the successes and pitfalls of the 100-year-old organization from its beginning in Great Britain through its international expansion. Since 1910, millions of girls worldwide have been exposed to Scouting. While much has changed since 1910, the core values of Scouting/Guiding are still recognizable in today's programs, namely the empowerment of girls through adventure, character-building, home skills, outdoor pursuits, and active learning. But has Scouting's very willingness to change with the times undermined its original ideologies and fundamentally changed the movement?As Girl Scouts and Guides move into their second century, their challenge will be to remain true to their founding values while remaking themselves on a regular basis. Given the changing nature of today's societies and the serious problems girls face on a daily basis, Girl Guides and Girl Scouts will need to be true to their motto, "Be Prepared," in order to march forward successfully into the future.

When the Germans invaded her small Belgian village in 1914, Marthe Cnockaert's home was burned and her family separated. After getting a job at a German hospital, and winning the Iron Cross for her service to the Reich, she was approached by a neighbor and invited to become an intelligence agent for the British. Not without trepidation, Cnockaert embarked on a career as a spy, providing information and engaging in sabotage before her capture and imprisonment in 1916. After the war, she was paid and decorated by a grateful British government for her service.Cnockaert's is only one of the surprising and gripping stories that comprise Female Intelligence. This is the first history of the female spies who served Britain during World War I, focusing on both the powerful cultural images of these women and the realities, challenges, and contradictions of intelligence service. Between the founding of modern British intelligence organizations in 1909 and the demobilization of 1919, more than 6,000 women served the British government in either civil or military occupations as members of the intelligence community. These women performed a variety of services, and they represented an astonishing diversity of nationality, age, and class. From Aphra Behn, who spied for the British government in the seventeenth century, to the most well known example, Mata Hari, female spies have a long history, existing in juxtaposition to the folkloric notion of women as chatty, gossipy, and indiscreet.Using personal accounts, letters, official documents and newspaper reports, Female Intelligence interrogates different, and apparently contradictory, constructions of gender in the competing spheres of espionage activity.

When the Germans invaded her small Belgian village in 1914, Marthe Cnockaert's home was burned and her family separated. After getting a job at a German hospital, and winning the Iron Cross for her service to the Reich, she was approached by a neighbor and invited to become an intelligence agent for the British. Not without trepidation, Cnockaert embarked on a career as a spy, providing information and engaging in sabotage before her capture and imprisonment in 1916. After the war, she was paid and decorated by a grateful British government for her service.Cnockaert's is only one of the surprising and gripping stories that comprise Female Intelligence. This is the first history of the female spies who served Britain during World War I, focusing on both the powerful cultural images of these women and the realities, challenges, and contradictions of intelligence service. Between the founding of modern British intelligence organizations in 1909 and the demobilization of 1919, more than 6,000 women served the British government in either civil or military occupations as members of the intelligence community. These women performed a variety of services, and they represented an astonishing diversity of nationality, age, and class. From Aphra Behn, who spied for the British government in the seventeenth century, to the most well known example, Mata Hari, female spies have a long history, existing in juxtaposition to the folkloric notion of women as chatty, gossipy, and indiscreet.Using personal accounts, letters, official documents and newspaper reports, Female Intelligence interrogates different, and apparently contradictory, constructions of gender in the competing spheres of espionage activity.

World War I heralded a new global era of warfare, consolidating and expanding changes that had been building throughout the previous century, while also instituting new notions of war. The 1914-18 conflict witnessed the first aerial bombing of civilian populations, the first widespread concentration camps for the internment of enemy alien civilians, and an unprecedented use of civilian labor and resources for the war effort. Humanitarian relief programs for civilians became a common feature of modern society, while food became as significant as weaponry in the fight to win.Tammy M. Proctor argues that it was World War I—the first modern, global war—that witnessed the invention of both the modern "civilian" and the "home front," where a totalizing war strategy pitted industrial nations and their citizenries against each other. Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918, explores the different ways civilians work and function in a war situation, and broadens our understanding of the civilian to encompass munitions workers, nurses, laundresses, refugees, aid workers, and children who lived and worked in occupied zones, on home and battle fronts, and in the spaces in between. Comprehensive and global in scope, spanning the Eastern, Western, Italian, East African, and Mediterranean fronts, Proctor examines in lucid and evocative detail the role of experts in the war, the use of forced labor, and the experiences of children in the combatant countries.As in many wars, civilians on both sides of WWI were affected, and vast displacements of the populations shaped the contemporary world in countless ways, redrawing boundaries and creating or reviving lines of ethnic conflict. Exploring primary source materials and secondary studies of combatant and neutral nations, while synthesizing French, German, Dutch, and English language sources, Proctor transcends the artificial boundaries of national histories and the exclusive focus on soldiers. Instead she tells the fascinating and long-buried story of the civilian in the Great War, allowing voices from the period to speak for themselves.