In a unique collection of international and interdisciplinary research, this book focuses on commemorative events around the world on the same day: 11 November 2018, the centenary of Armistice Day, the end of the First World War. It argues that we need to move beyond discourse, narrative and how historical events are represented to fully understand what commemoration does, socially, politically and culturally. Adopting an experiential reframing treats sensory, affective and emotional feelings as fundamental to how we collectively understand shared histories, and through them, shared identities. The volume features 15 case studies from ten countries, covering a variety of settings and national contexts specific to the First World War. Together the chapters demonstrate that a new conceptualisation of commemoration is needed: one that attends to how it feels.

This book challenges current thinking about the outbreak of World War I and the course of German foreign policy since Bismarck's chancellorship. In 1914, Germany's opening offensives against France were to be accompanied by a simultaneous offensive by her ally, Austria-Hungary, against Russia. The Austrian offensive was intended to hold the Russians until Germany defeated the French-six weeks, no more. Then, the German army would turn east to support the Austrians. The Austrian offensive was a catastrophic failure. After only days of fighting Russia, Germany was obliged to send troops to support Austria lest she capitulate while most of the German army was still in France. The Austrian army's severe deficiencies were a constant drain on the German effort throughout the war. After the war, German memoirists and historians claimed that the German leadership had been unaware of these deficiencies before the war broke out. These claims have been accepted by historians down to today. The book presents recently re-discovered documentary evidence that the German general staff and Germany's political leadership had known of the Austrian army's weaknesses for decades before the war. The book also reveals a new perspective of Bismarck's diplomacy beginning shortly after he engineered the Dual Alliance between the two countries in 1879. It demonstrates that as early as 1882 Bismarck became aware that the Austrian army was far weaker than assumed when he concluded the alliance. It was primarily his concern about Austria's weakness that spurred Bismarck's energetic diplomacy, seeking alliances and understandings with other countries in the region, and which became the main consideration that guided his foreign policy from then on. For if Austria suffered a defeat, Germany would find itself alone between two dangerous powers: France and Russia. The consequences of his policies resulted in peace down to his departure in 1890. His successors, for a variety of reasons addressed in the book, were not as careful, ignored Austria's weaknesses despite the warnings of the military attaches, and permitted Austria to become involved in a war. The result was tragically foreseeable.

The First World War had a devastating impact on the Russian state, yet relatively little is known about the ways in which ordinary Russians experienced and viewed this conflict. Melissa Kirschke Stockdale presents the first comprehensive study of the Great War's influence on Russian notions of national identity and citizenship. Drawing on a vast array of sources, the book examines the patriotic and nationalist organizations which emerged during the war, the role of the Russian Orthodox Church, the press and the intelligentsia in mobilizing Russian society, the war's impact on the rights of citizens, and the new, democratized ideas of Russian nationhood which emerged both as a result of the war and of the 1917 revolution. Russia's war experience is revealed as a process that helped consolidate in the Russian population a sense of membership in a great national community, rather than being a test of patriotism which they failed.

This book examines British responses to genocide and atrocity in the Ottoman Empire during the aftermath of World War I. The authors analyze British humanitarianism and humanitarian intervention through the advice and policies of the Foreign Office and British government in London and the actions of Foreign Officers in the field. British understandings of humanitarianism at the time revolved around three key elements: good government, atrocity, and the refugee crises; this ideology of humanitarianism, however, was challenged by disputed policies of post-war politics and goals regarding the Near East. This resulted in limited intervention methods available to those on the ground but did not necessarily result in the forfeiture of the belief in humanitarianism amongst the local British officials charged with upholding it. This study shows that the tension between altruism and political gain weakened British power in the region, influencing the continuation of violence and repression long after the date most perceive as the cessation of WWI. The book is primarily aimed at scholars and researchers within the field; it is a research monograph and will be of greatest interest to scholars of genocide, British history, and refugee studies, as well as for activists and practitioners.

The book is a sociocultural microhistory of migrants. From the 1880s to the 1930s, it traces the lives of the occupants of a housing complex located just north of the French capital, in the heart of the Plaine-Saint-Denis. Starting in the 1870s, that industrial suburb became a magnet for working-class migrants of diverse origins, from within France and abroad. The author examines how the inhabitants of that particular place identified themselves and others. The study looks at the role played, in the construction of social difference, by interpersonal contacts, institutional interactions and migration. The objective of the book is to carry out an original experiment: applying microhistorical methods to the history of modern migrations. Beyond its own material history, the tenement is an observation point: it was deliberately selected for its high degree of demographic diversity, which contrasts with the typical objects of the traditional, ethnicity-based scholarship on migration. The micro lens allows for the reconstruction of the itineraries, interactions, and representations of the tenement's occupants, in both their singularity and their structural context. Through its many individual stories, the book restores a degree of complexity that is often overlooked by historical accounts at broader levels.

In October 1911, Winston S. Churchill was an accomplished young Liberal politician who, as the newly appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, still wore his ambition and emotion on his sleeve. Robert L. Borden was the new Canadian Prime Minister, less emotional and much older than Churchill. They became companions in an attempt to provide naval security for the British Empire as a naval crisis loomed with Germany. Their scheme for Canada to provide three Dreadnought battleships for the Royal Navy as part of an Imperial squadron was hotly debated by the Canadian Parliament and rejected by the Senate. It was one of the most divisive debates in Canadian parliamentary history. Churchill invested considerable time and effort in trying to deliver the scheme and even believed he might need to resign when it failed. The decision had great implications for the future, leading to the crises in shipbuilding foreshadowing the outbreak of WW1.

In this provocative study, Hazel Hutchison takes a fresh look at the roles of American writers in helping to shape national opinion and policy during the First World War. From the war's opening salvos in Europe, American writers recognized the impact the war would have on their society and sought out new strategies to express their horror, support, or resignation. By focusing on the writings of Henry James, Edith Wharton, Grace Fallow Norton, Mary Borden, Ellen La Motte, E. E. Cummings, and John Dos Passos, Hutchison examines what it means to be a writer in wartime, particularly in the midst of a conflict characterized by censorship and propaganda. Drawing on original letters and manuscripts, some never before seen by researchers, this book explores how the essays, poetry, and novels of these seven literary figures influenced America's public view of events, from August 1914 through the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, and ultimately set the literary agenda for later, more celebrated texts about the war.

World War I was obviously one of the most important events of the 20th century. It was also a crucial period in Leon Trotsky's political biography. This work is an examination of Trotsky's writings of 1914-1917 and the context in which they were produced. Its findings challenge Trotsky's autobiography and the standard account by Isaac Deutscher. Trotsky's war time journalism is shown to be of continuing relevance to contemporary issues ranging from European unity to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

Nearly 100 years ago, on October 4, 1918, on a muddy, poison gas-soaked hillside in France, the U.S. 26th Infantry Regiment jumped-off amidst a hail of shell fire and machine-gun fire to begin the final push to end World War I. For the next 39 days, with little respite, the regiment fought desperately against a determined, well-armed foe. This is the story of a single regiment in a successful, highly acclaimed "Regular Army" division, during the greatest American battle to date. This is not a dry recitation of facts, but an in-depth examination of a single regiment that allows the reader to appreciate the intricacies of small-unit action and the problems associated with leading platoons, companies, and battalions in battle during the Great War, while at the same time depicting the human drama associated with the terrible carnage

Women 'kept the home fires burning' while their men went off to war. This is the usual image of the part played by women in the First World War, reinforced through countless posters, government exhortations and even popular songs. It is very far from the truth. As this remarkable book shows, originally published in 1987, the truth was that women showed themselves capable of undertaking many roles hitherto the sole prerogative of men, a position accepted during the emergency of war but quickly 'righted' once peace was restored: the women who had helped to win the war were displaced by the returning heroes from the Front. Diana Condell and Jean Liddiard selected more than 150 superb contemporary photographs, and these unique pictures, with extended captions and accompanying text, illustrate the many and varied roles played by women in the First World War. Many of the photographs had never been published before and they reveal dramatically the extent to which women took over the day-to-day running of society during the war. Fulfilling these roles helped to change women's perceptions of themselves and their place in the social fabric: the photographs are arranged thematically to reveal this and how society's own view of women was altered as a result. The book also tells the story of the war from the female viewpoint, assessing its effect on the women involved. It focuses in a neglected but vital part of the history of the emancipation of women and also raises questions about what sort of victory they had worked for. In quality and range this was a pioneering study. More than that, through the haunting quality of its images it creates a pathway into the mind and world of the past.

Food is critical to military performance, but it is also central to social interaction and fundamental to our sense of identity. The soldiers of the Great War did not shed their eating preferences with their civilian clothes, and the army rations, heavily reliant on bully beef and hardtack biscuit, were frequently found wanting. Nutritional science of the day had only a limited understanding of the role of vitamins and minerals, and the men were often presented with a diet that, shortages and logistics permitting, was high in calories but low in flavour and variety. Just as now, soldiers on active service were linked with home through the lovingly packed food parcels they received; a taste of home in the trenches. This book uses the personal accounts of the men themselves to explore a subject that was central not only to their physical health, but also to their emotional survival. -- .

The First World War in Computer Games analyses the depiction of combat, the landscape of the trenches, and concepts of how the war ended through computer games. This book explores how computer games are at the forefront of new representations of the First World War.

