This transnational, interdisciplinary study argues for the use of comics as a primary source. In recuperating currently unknown or neglected strips the authors demonstrate that these examples, produced during the World Wars, act as an important cultural record, providing, amongst other information, a barometer for contemporary popular thinking.

Ranging from soldiers reading newspapers at the front to authors' responses to the war, this book sheds new light on the reading habits and preferences of men and women, combatants and civilians, during the First World War. This is the first study of the conflict from the perspective of readers.

The importance of the Italian front in the First World War is often overlooked. Nor is it realised that British troops fought in Italy. The Forgotten Front demonstrates Italy's vital contribution to the Allied effort, including Lloyd George's plan to secure overall victory by an offensive on this front. Although his grand scheme was frustrated, British troops were committed to the theatre and played a real part in holding the Italian line and in the final victory of 1918. George H. Cassar, in an account that is original, scholarly and readable, covers both the strategic considerations and the actual fighting.
Faced by stalemate on the Western Front, Lloyd George argued strongly in 1917 for a joint Allied campaign in Italy to defeat Austria-Hungary. Knocking Germany's principal ally out of the war would lead in turn to the collapse of Germany itself. While his plan had real attractions, it also begged many questions. These allowed Haig and Robertson to join the French high command to thwarting it. The disastrous Italian defeat at Caporetto in October 1917 led, however, to the deployment of a British corps in Italy under Sir Herbert Plumer, which bolstered the Italians at a critical juncture. Subsequently led by the Earl of Cavan, British troops fought gallantly at the battle of Asiago in February to March 1918 and contributed significantly to the final defeat of Austria-Hungary at Vittorio Veneto in October.

The American, his motor car and the cavalry in its last great conflict
This essential Leonaur Original, combines two works by American author Frederic Coleman, and has been published to coincide with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Coleman, an American member of the Royal Automobile Club, together with a number of like minded volunteers, offered his own motor vehicle and services as a driver to the war effort. In 1914 they and their collection of superior cars arrived at the Western Front to be used as chauffeurs and couriers by staff and regimental officers of division and brigade. For many the Great War means massive armies locked in a war of attrition fought over a ' No Man's Land ' fringed with barbed wire behind which helmeted soldiers cowered in squalid trenches. For much of the war that image is accurate, but it was not always so. In the early stages infantry marched, cavalry charged and artillery was pulled into action by horsepower, just as it had been for hundreds of years. The invading Imperial German Army, superior in numbers and equipment of every kind, swept through Belgium and France as the allied armies fought and retired before its might. Coleman was allocated to the 2nd Cavalry Brigade of De Lisle as part of Allenby's First Cavalry Division. He kept a meticulous diary that enabled him to write these well crafted and detailed books full of anecdote, narrative and action. 'President' Coleman (as he was christened by the cavalry) was an eyewitness in the very heart of the conflict and in the company of the officers and men of the British Army's cavalry regiments he takes the reader from the campaigns of 1914 and the retreat from Mons to the war of stalemate of 1915. His descriptions of cavalry in action on the field of battle are riveting. Aside from his fascinating insights into some of the last campaigns of mounted soldiers, Coleman also provides the reader with a thrilling account of his own adventures with his trusty and almost indestructible motor car.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

Provides an account of war veterans and their associations which spanned French politics. Their work is distinguished from other European veterans' organizations by their commitment to civic rather than military virtues. The author has prepared a new introduction for this English edition."

This work explores the reasons for the Allied intervention into Russia at the end of the Great War and examines the military, diplomatic and political chaos that resulted in the failure of the Allies and White Russians to defeat the Bolshevik Revolution.

Letters from under the Guns
Observation Posts, a special Leonaur book, brings together two books by Dawson concerning warfare as experienced by the men in the trenches during the First World War on the Western Front. 'Carry On' and its sequel 'Living Bayonets' are based on the author's time as an artillery officer and principally comprise his letters to his family. Dawson was an intelligent, thoughtful correspondent who in fine prose has left posterity an intimate 'gunner's' view of the Great War making this book an essential source work for students of the period. This good value 'two-in-one' Leonaur edition enables collectors to own these uncommon and related accounts in a single, value-for-money volume.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their spines and fabric head and tail bands.

This book discusses British cinema's representation of the Great War during the 1920s. It argues that popular cinematic representations of the war offered surviving audiences a language through which to interpret their recent experience, and traces the ways in which those interpretations changed during the decade.

Far from the battlefront, hundreds of thousands of workers toiled in Bohemian factories over the course of World War I, and their lives were inescapably shaped by the conflict. In particular, they faced new and dramatic forms of material hardship that strained social ties and placed in sharp relief the most mundane aspects of daily life, such as when, what, and with whom to eat. This study reconstructs the experience of the Bohemian working class during the Great War through explorations of four basic spheres-food, labor, gender, and protest-that comprise a fascinating case study in early twentieth-century social history.

James D. Startt previously explored Woodrow Wilson's relationship with the press during his rise to political prominence. Now, Startt returns to continue the story, picking up with the outbreak of World War I in 1914 and tracing history through the Senate's ultimate rejection in 1920 of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations. Woodrow Wilson, the Great War, and the Fourth Estate delves deeply into the president's evolving relations with the press and its influence on and importance to the events of the time. Startt navigates the complicated relationship that existed between one of the country's most controversial leaders and its increasingly ruthless corps of journalists. The portrait of Wilson that emerges here is one of complexity-a skilled politician whose private nature and notorious grit often tarnished his rapport with the press, and an influential leader whose passionate vision just as often inspired journalists to his cause.

