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I cannot help a passing allusion to the lack of pictorial records of this war – records made by artists of experience, who actually witness the scenes they portray.
This book achieves two aims: to locate the Great War in the history of the 20th century, and to show how, as the 20th century unfolded, our understanding of the meaning and significance of the Great War changed as well.
Ryan Floyd’s Abandoning American Neutrality should be considered required reading about America’s entry into the First World War.
The centenary of the First World War has acted as a catalyst for intense public and academic attention. One of the most prominent manifestations of this increasing interest in the conflict is in the proliferation of digital resources made available recently.
Asked to call to mind images of children and war in Britain, and the most ready association is that of children living through the ordeal of bombing and evacuation in the Second World War. The Children’s War, Britain 1914–1918 re-directs our attention to the lives of British children in the Great War.
Endless books have attempted to answer the question as to why the First World War broke out in summer 1914, and the centenary of the July crisis will no doubt prompt historians and popular audiences to further revisit the circumstances in which European leaders ‘sleepwalked’ into a military conflict of unprecedented proportions.
Matthew Hendley’s Organized Patriotism examines the ways in which three ‘patriotic and imperialist leagues’ coped with the impact of the First World War. Focusing on the ‘politically and socially acceptable’ National Service League, League of the Empire and Victoria League (p.
‘We have to produce something that doesn’t yet exist and of which we can have no idea of what it will be’.
The study of war and memory has been popular amongst cultural historians for over two decades, yet scholarly interest in the subject shows no sign of abating. Indeed, as this collection demonstrates, memory remains a fruitful area of research, particularly if approached from a comparative perspective.
In an article for The Times Magazine published earlier this year, the novelist Sebastian Faulks characterized relations between soldiers of the First World War (whose monolithic perspective he takes on in the article) and British civilians thus: ‘When you return home, on leave, wounded or, with luck, demobilised in 1918, you will find that people have little idea of what you have endur