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Books > Humanities > History > World history > From 1900 > First World War
First published in 1914, this is a systematic treatment of the
people whose contribution to civilization of the Nile Valley was
for so long a source of controversy.
In 1914, the Associated Newspapers sent correspondent Herbert Corey
to Europe on the day Great Britain declared war on Germany. During
the Great War that followed, Corey reported from France, Britain,
and Germany, visiting the German lines on both the western and
eastern fronts. He also reported from Greece, Italy, Switzerland,
Holland, Belgium, and Serbia. When the Armistice was signed in
November 1918, Corey defied the rules of the American Expeditionary
Forces and crossed into Germany. He covered the Paris Peace
Conference the following year. No other foreign correspondent
matched the longevity of his reporting during World War I. Until
recently, however, his unpublished memoir lay largely unnoticed
among his papers in the Library of Congress. With publication of
Herbert Corey's Great War, coeditors Peter Finn and John Maxwell
Hamilton reestablish Corey's name in the annals of American war
reporting. As a correspondent, he defies easy comparison. He
approximates Ernie Pyle in his sympathetic interest in the American
foot soldier, but he also told stories about troops on the other
side and about noncombatants. He is especially illuminating on the
obstacles reporters faced in conveying the story of the Great War
to Americans. As his memoir makes clear, Corey didn't believe he
was in Europe to serve the Allies. He viewed himself as an
outsider, one who was deeply ambivalent about the entry of the
United States into the war. His idiosyncratic, opinionated, and
very American voice makes for compelling reading.
The Politics of Wounds explores military patients' experiences of
frontline medical evacuation, war surgery, and the social world of
military hospitals during the First World War. The proximity of the
front and the colossal numbers of wounded created greater public
awareness of the impact of the war than had been seen in previous
conflicts, with serious political consequences. Frequently referred
to as 'our wounded', the central place of the soldier in society,
as a symbol of the war's shifting meaning, drew contradictory
responses of compassion, heroism, and censure. Wounds also stirred
romantic and sexual responses. This volume reveals the paradoxical
situation of the increasing political demand levied on citizen
soldiers concurrent with the rise in medical humanitarianism and
war-related charitable voluntarism. The physical gestures and
poignant sounds of the suffering men reached across the classes,
giving rise to convictions about patient rights, which at times
conflicted with the military's pragmatism. Why, then, did patients
represent military medicine, doctors and nurses in a negative
light? The Politics of Wounds listens to the voices of wounded
soldiers, placing their personal experience of pain within the
social, cultural, and political contexts of military medical
institutions. The author reveals how the wounded and disabled found
culturally creative ways to express their pain, negotiate power
relations, manage systemic tensions, and enact forms of 'soft
resistance' against the societal and military expectations of
masculinity when confronted by men in pain. The volume concludes by
considering the way the state ascribed social and economic values
on the body parts of disabled soldiers though the pension system.
How the Great War came to the cinema screen
Everyone familiar with motion picture footage of the First World
War on the Western Front will certainly have witnessed the talent,
daring, uniquely invaluable and enduring work of the author of this
book, Geoffrey Malins. Malins was one of two 'Official War Office
Kinematographers' authorised to film the allied armies in action in
France. There have been comments detrimental to Malins' character,
he might have been guilty of embellishment as regards his own
actions (no strange phenomenon in a military memoir) and he
certainly downplayed the role of his colleague J. B. McDowell to
the point of invisibility, but it is pointless to concentrate on
the imperfections of the man when balanced against his indisputable
achievements. One thing is certain, our knowledge of the Great War
would be poorer without Malins. Here was a 'movie man' prepared to
go into the danger zone to record the reality of the war of wire,
the blood and trenches the ordinary 'Tommy' knew, while dragging
around the most cumbersome equipment. His most famous film, 'The
Battle of the Somme, ' filmed in 1916 and considered to be
excessively graphic by many at the time, was viewed by over 20
million people and is shown on television to the present day.
Despite producing some now well known fake 'over the top'
sequences, Malins was responsible for the iconic footage of the
blowing of the Hawthorn Crater and anyone interested in the Great
War and the earliest days of war cinematography will be fascinated
to read the story of how it came about. The exploits of Malins and
his colleagues make no less gripping reading.
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.
