Exhibiting War
The Great War, Museums, and Memory in Britain, Canada, and Australia

A comparative study of how museum exhibitions in Britain, Canada and Australia were used to depict the First World War.

Jennifer Wellington (Author)

9781316501023, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 July 2019

365 pages, 50 b/w illus.
23 x 15.3 x 2 cm, 0.45 kg

'As a richly contextualised account of the origins of three major war museums of the British and Dominion experience, Exhibiting War captures the continuities and deeper cultural currents that animated the more familiar institutional story in each case.' Geoffrey A.C. Ginn, Australian Journal of Politics and History

What does it mean to display war? Examining a range of different exhibitions in Britain, Canada and Australia, Jennifer Wellington reveals complex imperial dynamics in the ways these countries developed diverging understandings of the First World War, despite their cultural, political and institutional similarities. While in Britain a popular narrative developed of the conflict as a tragic rupture with the past, Australia and Canada came to see it as engendering national birth through violence. Narratives of the war's meaning were deliberately constructed by individuals and groups pursuing specific agendas: to win the war and immortalise it at the same time. Drawing on a range of documentary and visual material, this book analyses how narratives of mass violence changed over time. Emphasising the contingent development of national and imperial war museums, it illuminates the way they acted as spaces in which official, academic and popular representations of this violent past intersect.

Part I: 1. In search of the 'authentic' experience of war, 1914–17
Part II: 2. Exhibiting for victory: travelling war photography displays, 1917–20
3. Art exhibitions: a higher truth in aid of victory and for posterity
4. Taming the monsters of war: exhibiting weapons and war trophies 1917–20
Part III: 5. Consolidations: creating national museums and narratives of war, 1920–35
6. Museums, monuments, and memory: exhibiting war as part of national and imperial commemorative projects since 1925.

Subject Areas: First World War [HBWN], Military history [HBW], Social & cultural history [HBTB], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW]