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s the deft pun in the title reminds us, one of the ways in which nations were both imagined and institutionalised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was through the conscripting of young men into the army. The ways in which they were called up, selected, trained and led, and the arrangements made for their families left behind deeply affected the nature of nationhood.
I know from my own research into the pre-First World War activities of the British military attachés in Berlin just how difficult it is to find archival material that illuminates the role of these elusive soldier-diplomats.(1) Not only did few of these individuals keep extensive collections of private papers, but the War Office, taking the view that intelligence materi
Götz Aly’s and Susanne Heim’s Architects of Annihilation is a translation of the authors’ Vordenker der Vernichtung. Auschwitz und die deutschen Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe), first published in 1991. The alteration to the title may be designed to emphasise the authors’ argument that there was a rational purpose behind the Holocaust.
In the popular imagination, the geographical complexity of the Holocaust has been reduced to two Polish towns, Oswiecim and Warsaw. The death camp sited in the former has emerged as not only the definitive death camp and representative of the state-sponsored factory-like mass killings of the Holocaust, but also as a synonym for evil.
When one thinks of the Liberation of France after World War II, one generally thinks of those weeks as ones of a transition from German control through a short, if intense period of anarchy and chaos to the establishment of centralised control by a new, if provisional, French government, with law and ord
Julian Jackson’s monumental history of Vichy is a powerful contribution to the historiography. No one knows more about this subject than he: every book, article, memoir and dissertation on it seems to have been located, analysed and woven into this account.
This book can be viewed in several ways. Each of its ten chapters by a different author deals with a discrete topic (women, gender, public opinion, photography and food supply) without any pretence of thematic unity.
In August 1985 the French weekly L'Evénement du jeudi published a dossier of articles by professional historians titled 'Pétain, héros ou traître?' to mark the fortieth anniversary of the Marshal's trial for high treason as Vichy head of state.
The First World War is Russia’s ‘forgotten war’. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the memory of the war was subsumed into the history of the revolutionary process.
Matthew Seligmann's Spies in Uniform is an attempt to understand more fully the bases of British decision-making and policy from 1900–1914 in the light of a full investigation of the reports and work of the naval and military attachés in Germany.