Introduction: Marginalised Histories of the Second World War¹

Abstract

This special issue, stemming out of the AHRC-funded Teaching and Learning War Research Network (2017–2020), is published at an important juncture in cultural memory: as the focus of public commemorative events in Britain and the Commonwealth shifts from the First to the Second World War, including the Holocaust. Not only does it showcase exciting and cutting-edge research, but it also aims to stimulate conversation and ‘forward-thinking’ about commemorative cycles over the next two-and-a-half decades (2025–2045). The three research articles and four provocations focus, in different ways, on the question of ‘hidden histories’ in the expectation of a need to ensure that diversity, multi-perspectivity, complexity, and contention remain at the heart of ‘national’ commemorative processes (whether in Britain or elsewhere).

Keywords:

• First World War
• Second World War
• Holocaust
• centenary
• commemoration
• marginalised histories
• memory studies
• memory politics

Commemorating total wars

This special issue was born out of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)-funded Teaching and Learning War Research Network, which ran from 2017 to 2020.² The network provided the opportunity to bring together European Union and international researchers and stakeholders, from a range of academic disciplines and professional backgrounds, to explore young people’s engagement with and receptivity to the cultural memory messages of the two world wars from a comparative perspective. Configured around a series of events, the project was positioned at an important juncture in cultural memory: as the focus of public commemorative events in Britain and the Commonwealth shifted from the First to the Second World War, including the Holocaust. On 11 April 2018, the Research Network held a one-day workshop, ‘Marginalised Memories of the Second World War’ at King’s College London. Six out of the seven articles and shorter provocations in this special issue of War & Society journal came from papers presented on that day. We are very grateful to all the Network members and the participants in the workshop for their support and contributions, which have helped to recast much wider discussions into the more limited but cohesive format required for a stimulating special issue.³ Those requirements have also meant that discussions of the Holocaust at the workshop, which included a dedicated panel and ran through question and answer sessions and informal conversations throughout the day – are represented here solely by Andy Pearce’s provocation. This excellent piece engages with all of the tensions spoken about by other researchers on the day: we are grateful to be able to include it to encompass a topic about which it would have been possible to curate a special issue of its own.

Our aim in editing this special issue is not only to showcase exciting and cutting-edge research, but also to stimulate conversation and ‘forward-thinking’ about commemorative cycles over the next two-and-a-half decades (2025–45). This volume contributes to a wider scholarly concern among socio-cultural historians of twentieth-century warfare to better enable dialogue across the two world wars and the history of genocide.⁴ It is no coincidence that both co-editors of this volume cut their professional teeth in studies of the First World War and were closely involved in its centenary commemorations (2014–18). Our careers have required multiple re-engagements with and reflection on the potential of public anniversaries to introduce different audiences to new histories and of the consequences for the dense entanglement of history and memory in which these conflicts rest.

Our experience of the centenary of the First World War has influenced this special issue’s form as well as its content. In 2016, Twentieth Century British History published a special ‘forum’ where academics and curators were invited to consider, in short pieces, the centenary as a moment of commemoration and of public history.⁵ These inspired the shorter provocations that form the second half of this special issue. Authored by established academics and stakeholders from the museum and education sectors, they are meant to provoke readers to think about the challenges and controversies surrounding marginalised histories of the Second World War, including the Holocaust, as well as the often-tense relationship between popular and academic engagement.

The First World War centenary also demonstrated the desire of many historians not only to ‘maximize the presence of history in the public sphere’⁶ but to encourage the public to think beyond familiar historical narratives.⁷ The expectation of a similar desire around the anniversaries of the Second World War influences this special issue’s contents.

In putting it together, we recognise that the effect of the First World War centenary on the attitudes of audiences and creators remains unclear. The November 2016 report by the think tank, British Future, ‘A Centenary Shared: Tracking public attitudes to the First World War Centenary 2013–16′, suggested that during this period the British public’s understanding of lesser known aspects of the First World War had expanded ‘globally’. ⁸ This meant that it now took into account the contributions made by soldiers from Australia, Canada, and India, rather than being limited to a perception that the war had been fought solely by white British soldiers on the Western Front. The British government’s official 2019 inquiry into the impact of the commemorations echoed these plaudits, concluding that ‘the centenary commemorations reached new audiences, and enabled the public to be more exposed to hidden or less well-known histories’.⁹

