History – Munitions of the Mind

Serial Propaganda: Replicating the Trope of ‘Barbarous’ Germans in British Boys’ Story Papers during the First World War

Published June 26, 2017

Written by Thomas Stephens.

British boys’ authors writing during the First World War embraced the conflict as a new arena for their fictional heroes. Stories about the war were at a premium from 1914 onwards, and many authors also took the opportunity to use their publications to mobilise youth to help in the war effort. Those writing about the war for boys got information about the conflict using information from a combination of newspapers, official propaganda, personal knowledge, rumour, and imagination. In 1914 and 1915, a flood of stories focusing on the conflict appeared in boys’ literature. But by 1916, many story papers such as the Boys’ Own Paper, Magnet, and Boys’ Friend returned to primarily running humorous public-school stories or colonial adventures. These topics gave readers an escape from the sombre matter of industrialised warfare. Wartime inflation and loss of staff also made returning to easily reprintable stories a sensible idea. Many novels and some adventure serials, like Chums, continued to feature narratives about the front throughout the conflict.

Across the Pyrenees: Medical Care of the Defeated in French and Spanish Concentration Camps and Prisons following the Spanish Civil War

Published April 17, 2017

Written by J. Sebastian Browne.

On 26 January 1939, the Catalan capital of Barcelona fell to the advancing troops of General Franco. The occupation of Barcelona was the last major battle of the Spanish Civil War, with the Republic forced into unconditional surrender two months later. The Insurgent offensive against the Republican Army in Catalunya begun on 23 December 1938 prompted the beginning of an exodus that was to result in the flight of 470,000 refugees into France, with the greatest number crossing the frontier in the two weeks that preceded Franco’s closure of the border on 10 February 1939. Republican forces in fact fought a well-organised retreat and much of the army of the Levant passed over into France where it was disarmed and its soldiers incarcerated in concentration camps, with initially little or no shelter or sanitary facilities and treated as prisoners of war.

Medicine in Exile after the Spanish Civil War: A Clinical Trial in a French Concentration Camp, 1939-1940

Published April 4, 2017

Auscultation of an internee at the Bram Concentration Camp (Aude, France, 1939).
Image courtesy of: ESPAÑA. MINISTERIO DE EDUCACIÓN, CULTURA Y DEPORTE, Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica. Archivo Centelles. Foto.9380

Written by Àlvar Martínez-Vidal and Xavier García-Ferrandis.

In concentration camps organised in France to intern refugees who had fled Spain at the end of the Civil War (February 1939), a number of clinical trials were performed by Catalan doctors in order to provide health assistance to their compatriots in the most rational way possible.

This short paper focuses on one of these human experiments, which combined health care, clinical supervision and scientific research. It was not the only clinical trial of this kind performed in such strange circumstances, but it was the most significant.

Tag: History

Serial Propaganda: Replicating the Trope of ‘Barbarous’ Germans in British Boys’ Story Papers during the First World War

Across the Pyrenees: Medical Care of the Defeated in French and Spanish Concentration Camps and Prisons following the Spanish Civil War

Medicine in Exile after the Spanish Civil War: A Clinical Trial in a French Concentration Camp, 1939-1940