Keown, Bridget
(2023)
YOWB: War Risks: Understanding war trauma through a comprehensive study of War Risk Insurance Claims by American veterans of the First World War.
In: Pitt Momentum Fund 2023.
Abstract
I am seeking Momentum Funds to study the “War Risk Files” held in regional archives of the National Archives and Records Administration. These records represent an invaluable collection of veterans’ testimony of their service, and related injury and trauma, as well as the dialogue that took place between veterans and the officials charged with validating their suffering through financial compensation. The “shell-shocked soldier” remains among of the most enduring and culturally ubiquitous images of the First World War and is invoked in discussions of post-traumatic stress conditions today. Yet little scholarship addresses who was allowed access the language of suffering, and how specific symptoms or social conditions, including race, gender, and class, affected veterans’ claims and ability to access care. The “War Risk Insurance” files offer unique insight into how veterans’ narrated their own suffering and engaged with state power in pursuit of recognition and compensation. These records have not been widely studied, because they are geographically scattered and are not digitized. My project would identify these files as the foundation for a publication on war trauma among American First World War veterans that emphasizes how social and cultural assumptions around identity influenced veterans’ diagnoses, care, and long-term wellbeing.
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