In contrast, however, it is easy to argue that diversity was the exception rather than the rule in commemorative representations and that where it did exist, it was confined primarily to military service rather than the range of experiences from across an empire at war, many of which would have been much more difficult to contain within commemorative conventions. Peter Jackson’s documentary film They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) – in terms of audience reach, the key moment of the centenary’s final act – was, for Santanu Das, ‘dispiriting’ in the way that focus was once again narrowed ‘back to the Western Front’ where ‘we get to see very little of the globe’; in his view, it was symptomatic of ‘the wider sea of amnesia that still surrounds these islands of Eurocentric memory in popular culture’.¹⁰

This special issue – and the workshop from which it stemmed – is therefore configured as an early stepping stone on the path to the centenaries of the Second World War and the Holocaust. It focuses on the question of ‘hidden histories’ in the expectation of a need to ensure that diversity, multi-perspectivity, complexity, and contention remain at the heart of ‘national’ commemorative processes (whether in Britain or elsewhere). We prefer marginalisation to ‘forgotten’ because it can encompass exclusion, intentional or otherwise, from popular discussion and general knowledge, without implying an absolute consignment to oblivion.

Even during the war, of course, competing narratives existed about the struggle’s meaning, and who was fighting for what. The contest was not only between national accounts pitched by powerful state propaganda agencies, but also between different political, institutional, and cultural actors within each belligerent. As in the First World War, such stories were sometimes shared between the home and fighting fronts, eliding distinctions between the two, but they could also exist within distinct military and civil communities, marking out their sacrifice as unique. Servicemen far from home often worried about being forgotten; maintaining memory became a matter of morale.¹¹

Other versions of what the war was about were marginalised at the time. This occurred as a result of state action, both under totalitarian regimes which sought to eradicate alternative histories as they eliminated people, and in democratic polities which – particularly in the imperial sphere – used emergency powers and restricted freedom of speech to counter perceived threats to the war effort. Such efforts often aligned with the limitation of dissent by non-state actors including film, newspaper, and newsreel companies, whose acquiescence made widely shared narratives easier to control. Nor should we exclude the cognitive bias of combatant populations – both individually and collectively – who, as in peacetime, and with varying degrees of passivity, either ignored or made it impossible to tell stories which they found distressing, confusing, or distasteful. Work on British wartime knowledge of, and attitudes to, the Holocaust, for example, has emphasised that despite the caution of government propagandists and their reluctance to emphasise the specifically anti-Jewish nature of the Nazi genocides, plenty of evidence was in fact available to the public about what was going on in Occupied Europe. Many, however, chose either to ignore or disbelieve it – not least because of their own anti-Semitism – hence the sense of shocked revelation at the liberation of the camps in 1944–1945.¹²

As in this case, while claims that this or that aspect of the struggle had been ‘forgotten’ were frequent during and after the war, this did not necessarily mean that they had not been talked about at the time. And while such claims often reflected genuine sentiments, they could also be potent levers within economies of sacrifice in which the articulation of demands for recognition became part of wartime identities. In 1944, when the UK government – in an effort to secure US aid for reconstruction – began promoting distinctly national statistics of wartime effort that showed ‘What Britain Has Done’, for example, the most positive reaction came from members of the British public who felt that previous celebrations of the international Grand Alliance had led to Soviet and American efforts being elevated above their own. They thought – as quoted in a Home Intelligence Report for the Ministry of Information – that it was ‘high time we told the world and blew our own trumpet’.¹³ From the perspective of 75 years later, fears that the UK might have allowed its wartime endeavours to be forgotten seem somewhat misplaced.

The marginal and Second World War history

Notwithstanding the wider global remit of the workshop, it is not surprising that we have been able to put together a special issue which relates specifically to the UK and the British Empire. The academic study of the war is enjoying a resurgence in the Anglosphere, related to but separate from the nostalgic presence of the conflict in popular media and contemporary politics, which must itself be seen in the context of even fiercer weaponisation of different versions of the conflict in Eastern Europe.