On a summer morning in Sarajevo a hundred years ago, a teenage
assassin named Gavrilo Princip fired not just the opening shots of
the First World War but the starting gun for modern history, when
he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Yet the events Princip
triggered were so monumental that his own story has been largely
overlooked, his role garbled and motivations misrepresented. The
Trigger puts this right, filling out as never before a figure who
changed our world and whose legacy still has an impact on all of us
today. Born a penniless backwoodsman, Princip's life changed when
he trekked through Bosnia and Serbia to attend school. As he
ventured across fault lines of faith, nationalism and empire, so
tightly clustered in the Balkans, radicalisation slowly transformed
him from a frail farm boy into history's most influential assassin.
By retracing Princip's journey from his highland birthplace,
through the mythical valleys of Bosnia to the fortress city of
Belgrade and ultimately Sarajevo, Tim Butcher illuminates our
understanding both of Princip and the places that shaped him. Tim
uncovers details about Princip that have eluded historians for a
century and draws on his own experience, as a war reporter in the
Balkans in the 1990s, to face down ghosts of conflicts past and
present. The Trigger is a rich and timely work that brings to life
both the moment the world first went to war and an extraordinary
region with a potent hold over history.
This is the first ever major study examining of the views of the
Conservative Party towards the key aspects of Anglo-German
relations from 1905 to 1914. Drawing on a wide variety of original
sources, it examines the Conservative response to the German
threat, and argues that the response of the Conservative Party
towards Germany showed a marked absence of open hostility towards
Germany. Overall, this important new study provides a powerful and
overdue corrective to the traditional depiction of the Conservative
Party in opposition as 'Scaremongers' and the chief source of
Germanophobic views among the British political parties.
Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and
provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in
the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and
communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides
fresh interpretations offundamental works and of the vital and
challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By
engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production,
and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the
boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the
seriesquestion familiar frameworks and provide innovative
interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.
The Great War shaped the modern world, and much of its literary
imagination. Literature and the Great War insightfully reassesses
this impact, analysing a wide range of authors, both established
and less well-known, and re-examining critical judgements, popular
assumptions - even 'myths' - about war writing that have developed
in the century or so that has followed.
By looking at all genres of Great War writing in a single volume,
the study allows reconsideration of the relative merits of the
period's much-praised poetry and its generally less celebrated
narrative texts. Randall Stevenson looks far beyond the work of
soldier-authors, considering also the role of an older generation
of writers - ones whose reputations were established before the war
began - as well as the impact of war on the modernist imagination
developing afterwards, in the 1920s.
Literature and the Great War examines the context in which this
literature was produced. Taking into consideration military life,
the role of newspapers, war correspondents, politicians and
propagandists.
The unintelligible violence of the Great War placed a huge amount
of pressure on the language, imagination, and textual practice of
all who attempted to describe it. Incisively reconsidering these
fundamental issues, Literature and the Great War challenges and
rejuvenates approaches to its subject, redefining the
interconnections of history, culture, and literary imagination in
the early decades of the twentieth century.
"Riveting . . . There is a wealth of new information here that adds
considerable texture and nuance to his story and helps to set
Russia apart from previous works."-The Wall Street Journal An epic
new account of the conflict that reshaped Eastern Europe and set
the stage for the rest of the twentieth century. Between 1917 and
1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the
collapse of the Tsarist empire. The doomed White alliance of
moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance
against Trotsky's Red Army and the single-minded Communist
dictatorship under Lenin. In the savage civil war that followed,
terror begat terror, which in turn led to ever greater cruelty with
man's inhumanity to man, woman and child. The struggle became a
world war by proxy as Churchill deployed weaponry and troops from
the British empire, while contingents from the United States,
France, Italy, Japan, Poland, and Czechoslovakia played rival
parts. Using the most up to date scholarship and archival research,
Antony Beevor assembles the complete picture in a gripping
narrative that conveys the conflict through the eyes of everyone
from the worker on the streets of Petrograd to the cavalry officer
on the battlefield and the doctor in an improvised hospital.
Invented during World War I to break the grim deadlock of the
Western Front trenches, tanks went on to revolutionize warfare.
From the lightning Blitzkrieg assaults of World War II, to the
great battles in the Middle Eastern desert, tanks have become one
of the key components of the 'combined arms' philosophy of the
modern battlefield. This pocket guide makes accessible to
'rivetheads' everywhere essential information to identify 40 of
history's most fearsome tanks, including Germany's Tiger, Russia's
T-34, America's Sherman and Panther, and France's FT-17. Each tank
is presented with a detailed drawing to aid recognition.
The Remembered Dead explores the ways poets of the First World War
- and later poets writing in the memory of that war - address the
difficult question of how to remember, and commemorate, those
killed in conflict. It looks closely at the way poets struggled to
meaningfully represent dying, death, and the trauma of witness,
while responding to the pressing need for commemoration. The
authors pay close attention to specific poems while maintaining a
strong awareness of literary and philosophical contexts. The poems
are discussed in relation to modernism and myth, other forms of
commemoration (such as photographs and memorials), and theories of
cultural memory. There is fresh analysis of canonical poets which,
at the same time, challenges the confines of the canon by
integrating discussion of lesser-known figures, including
non-combatants and poets of later decades. The final chapter
reaches beyond the war's centenary in a discussion of one
remarkable commemoration of Wilfred Owen.
This is the compelling story of West Belfast's involvement fighting
on the Western Front throughout the First World War. This is the
story of men from either side of West Belfast's sectarian divide
during the Great War. This dramatic book tells the story of the
volunteers of the 36th and 16th divisions who fought on the Somme
and side-by-side at Messines. Grayson also brings in forgotten West
Belfast men from throughout the armed forces, from the retreat at
Mons to the defeat of Germany and life post-war. In so doing, he
tells a new story which challenges popular perceptions of the war
and explains why remembrance remains so controversial in Belfast
today.
Why, despite the appalling conditions in the trenches of the
Western Front, was the British army almost untouched by major
mutiny during the First World War? Drawing upon an extensive range
of sources, including much previously unpublished archival
material, G. D. Sheffield seeks to answer this question by
examining a crucial but previously neglected factor in the
maintenance of the British army's morale in the First World War:
the relationship between the regimental officer and the ordinary
soldier.
Booth offers a complex portrait of the relation between British Great War culture and modernist writings. She notes that unlike civilians, modernist writers and combatants shared a concern with the divide between language and experience, and draws connections between the sensibility of the modernist writer and the soldier, particularly regarding efforts to describe dying and the dead. Her analysis extends to memorials, posters, and architecture of the Great War, though her emphasis is on literary works by Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, Vera Brittain, and others.
From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the
history of the First World War has been continually written and
rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography
shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation.
Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast
body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and
regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars
in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts
ranging from Nazi Germany to India's struggle for independence,
this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay
of memory and history.
The Great War is still seen as a mostly European war. The Middle
Eastern theater is, at best, considered a sideshow written from the
western perspective. This book fills an important gap in the
literature by giving an insight through annotated translations from
five Ottoman memoirs, previously not available in English, of
actors who witnessed the last few years of Turkish presence in the
Arab lands. It provides the historical background to many of the
crises in the Middle East today, such as the Arab-Israeli
confrontation, the conflict-ridden emergence of Syria and Lebanon,
the struggle over the holy places of Islam in the Hejaz, and the
mutual prejudices of Arabs and Turks about each other.
This is a major new history of the British army during the Great
War written by three leading military historians. Ian Beckett,
Timothy Bowman and Mark Connelly survey operations on the Western
Front and throughout the rest of the world as well as the army's
social history, pre-war and wartime planning and strategy, the
maintenance of discipline and morale and the lasting legacy of the
First World War on the army's development. They assess the
strengths and weaknesses of the army between 1914 and 1918,
engaging with key debates around the adequacy of British
generalship and whether or not there was a significant 'learning
curve' in terms of the development of operational art during the
course of the war. Their findings show how, despite limitations of
initiative and innovation amongst the high command, the British
army did succeed in developing the effective combined arms warfare
necessary for victory in 1918.
Over 185,000 British military servicemen were captured by the
Germans during the First World War and incarcerated as prisoners of
war (POWs). In this original investigation into their experiences
of captivity, Wilkinson uses official and private British source
material to explore how these servicemen were challenged by, and
responded to, their wartime fate. Examining the psychological
anguish associated with captivity, and physical trials, such as the
controlling camp spaces; harsh routines and regimes; the lack of
material necessities; and, for many, forced labour demands, he asks
if, how and with what effects British POWs were able to respond to
such challenges. The culmination of this research reveals a range
of coping strategies embracing resistance; leadership and
organisation; networks of support; and links with 'home worlds'.
British Prisoners of War in First World War Germany offers an
original insight into First World War captivity, the German POW
camps, and the mentalities and perceptions of the British
servicemen held within.
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