First World War Lectures/Presentations/Discussions on YouTube

[WilliamRev]

Anyone seriously studying the British Expeditionary Force in 1914 and 1915 will almost certainly have read two books by Dr. Spencer Jones (if not then they are: Stemming the Tide, and Courage Without Glory). Dr Jones is a superbly entertaining lecturer who has an unparalled understanding of the first seventeen months of the war on the Western Front. (Disclaimer: I am studying for my MA at Wolverhampton University under him, and am probably somewhat biased ).

William

[The Ibis]

Anyone seriously studying the British Expeditionary Force in 1914 and 1915 will almost certainly have read two books by Dr. Spencer Jones (if not then they are: Stemming the Tide, and Courage Without Glory). Dr Jones is a superbly entertaining lecturer who has an unparalled understanding of the first seventeen months of the war on the Western Front. (Disclaimer: I am studying for my MA at Wolverhampton University under him, and am probably somewhat biased ).

William

There is a lot of great stuff on The Western Front Association's Youtube page (link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb0Usv1mdl3_UvUPNjUmpkg). Sadly it hasn't been updated in about a year. Hopefully they will post some updates soon!

[The Ibis]

Getting America into the Great War by Michael Neiberg.

[The Ibis]

Feeding War: Gender, Health, and the Mobilized Kitchen in WWI Germany by Heather Perry

Published on May 3, 2016

Medical historian Heather Perry (Associate Professor of History at UNC Charlotte) shares her research on impact of World War I on the homefront in Germany. Perry’s work provides an overview on medicine, population health, and public policies in wartime, with more in-depth scrutiny of how women and their families coped with privations that impacted their health and well-being.

[The Ibis]

Karen Petrone Presents: “A Glorious War?”: Contemporary Russia Reimagines World War I

Description

After more than seventy years of the Soviet Union rejecting the First World War as an "imperialist war," it fell to the Soviet Union's successor state of Russia to commemorate the War's centenary in 2014. Exploring the creation of Russia's first national memorial to the First World War in Moscow and the founding of a World War I History Museum in Tsarskoe Selo, Karen Petrone argues that Russia's new remembrance of the First World War is an integral part of Vladimir Putin's campaign to re-nationalize, re-militarize, and re-masculinize contemporary Russia. To some degree, the ordeal of the Russian Empire during the First World War is being rewritten as a glorious chapter in Russian national history.

Notes

Karen Petrone is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Kentucky. Her primary research interests are cultural history, gender history, propaganda, representations of war, and the history of subjectivity and everyday life, especially in Russia and the Soviet Union. She is the author of The Great War in Russian Memory which challenges the notion that World War I was a forgotten war in the Soviet Union; and Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin, as well as the co-editor of The New Muscovite Cultural History, Gender Politics in Mass Dictatorship: Global Perspectives and Everyday Life in Russia. She is currently co-authoring a textbook for Oxford University Press entitled The Soviet Union and Russia, 1939-2015: A History in Documents.

[The Ibis]

John Maurer: A history lesson on the Battle of Jutland

Published on Jun 2, 2016

Professor John Maurer, "Battle of Jutland," Lecture of Opportunity, U.S. Naval War College, May 31, 2016.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Jutland, the largest sea fight of World War I. On May 31, 1916, the main fleets of Germany and Great Britain clashed in a hard-fought battle in the North Sea off Denmark’s Jutland peninsula. The battle was a trial of strength at sea between the fleets of a rising challenger, with aspirations to world power, and the reigning superpower, accustomed to thinking itself the indispensable leader of the international system. On the outcome of this battle in the cold waters of the North Sea (or so it was widely thought), nothing less than the fate of empires was at stake. To whom did the future belong—the rising power or the keeper of the system? A single day of combat between the steel giants making up the British and German fleets could decide the vital question of world power or decline for these competing empires. Professor Maurer’s lecture examines the background to the battle, the course of the battle on the day itself, the strategic consequences of the battle, and concludes with some “so what” thoughts about what we in the twenty-first century might learn from remembering an important battle.

Bio: Dr. John H. Maurer serves as the Alfred Thayer Mahan Professor of Sea Power and Grand Strategy in the Strategy and Policy Department.

Edited 5 June , 2016 by The Ibis

[The Ibis]

The U.S. Role on the Western Front by Jennifer Keene

 

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Published on Apr 21, 2016

The third presentation at the Teaching Military History Institute entitled "America’s Entry into World War I." This History Institute was sponsored by FPRI's Madeleine and W.W. Keen Butcher History Institute, the First Division Museum at Cantigny (a division of the Robert R. McCormick Foundation), Carthage College, and FPRI's Center for the Study of America and the West. These remarks were made at the First Division Museum at Cantigny in Wheaton, IL, on April 9, 2016.