We can see this as the confluence of several long-term trends. One is the continued public interest in the history of both world wars and the Holocaust, and the students, book contracts, and academic posts thus created. Another has been the generational and archival cycle which allows the maturation of a field. Notably, this has occurred for the Second World War over the last decade in the same way that it did for the First World War from the 1990s, although without the collective central thrust of a group such as that based around the Historial de la Grande Guerre at Péronne, which pioneered the cultural history of the earlier conflict. The difference is clearly apparent in the two multi-volume sets of Cambridge Histories of the two wars. That for the First World War demonstrates the development since the 1990s of a set of well recognised research questions around mobilisation, participation, and war culture which is recognised, even if not accepted, by academic historians around the world and which encourages them to frame different national histories in similar ways.¹⁴ In contrast, the volumes on the Second World War indicate a continued separation of research fields and national historical traditions which make it harder for historians of the same event in different locations to enter into dialogue with each other.¹⁵

Second World War histories have nonetheless also been affected by wider changes in the discipline. Both inside and outside universities, the combination of academic Marxism, postmodernism, and the ‘cultural turn’ encouraged a growing interest in previously overlooked issues of race, class, sexuality, gender, and ethnicity; ‘in short a focus on multiple histories rather than one overarching history’.¹⁶ Meanwhile, post-colonial studies served to disrupt the traditional binary of the colonial subject as ‘other’ to the West. One broader consequence has been an attempt to restore agency to non-white, non-combatant, non-male, and non-heterosexual communities who were otherwise depicted, if at all, as wartime objects. The ‘memory wars’ that ensue therefore revolve ‘around hierarchies of victimhood and martyrdom, issues of recognition and reparation and, above all, around that crucial intersection between history, memory and identity’.¹⁷

These trends are all at play in the current resurgence of writing about the war and the Holocaust and are showcased in this special issue. Without cataloguing all of it, one key aspect is the move towards more global histories of the conflict, which write back in combatants previously marginalised in dominant narratives in the UK as well as incorporating the Holocaust as an essential element within, rather than a sidelight to, the international clash of arms.¹⁸ Given Britain’s role at the time as a powerful if declining hegemon, these have often been, intentionally or otherwise, histories of the ‘British world’ at war. Others focus on particular areas of the Empire, including recent histories of India’s war which have done much to restore the experience of the sub-continent to our understanding of the world crisis.¹⁹

In different ways, all of the research articles in this edition draw out of this boom in appreciation of the global and imperial nature of the war and the implications of that in regard to memory politics. Roy Marom’s article on RAF Ein Shemer identifies the role of a British military installation as the site both for international interactions during the war and local marginalisation after it. In her article on Allied troops of colour on the South African home front, Jean P. Smith highlights the place of leisure as the conceptual location where the tensions created by clashing views of race could no longer be ignored. Both articles also demonstrate the extent to which accounts of the war built around military combat marginalise military service spent out of combat and the degree to which the lives of service personnel entwined with those of non-combatants. Urvi Khaitan’s analysis of the role and representation of female coal miners in India demonstrates how the global problems of labour and calorie shortages for coal production impacted imperially, nationally, and individually. Khaitan’s article highlights the multiple marginalisations that took place at the time: neither officials attempting to extract labour from what they regarded as a disposable resource, or the parties and pressure groups advocating for and against the use of female workers had much sense of the pressures these women were under or the choices that resulted.

Khaitan’s article is also striking because of the degree to which it incorporates gender into a history of raw materials often written in terms of imperial economics and politics that skew male. As Yasmin Khan points out in her provocation, despite numerous histories of metropolitan women’s war experiences (usually in work or in uniform), and an increasing appreciation for the degree to which contemporary constructions of masculinity and femininity shaped wartime lives, our understanding of the conflict’s course and consequences, derived as they are from the timing of military campaigns, battlefield defeats and victories, and great strategic conferences, is still overwhelmingly male. Khan makes a persuasive case for thinking what a feminist history of the war would look like.

Since the start of the twenty-first century, studies of the remembrance of the Second World War in Britain and what was the British Empire have undergone their own ‘memory boom’. They now go beyond studies of the development of widely shared ‘myths’ to engage with the multi-vocality of memory, the search for a ‘usable past’, and the changing ways in which veterans have told their tales.²⁰ Our provocations from Tim Cook and Vikki Hawkins both draw out of their authors’ expertise and experience in the field of public memory. Examining the redevelopment of the Imperial War Museum London’s Second World War galleries, Hawkins challenges us to consider the practical obstacles that institutions encounter when they seek to tell a more international version of the past. Examining the ways in which the internment of Japanese Canadians has been written into contemporary remembrance in Canada, Cook asks readers to consider how a determination to bring back history from the margins in order to address current concerns can fundamentally unbalance public understanding.

