This is an introduction to researching war experience and its legacy: taking individual, family and community perspectives through the prism of the local, national and international. It will raise questions such as:

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.

PROGRAMME

10.00  registration, and coffee/tea

10:30  welcome and introduction: Professor Philip Murphy, Director, Institute of Commonwealth Studies (ICwS).

10:45  keynote: The relationship of locality to national and international events in the First World War. Dr Catriona Pennell (Exeter)

11:30  Local responses to 'the other': 1. Whose remembrance? a study of available research on communities in Britain, and the colonial experience of the First World War. Dr Suzanne Bardgett (Imperial War Museum)  2.  Responses to Black and Indian soldiers in Britain. Dr Richard Smith (Goldsmiths, University of London)

13:00   lunch

14:00 Localities, nations and Empire: Britain and Ireland in times of crisis, 1912-1922.
Professor David Killingray (Goldsmiths, University of London; and ICwS) 

15.00 Using The National Archives colonial records. Dr Mandy Banton (ICwS), 

15.45  final discussion, and tea.

For flyer, further details and registration:

http://events.sas.ac.uk/icws/events/view/14049