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Historians of nursing in Britain have long been fighting for a place in the history of medicine. For example, of the 718 pages of text in Roy Porter’s best-selling The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, only five are concerned with nursing, and these, inevitably, with Florence Nightingale and 19th-century hospital reform.
Introduction: trauma, modernity, and the First World War
Brian Bond’s newest book presents an analysis of Western Front memoirs written by British and Commonwealth authors, acting as an analogous volume to The Unquiet Western Front: Britain’s Role in Literature and History.(1) The study is organised into a series of essays discussing individual authors, which are in turn complemented by comparative thematic chapters
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive was launched in late 2008. The site comprises a substantially revamped version of what was previously the Wilfred Owen archive and includes Oxford University’s virtual seminars for teaching literature online series.
This book is the result of a bold and innovative research project funded between 1999 and 2002 by the then Arts and Humanities Research Board, with further funds provided subsequently by a number of scholarly institutions. The preface further acknowledges the support of a glittering array of scholars, not least Geoffrey Parker who read through the entire draft.
Katie Stevenson, in her Chivalry and Knighthood in Scotland, 1424–1513, presents a thorough, scholarly, and informative research monograph. The years 1424 to 1513 carry one from the return to his kingdom of James I, after the long detention in England following his capture as a boy of twelve in 1406, to the death of James IV at Flodden.
The 1715 rebellion has never really sparkled in the heroic iconography of the Jacobite cause. Within the old received narrative of doomed chivalry and defeated virtue, it inhabits a melancholic role, untouched by the colour and charisma of Charles Edward Stuart and the ’45, or the epic afterglow of Viscount Dundee’s earlier stand at Killecrankie.
Although the First World War ended almost ninety years ago, it has become a truism to note that the echoes of that conflict continue to resound in Western culture.
One of the strengths of the recent historiography of the First World War has been the shift in focus away from the Western Front towards a broader understanding of the conflict as a world war.
Peter Barham's book is an excellent example of 'underdog' history. Barham has trawled the archives in search of the lives and experiences of ordinary soldiers who suffered mental crises during the Great War.