Since formal rituals of war remembrance began in Britain and the Commonwealth, in the aftermath of the First World War, they have been understood as a pedagogical exercise for children.²¹ The Research Network that undergirds this special issue took, as its central point of enquiry, the role of education as a site of memory and a space of contestation, negotiation, and cultural production in regard to the two world wars.²² Andy Pearce reflects on trends in Holocaust education in the UK and poses challenging questions about the tensions and shortcomings involved. Does remembering and learning about human atrocity involve a marginalisation of historical content? In what ways does Holocaust education justify and legitimate a range of social, political, and cultural activity? These are questions not just for those who teach the Holocaust – but for anyone who works in educational settings that span history and remembrance.

The politics of bringing back the marginal

This leads us to our final reflection. Studies of both Holocaust education and the centenary of the First World War demonstrate that ‘remembrance’, not history, is the path into mass public engagement.²³ Yet memory is both unreliable and, in the era of social media, particularly subject to manipulation and weaponisation. We hope readers will use this special issue to consider whether, and with what potential challenges, established (Western) narratives and memories of the Second World War and the Holocaust can be reviewed, revised, and recast as we approach 2039–45.

It is generally understood that the writing of ‘accepted’ ordered histories are crucial in the formation of national identities in the modern era.²⁴ But if commemoration of past events can serve an integrative function in society, they can equally fuel conflict and contestation. Awkward, uncomfortable, and divisive experiences may destabilise attempts to use historical memories to promote political and social cohesion. As a result, ‘forgetting’ (or marginalisation) is actively managed to avoid the risk, as Rodney Harrison described, of ‘a “crisis” of accumulation of the past’.²⁵ Like any productive garden, certain memories need to be pruned back in order to allow others to thrive.²⁶

Of course, where the proverbial secateurs are applied is political. What a society selects to emphasise and celebrate as part of its collective memory tells us little of the history of that event, and more about how that society sees itself in the present day.²⁷ Stephen Small and Paul Gilroy, among others, have demonstrated, in the context of narratives of Black communities across the globe, how inclusions and exclusions of historical memory can not only breed hostility but also be used as weapons of control.²⁸ A more inclusive representation of the past is also part of a political rallying cry: an aspiration to live in a more cooperative society that responds to a need to better understand each other, as evidenced in the progressive aspirations of a sense of shared history witnessed in Ireland during its ‘decade of centenaries’ (2012–23).²⁹

But there are inherent risks in histories – such as those featured in this special issue – that seek to give ‘voice’ to unheard stories. Whose voice is being heard? How has it been constructed? Who has participated in that construction? And how collaborative was that process?³⁰ Furthermore, if we are concerned with delivery, we must also consider receptivity. Who is listening to these narratives that were not listening before? Why are they listening now? While welcoming an increasing acceptance of diversity and growing tolerance to public displays of difference, we also need to be alert to the dangers of ‘diverse histories’.³¹ Embracing difference without confronting the structural inequalities and exploitation within those experiences is, at best, a distraction, and at worst, another way of affirming traditional identities and power dynamics. It can become a ‘soft’ version of history – a good intended for passive consumption and uncritical celebration at risk of becoming nothing more substantial than a partial and tokenistic discourse of diversity.³²

We recognise that the construction of histories of the Second World War and the Holocaust – that form the basis of what societies choose to remember about that period – is a political act. But historians ought to be able to engage in that process whatever their political viewpoints, for the purpose of historical study ‘should not be celebration or denunciation, it should not aim to bring relief and comfort but understanding’.³³ That, ultimately, is the aim of this special issue. As we move towards a new period of intense war commemoration – one that will be framed against a variety of national and international political backdrops, including Britain’s exit from the European Union and the, as yet unclear, ramifications of a global pandemic – the challenge for historians, now more than ever, is to try to create a shared endeavour that is not just about detailing the previously marginalised but actually integrating it into a richer and more substantial version of the war and twentieth-century genocide. This special issue – and the stimulating research and provocations within it – is an early contribution to the endeavour of utilising the centenary of the Second World War and the Holocaust, not simply to (re)produce identities but enhance understanding, however unfamiliar or uncomfortable.