 

 

 

Edited 17 June , 2016 by The Ibis

[The Ibis]

The Life and Legacy of Sir John Monash by Ted Baillieu

 

 

 

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Published on Jun 20, 2016

The Hon Ted Baillieu, Former Premier of Victoria, discusses the life of Sir John Monash.

Sir John Monash was Australia’s foremost military commander during the First World War and a true pillar of Australian life. As one of the leading infrastructure experts in the country, Sir John was enormously influential in the development of Melbourne and Victoria more broadly.

Having been heavily involved in a variety of significant projects throughout Victoria both before and after the war, Sir John always sought to utilise his skills and abilities for the benefit of the wider community.

Perhaps his most important contribution to Australia, though, was his work in providing a voice for the soldiers returning from war, and commemorating those whom had lost their lives. He oversaw the construction of the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, and was a principal organiser of the annual observance of ANZAC Day, now one of our nation’s most cherished holidays.

On the year of the ANZAC Centenary, it is timely for us to remember a man who devoted so much of his life to provide innumerable contributions to Australia and ensure the sacrifices of the ANZACs would not be forgotten.

The AIIA Victoria is pleased to welcome The Hon Ted Baillieu to celebrate the life and legacy of Sir John Monash, and to talk about his own work in organising ANZAC commemorations around the state.

Mr Ted Baillieu is Chair of the Victorian Government’s ANZAC Centenary Committee, coordinating Victoria’s commemorations, and is passionate about connecting as many Victorians as possible with our original ANZACs. He served as the 46th Premier of Victoria from 2010 to 2013, retiring from Parliament in 2014 after 15 years of service as the Member for Hawthorn.

 

[The Ibis]

Audio: 1917-1920 and the Global Revolution of Rising Expectations

 

 

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Published on Jul 4, 2016

Jörn Leonhard, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

When the American President Woodrow Wilson developed his vision of a new world order in 1917, his focus on the right of national self-determination, particularly that of small nations, played an almost fundamental role. Against the background of the First World War and the hitherto unknown number of victims contemporaries sought to answer the question what the causes of this catastrophe had been. Wilson’s answer pointed to the suppression of nationalities: “This war had its roots in the disregard of rights of small nations and of nationalities which lacked the union and the force to make good their claim to determine their own allegiances and their own forms of political life.” Both the war and the Wilsonian moment provoked globally rising expectations of what a peace settlement after a totalized war would have to achieve. The hitherto unknown number of war victims which had to be legitimized through the results of the peace, ever radicalizing war aims, the ideal of a new international order which would make future wars impossible, as well as the new mass markets of public deliberations and the new relation between “international” and “domestic” politics in an age of mass media and democratic franchise: all these elements contributed to a massive disillusion and disappointment when the results of the peace settlements became obvious. Turning away from the new international order, which seemed to have lost its legitimacy very soon, paved the way to multiple revisionisms. Against this background my lecture will look at the period from 1917 to 1920 as a period of globally rising expectations – political and social as well as national and anticolonial expectations, often overlapping with each other and thereby reinforcing complexity. By departing from the classical chronological compartment of 1914 to 1918, our image of the war changes if we open our European narrative into a global one. Thus the end of the war becomes highly ambivalent. The beginning of the war in early August 1914 marked a common experience for millions over thousands of kilometers. Yet the end of the war was no longer a synchronic moment in history. If we follow the aura of the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918, we focus on the end of war between states in Western Europe – while other wars continued or were about to start: in Ireland and Poland, where new nation states emerged in civil war or national war, in Eastern Europe as a whole, where the state war had already ended in 1917 and had transcended into a civil war, time and again overlapping with ethnic conflicts, that would continue into the early 1920s, in the Near and Middle East, in India, Asia and in many parts of Northern Africa. The formal end of the war gave way to a broad spectrum of new spaces of violence on a global level – wars of independence, ethnic cleansing, wars to revise terms of the peace-treaties – which transcend chronological compartment of 1914-1918.