This is the first full scholarly history of the French Foreign Ministry - the Quai d'Orsay - in the years between the Fashoda Crisis and the First World War. In this intensively researched study, M. B. Hayne examines the bureaucratic machinery of the Quai d'Orsay, its policies, and its personnel. He explores the ideas and influence of leading diplomats and administrators, their prejudices, and their aims; and traces the often complex relationships between successive Foreign Ministers and the functionaries of the Quai d'Orsay. Dr Hayne's analysis throws much light on French policy and actions during the July Crisis, and makes a significant contribution to the debate over the origins of the First World War.

How does a democratic government conscript citizens, turn them into soldiers who can fight effectively against a highly trained enemy, and then somehow reward these troops for their service? In "Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America, " Jennifer D. Keene argues that the doughboy experience in 1917-18 forged the U.S. Army of the twentieth century and ultimately led to the most sweeping piece of social-welfare legislation in the nation's history--the G.I. Bill.

Keene shows how citizen-soldiers established standards of discipline that the army in a sense had to adopt. Even after these troops had returned to civilian life, lessons learned by the army during its first experience with a mass conscripted force continued to influence the military as an institution. The experience of going into uniform and fighting abroad politicized citizen-soldiers, Keene finally argues, in ways she asks us to ponder. She finds that the country and the conscripts--in their view--entered into a certain social compact, one that assured veterans that the federal government owed conscripted soldiers of the twentieth century debts far in excess of the pensions the Grand Army of the Republic had claimed in the late nineteenth century.

In April 1917, the United States embarked on its first overseas war - with no history of conscription, an army smaller than Bulgaria's, just two hundred agents in its federal Bureau of Investigation, and a political culture that saw little role for the federal government other than delivering the mail. Uncle Sam Wants You tells the dramatic story of the mobilization of the American homefront in World War I. In the absence of a strong federal government, Americans mobilized the Progressive Era's vibrant civil society by drawing on a political culture that stressed duty, obligation, and responsibility over rights and freedoms. In clubs, schools, churches, and workplaces, Americans governed each other during the war. But the heated temper of war quickly unleashed coercion on an unprecedented scale, making wartime America the scene of some of American history's most drastic political violence. Solving this problem prompted Americans to turn over increasing amounts of power to the federal government, giving rise to the modern American state of the twentieth century. Whether they were some of the four million men drafted under the Selective Service Act or the tens of millions of homefront volunteers - or counted themselves among the thousand of conscientious objectors, anti-war radicals, or German enemy aliens, Americans of the World War I era created a new American state - and new ways of being American citizens. Based on a rich array of sources bringing together political leaders and ordinary Americans, Uncle Sam Wants You offers a vivid and provocative new interpretation of American policial history.

Despite acts of female heroism, popular memory, as well as official memorialization in monuments and historic sites, has ignored French women's role in the First World War. This book explores stories that were never told and why they were not. These include the experiences of French women in the war, the stories they themselves told about these experiences and how French society interpreted them.The author examines the ways French women served their country - from charity work, nursing and munitions manufacture to volunteering for military service and espionage. In tracing stories about war heroines, but also about villainesses like Mata Hari, this fascinating study shows what these stories reveal about French understanding of the war, their hopes and fears for the future. While the masculine war story was unitary and unchanging, the feminine story was multiple and shifting. Initially praised for their voluntary mobilization, women's claims of patriotism were undercut by criticisms as the war bogged down in the trenches. Were nurses giving solace or seeking romance? Were munitions workers patriots or profiteers? The prosecutions of Mata Hari for espionage and Hel'ne Brion for subversion show how attitudes to women's claim of patriotism changed. French women's relationship to the war called into question ideas about gender, definitions of citizenship and national identity.This book is the first study of women at war to treat both their experiences and its representations, which shaped nationalism, war and gender for the rest of the twentieth century. It makes an important contribution to the burgeoning history of collective memory and of the First World War.

"Whiz-Bangs and Woolly Bears" is a story about a soldier of the Great War and his experiences as an artillery gunner in France. I used to listen carefully to his stories while we worked on his farm in Carleton County, New Brunswick. He had kept a diary during the war, and I later had a chance to look at it.

The short entries did not begin to describe the horrors of the Western Front in 1917 and 1918. As I grew older, I began to write him to ask about the details. He responded to questions about major battles in this example: "Passchendaele was just one glorious mudhole. We were there 42 days. Kept 24 men on the guns and lost 42 in the time, an average of one a day." This is the essence of what "Whiz Bangs and Woolly Bears" is about. It is a running discourse between a grandfather, Walter Ray Estabrooks and his grandson Hal Skaarup, now in the army as well.

Although the story is essentially about Walter Estabrooks, his experiences during the Great War, it is also about the fact that he lived to tell the tale. So many did not.

British children were mobilised for total war in 1914-18. War dominated their teaching and school experience, it was the focus of their extra curricular activities and they enjoyed it as a source of entertainment in literature and play. Children were not shielded from the war because it was believed their support was vital for Britain's present and future.
The study of children's lives provides a unique perspective on British society during the First World War. It lets us get to the very essence of how Britain's adults perceived the war and allows us to explore the methods society used to communicate with itself. Children's connection to the war, however, was personal. Millions had a relative in the army and those that did not had friends, neighbours and teachers involved in the fighting. Their participation, therefore, while shaped by adults, was motivated by a desire to remain in touch with their absent fathers and brothers.