Additional information

Funding

This introduction, and the special issue overall, was made possible by funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Notes on contributors

Catriona Pennell

Catriona Pennell is Professor of Modern History and Memory Studies at the University of Exeter. Her publications include A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and ‘Taught to remember? British youth and First World War centenary battlefield tours’, Cultural Trends, 27:2 (2018), 83–98. She recently co-edited A World at War, 1911–1949: Explorations in the Cultural History of War with Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses (Leiden: Brill, 2019). Between 2017 and 2020, she was the principal investigator on the AHRC-funded ‘Teaching and Learning War Research Network: Education and Modern Conflict in an International Comparative Perspective’ as well as acting, during the centenary of the First World War, as a consultant to the British Council, the BBC, and Imperial War Museums.

Daniel Todman

Daniel Todman is Professor of Modern History at Queen Mary University of London. His first book, The Great War: Myth and Memory (London: Hambledon, 2005) explored the changing way in which the First World War was represented in Britain over the eighty years after 1918. His two-volume history of Britain’s Second World War, Britain’s War, 1937–1941: Into Battle and Britain’s War, 1942–1947: A New World were published by Allen Lane to great acclaim in 2016 and 2020 respectively. Up to 2014, he was a member of the Academic Advisory Panel for the Imperial War Museum’s redesign of its First World War galleries; he currently sits on the equivalent body for the Museum’s Second World War gallery redesign.

Notes

1 This special issue began as a workshop on 11 April 2018. Since then, the co-editors, contributors, and editorial team at War & Society have been through a number of life’s inevitable highs and lows, including new arrivals and bereavements, as well as the challenge of completing the final stages of this edition in the midst of a global pandemic. To that end, the co-editors would like to acknowledge the patience and diligence of all involved. Academia can sometimes be a harsh landscape to inhabit; we are grateful that this edition is the product of a kinder way of working.

2 For more information on the network, see <http://teachlearnwar.exeter.ac.uk> [accessed 7 May 2020.]

3 We would especially like to acknowledge the involvement of the late Dennis Showalter – a pioneer in the field of military history and great practitioner of academic kindness – whom we had the privilege of hosting as panel chair in one of his last international engagements before his death in 2019.

4 C. Pennell and F. Ribeiro de Meneses (eds), A World At War, 1911–1949: Explorations in the Cultural History of War (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

5 See Twentieth Century British History, 27.4 (2016), 505–23. One of the co-editors of this special issue, Daniel Todman, contributed to this forum discussion. Other journals, including War & Society, 36.4 (2017), 235–303 Special Issue: Commemorating the Centenary of the First World War: National and Trans-National Perspectives, went on to dedicate special issues reflecting on the various activities marking the centenary of the First World War. See also Cultural Trends, 27.2 (2018), 61–141 First World War Commemorations. The other co-editor of this special issue, Catriona Pennell, contributed research articles to both of these volumes.

6 J. Tosh, ‘Public History, Civic Engagement and the Historical Profession in Britain,’ History: The Journal of the Historical Association, 99.335 (2014), 192.

7 H. McCarthy, ‘Public History and the Centenary of the First World War in Britain,’ Twentieth Century British History, 27.4 (2016), 505.

8 See <http://www.britishfuture.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/A-Centenary-Shared.WW1-tracker-report.2016.pdf> [accessed 5 May 2020.]

9 Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, ‘Lessons from the First World War Centenary’: Thirteenth Report of Session 2017–19 (July 2019). See <https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201719/cmselect/cmcumeds/2001/2001.pdf> [accessed 12 December 2019.]

10 S. Das, ‘AHR Roundtable: Colors of the Past: Archive, Art, and Amnesia in a Digital Age,’ American Historical Review, 124.5 (2019), 1773–6.

11 J. Fennell, Fighting the People’s War: The British and Commonwealth Armies and the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).

12 Summarised in D. Todman, Britain’s War II, 1942–1947: A New World (London: Allen Lane, 2020), 405–6.

13 Ministry of Information Home Intelligence Weekly Report, No. 218 (7 December 1944). See <http://www.moidigital.ac.uk/reports/home-intelligence-reports/home-intelligence-special-reports-inf-1-292-2-c/idm140465681334160/> [accessed 7 May 2020.]