Jörn Leonhard is Full Professor in Modern European History at the History Seminar of Freiburg University. He received his Doctorate (1998) and his Habilitation (2004) from the University of Heidelberg. From 1998-2003 he taught as Fellow and Tutor in Modern History at Oxford University, from 2004-2006 as Reader in West European History at Jena University before coming to Freiburg. From 2007-2012 he was one of the Founding Directors of the School of History of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). In 2012/13 he was Visiting Fellow at the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, where he completed a general history of the First World War. In 2015 he was elected member of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. In 2016/17 he will be a Senior Fellow at the Historisches Kolleg in Munich to complete his book “Overburdened Peace: A Global History 1918-1923”. His main publications include: “Liberalismus. Zur historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters“ (2001, edited with Ulrike von Hirschhausen), “Nationalismen in Europa: West- und Osteuropa im Vergleich“ (2001); “Bellizismus und Nation. Kriegsdeutung und Nationalbestimmung in Europa und den Vereinigten Staaten 1750-1914“ (2008); “Empires und Nationalstaaten im 19. Jahrhundert“ (2nd edition 2010, with Ulrike von Hirschhausen); ”Comparing Empires. Encounters and Transfers in the Nineteenth an Early Twentieth Century” (2nd edition 2012, edited with Ulrike von Hirschhausen); “What Makes the Nobility Noble? Comparative Perspectives from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century” (2011, edited with Christian Wieland); “Die Büchse der Pandora. Geschichte des Ersten Weltkriegs” (5th edition 2014).

The talk was held at the international conference “World-Counter-Revolutions”, 9 June 2016 in Hanover, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

 

[The Ibis]

Sepoys in the Trenches: The Indian Corps on the Western Front 1914-15

 

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Published on Jul 18, 2016

Historian and author, Major Gordon Corrigan MBE (Retd, Royal Gurkha Rifles), talks about the vital but unrecognised role of the Indian Army in First World War, highlighting the Sikh contribution within this forgotten narrative.

A talk from the symposium ‘In the Line of Fire: Deeds that Thrilled Empire’ convened by the UK Punjab Heritage Association on 31 August 2014 at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London, 10 Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG, United Kingdom.

 

 

[The Ibis]

Audio: "Knave Proof": The Macroeconomics of Stabilization in Europe and the U.S., 1919-1926 by Adam Tooze.

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Published on Jul 4, 2016

Adam Tooze, Columbia University

The violent politics of counter-revolution in the aftermath of World War I are eye-catching. But focusing on them can lead us to underestimate a larger and more broad-based phenomenon of unsettlement and restabilization that operated in the more abstract arena of macroeconomic forces. Between 1919 and the mid-1920s a gigantic cycle of inflation and deflation rocked the world economy. Here too a politics of stabilization was at work. It is one that operated in a classically counter-revolution fashion against the left and organized labor. But it also served to contain the more violent forces of the nationalist right-wing. It is precisely in this sphere that a liberal politics of stabilization was at its most powerful and effective.
Adam Tooze is Professor of History at Columbia University. Previously, he was Professor at Yale University (2009 - 2015) and Director of International Security Studies at the University of Cambridge (1996 - 2009). He is an Invited Commission Member of the Ministerial Research Project “History of the Reichsministerium der Finanzen in the Third Reich”. In 2002, he won the book prize for modern history with his work on “Statistics and the German state 1900-1945: The making of modern economic knowledge”. Moreover, he is the author of “The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy” (2006). His latest publication “The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931” was published in 2014 and won the LA Times History Prize. In 2015, he co-edited the “Cambridge History of World War II. Volume 3” (with Michael Geyer). That same year, he published a book on “Normalität und Fragilität: Demokratie nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg“ (with Tim B. Müller).

The talk was held at the international conference “World-Counter-Revolutions”, 10 June 2016 in Hanover, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation.

 

 

[The Ibis]

	Can't figure out how to get this to display. Anyway, there are some excellent lectures if you follow this link. https://sms.cam.ac.uk/collection/1183660 Here is: Why Allies: necessity or folly? Professor John Keiger, University of Salford response Professor Chris Clark, University of Cambridge https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1185506

[The Ibis]

Last one for today: The Great War and Today's World - Sir Hew Strachan 19 July 2016.

 

 

 

[The Ibis]

War origins talk from 2015

 

 

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Published on Aug 3, 2016

30-11-15 Institute of Historical Research
http://www.sas.ac.uk/
Institute: http://history.ac.uk
IHR Creighton Lecture 2015
The Outbreak of the First World War: Why the debate goes on
Margaret MacMillan (University of Oxford)

 

 

 

[The Ibis]

The Gallipoli Campaign; the August Offensive by Dr Brendan Nelson

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Published on Aug 24, 2015

On Thursday 6 August 2015, the Director of the Australian War Memorial, Dr Brendan Nelson, delivered an address to the National Press Club in Canberra on the centenary of the bloodiest conflict of the Gallipoli campaign – the August Offensive (6-10 August 1915).

Dr Nelson’s address The last gasp – the August Offensive on Gallipoli delved into the allied attempt to break the deadlock on the peninsula and force a decisive victory including the horrific battles at Lone Pine, The Nek, Chunuk Bair, and Hill 60. It was the August Offensive which led the allied soldiers to the realisation that the Gallipoli conflict could not be won.