14 J. Winter (ed.), The Cambridge History of the First World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

15 J. Ferris, E. Mawdsley, R. Bosworth, J. Maiolo, M. Geyer, and A. Tooze (eds), The Cambridge History of the Second World War, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

16 K. Burrell and P. Panayi, ‘Immigration, History and Memory in Britain,’ in Histories and Memories: Migrants and their History in Britain, ed. Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), 4.

17 N. Cooper and K. Jones, ‘Introduction: Memories of Conflict in Eastern Europe,’ Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 17.1 (2009), 4.

18 In terms of non-European combatants, most obviously for China, for example in R. Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945: A Struggle for Survival (London: Allen Lane, 2013). In terms of the reincorporation of the Holocaust: A. Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy (London: Allen Lane, 2006).

19 For example: C. Bayly and T. Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire and War with Japan (London: Allen Lane, 2004); T. Barkawi, Soldiers of Empire: India and British Armies in World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); A. Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London: Bloomsbury, 2006); Y. Khan, The Raj at War: A People’s History of India’s Second World War (London: Bodley Head, 2015); S. Raghavan, India’s War: The Making of Modern South Asia, 1939–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2016); M. Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). The trend towards the study of the ‘British world’ at war is clearly apparent in recent military histories including D. E. Delaney, The Imperial Army Project: Britain and the Land Forces of the Dominions and India, 1902–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018) and Fennell, Fighting the People’s War (2019).

20 Contrast A. Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991); M. Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson, 2004) with M. Grant, ‘The Trial of Neville Heath, the Popular Press, and the Construction of the Memory of the Second World War in Britain, 1945–1946,’ English Historical Review, 133 (2018), 564 (2018), 1155–77; F. Houghton, The Veterans’ Tale: British Military Memoirs of the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); L. Noakes, Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020).

21 C. Pennell, ‘Centenary (Education, Pedagogy, Youth Programmes) ,’ in 1914–1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson (Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin, forthcoming).

22 For more on this shift in memory studies towards a focus on education see J. Paulson et al, ‘Education as Site of Memory: Developing a Research Agenda,’ International Studies in Sociology of Education (published online 15 April 2020 <https://www-tandfonline-com.wwwproxy1.library.unsw.edu.au/doi/full/10.1080/09620214.2020.1743198>).

23 H. Strachan, ‘Re-thinking Remembrance,’ British Academy Review, 34 (2018), 45–47. See <https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publications/british-academy-review/34/rethinking-remembrance> [accessed 8 May 2020.]

24 See for example, A. D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991) and Myths and Memories of the Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

25 R. Harrison, ‘Forgetting to Remember, Remembering to Forget: Late Modern Heritage Practices, Sustainability and the “Crisis” of Accumulation of the Past,’ International Journal of Heritage Studies, 19.6 (2013), 580. See also P. Ricoeur, History, Memory, Forgetting (Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

26 M. Augé, Oblivion (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) cited in Harrison (2013), 588.

27 R. F. Foster, The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland (London: Penguin, 2001), 219.

28 P. Gilroy, Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (London: Routledge, 1987); S. Small, The Politics of British Black History (With Special Reference to Liverpool) (Northampton: Northampton Racial Equality Council, 1991); cited in A. Flinn, ‘Community Histories, Community Archives: Some Opportunities and Challenges,’ Journal of the Society of Archives, 28.2 (2007), 151–76.

29 C. Pennell, ‘“Choreographed by the Angels”? Ireland and the Centenary of the First World War,’ War & Society, 36.4 (2017), 256–75. See also S. Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

30 Burrell and Panayi (2006), 11.

31 Kevin Myers highlights the tendency, with the portrayal of the Irish in Birmingham, to focus on the positive stories of integration and economic success, side-lining the less comfortable experiences of destitution and hostility: K. Myers, ‘Historical Practice in the Age of Pluralism: Educating and Celebrating Identities,’ in Histories and Memories: Migrants and their History in Britain, ed. Kathy Burrell and Panikos Panayi (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2006), 35–53.

32 S. Das, ‘The First World War and the Colour of Memory,’ Guardian, 22 July 2014. See <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/22/first-world-war-whitewashed-eurocentric> [accessed 6 May 2020.]

33 Myers (2006), 41.