The address recounts the extraordinary bravery of Australian soldiers in the face of harrowing hand-to-hand combat marked by the awarding of seven Victoria Crosses, including to Captain Alfred John Shout VC MC, of 1st Division. The Australians suffered more than 2,200 casualties—virtually half of those who went into the attack—including more than 800 killed or died of wounds. The Turks incurred more than 6,000 casualties, including over 1,500 dead.

Dr Nelson spoke to the tactics employed, and decisions made by commanders in the August Offensive in what is remembered in history as an inevitable tragedy in the context of the First World War.

 

 

[The Ibis]

Russia 1917: The Great Demobilization of the Empire by Eric Lohr. This one is an excellent primer. Lohr is part of the new generation of Western scholars focusing on wartime Russia and has done some really good work. In this lecture, Lohr does a nice job of summarizing much of the recent scholarship discussing these topics, in addition to presenting his own conclusions.

 

 

Edited 16 September , 2016 by The Ibis

[The Ibis]

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TDP Episode 9 - On Innovation in WW1 

 

Published on Sep 6, 2016

 

In this episode Mick chats with Dr. Aimée Fox-Godden, a teaching fellow in the history of warfare at the University of Birmingham. They discuss innovation in the British military during the First World war. They discuss common misconceptions about innovation and change in military forces as well as confirm whether or not Mulder and Scully were cooler than change agents.Aimée also provides a new and interesting definition of war.

 

 

 

[The Ibis]

I thought this was pretty interesting: Clifford Pereira - Canadian Secret Sailors

 

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Published on Nov 29, 2016

Webcast sponsored by the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre and hosted by the UBC Library's Rare Books and Special Collections. Historical geographer Clifford Pereira delivers this lecture about his current, groundbreaking work on the history of Chinese crews on Canadian vessels during the First World War. After a century of silence, a story emerges of hundreds of Asian crew working, and thousands of Chinese transported on ships of the Canadian Pacific "Empress" line as part of the First World War Effort. Clifford Pereira is Kenyan-Asian of Goan heritage, formally based in London, UK and now based in Hong Kong (SAR), who worked in several places around the world and in several industries before embarking on the current career in the heritage industry. This talk is part of the Remembrance Day speaker series, in conjunction with an exhibit at the Chung Collection curated by Clifford Pereira.

 

 

[The Ibis]

1916: The Air War - Dr. John Curatola

 

 

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Published on Dec 9, 2016

This lecture was delivered at the National World War I Museum and Memorial's Symposium -- 1916 | Total War -- which was held in Kansas City, Mo. November 4-5, 2016. https://www.theworldwar.org/learn/201...

Starting with the 'Fokker Scourge' in late 1915, the air battles over Verdun and the Somme as well as the Zeppelin raids over England in 1916 led to a technological and doctrinal race for air superiority. These events had both a physical and psychological toll and lead to the development of the modern concept of 'total war.'

John Curatola is an associate professor of History at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Prior to this position he was an active duty Marine Corps officer and retired in 2009 as a Lieutenant Colonel after 22 years of service.He received his doctorate from the University of Kansas in 2008. His work has been published in number of books and national periodicals.

 

[The Ibis]

The Western Front Association has a few new videos up.  Here is Hounds to the Hunters - The East Cost Raid and the Naval War, 1914, presented by Scott Lindgren.

 

 

[The Ibis]

Here is Richard S. Faulkner presenting Verdun: The Bleeding of Nations.  There are a few obvious errors but its a good use of an hour.

 

 

[The Ibis]

British Intelligence and the First World War:

 

 

[The Ibis]

Lawfare

 

 

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Published on Mar 2, 2017

The law and warfare have always been intertwined, but never has the connection between the two been so codified and radically changed as during World War I. Join Mark Hull as he discusses how the war and its aftermath shattered the traditional legal abyss that divided supreme sovereign authority and the soldier pulling the trigger, opening the door for our modern war crime trials.

Dr. Hull appears as part of The John J. Pershing Great War Centennial Series, in partnership with Command and General Staff College Foundation.

 

Edited 8 March , 2017 by The Ibis

[The Ibis]

Last Stands: The Eastern Front in Literature and Film

 

 

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Published on Feb 27, 2017

Explore how the traumatic destructiveness of the Eastern Front, and perhaps was more comparable to the Civil War. Enjoy this enlightening conversation with 20th century film and literature specialist and German language professor Dr. Larson Powell of the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Presented in conjunction with the special exhibition Wacht im Osten: German Encounters with the East in World War I. Supported by the Francis Family Foundation.

 

[The Ibis]

WFA PC15 John Sneddon HD

 

 

 

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Published on Mar 8, 2017

In this video Dr John Sneddon looks at a little known aspect of the First World War - the Trench Warfare Department under Major General Sir Louis Jackson, and the methods used during 1915 to develop trench weapons.