The Russian Revolution in Asia: From Baku to Batavia presents a unique and timely global history intervention into the historiography of the Russian Revolution of 1917, marking the centenary of one of the most significant modern revolutions. It explores the legacies of the Revolution across the Asian continent and maritime Southeast Asia, with a broad geographic sweep including Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. It analyses how revolutionary communism intersected with a variety of Asian contexts, from the anti-colonial movement and ethnic tensions, to indigenous cultural frameworks and power structures. In so doing, this volume privileges Asian actors and perspectives, examining how Asian communities reinterpreted the Revolution to serve unexpected ends, including national liberation, regional autonomy, conflict with Russian imperial hegemony, Islamic practice and cultural nostalgia. Methodologically, this volume breaks new ground by incorporating research from a wide range of sources across multiple languages, many analysed for the first time in English-language scholarship. This book will be of use to historians of the Russian Revolution, especially those interested in understanding transnational and transregional perspectives of its impact in Central Asia and Southeast Asia, as well as historians of Asia more broadly. It will also appeal to those interested in the history of Islam.

Examining Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's Buyuk Nutuk (The Great Public Address), this book identifies the five founding political myths of Turkey: the First Duty, the Internal Enemy, the Encirclement, the Ancestor, and Modernity. Offering a comprehensive rhetorical analysis of Nutuk in its entirety, the book reveals how Ataturk crafted these myths, traces their discursive roots back to the Orkhon Inscriptions, epic tales, and ancient stories of Turkish culture, and critiques their long-term effects on Turkish political culture. In so doing, it advances the argument that these myths have become permanent fixtures of Turkish political discourse since the establishment of Turkey and have been used by both supporters and detractors of Ataturk. Providing examples of how past and present leaders, including Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a vocal critic of Ataturk, have deployed these myths in their discourses, the book offers an entirely new way to read and understand Turkish political culture and contributes to the heated debate on Kemalism by responding to the need to go back to the original sources - his own speeches and statements - to understand him. Contributing to emerging discourse-based approaches, this book is ideal for scholars and students of Turkish Studies, History, Nationalism Studies, Political Science, Rhetorical Studies, and International Studies.

This book, first published in 1965, gives a thumb-nail sketch of the Working Men's College during two periods of total war. It describes from contemporary accounts the life in the College itself, and reprints a selection of letters received from College men serving in the armed forces, giving a clear-eyed picture of the lives of men at war.

In historical writing on World War I, Czech-speaking soldiers serving in the Austro-Hungarian military are typically studied as Czechs, rarely as soldiers, and never as men. As a result, the question of these soldiers' imperial loyalties has dominated the historical literature to the exclusion of any debate on their identities and experiences. Men under Fire provides a groundbreaking analysis of this oft-overlooked cohort, drawing on a wealth of soldiers' private writings to explore experiences of exhaustion, sex, loyalty, authority, and combat itself. It combines methods from history, gender studies, and military science to reveal the extent to which the Great War challenged these men's senses of masculinity, and to which the resulting dynamics influenced their attitudes and loyalties.

For Home and Empire is the first book to compare voluntary wartime mobilization on the Australian, Canadian, and New Zealand home fronts. Steve Marti shows that collective acts of patriotism strengthened communal bonds, while reinforcing class, race, and gender boundaries. Which jurisdiction should provide for a soldier's wife if she moved from Hobart to northern Tasmania? Should Welsh women in Vancouver purchase comforts for hometown soldiers or Welsh ones? Should Maori enlist with a local or an Indigenous battalion? Such questions highlighted the diverging interests of local communities, the dominion governments, and the Empire. Marti applies a settler colonial framework to reveal the geographical and social divides that separated communities as they organized for war.

The Punjab region of India sent more than 600,000 combatants to assist the British war effort during World War I. Their families back home, thousands of miles from the major scenes of battle, were desperate for war news, and newspapers provided daily reports to keep the local population up-to-date with developments on the Western Front. This book presents the first English-language translations of hundreds of articles published during World War I in the newsapers of the Punjab region. They offer a lens into the anxieties and aspirations of Punjabis, a population that committed resources, food, labour as well as combatants to the British war effort. Amidst a steadily growing field of studies on World War I that examine the effects of the war on colonial populations, War News in India makes a unique and timely contribution.

Why did Asquith take Britain to war in 1914? What did educated young men believe their role should be? What was it like to fly over the Somme battlefield? How could a trench on the front line be 'the safest place'? These compelling eye-witness accounts convey what it was really like to experience the first two years of the war up until the fall of Asquith's government, without the benefit of hindsight or the accumulated wisdom of a hundred years of discussion and writing. Using the rich manuscript resources of the Bodleian Libraries, the book features key extracts from letters and diaries of members of the Cabinet, academic and literary figures, student soldiers and a village rector. The letters of politicians reveal the strain of war leadership and throw light on the downfall of Asquith in 1916, while the experiences of the young Harold Macmillan in the trenches, vividly described in letters home, marked the beginning of his road to Downing Street. It was forbidden to record Cabinet discussions, but Lewis Harcourt's unauthorised diary provides a window on Asquith's government, complete with character sketches of some of the leading players, including Winston Churchill. Meanwhile, in one Essex village, the local rector compiled a diary to record the impact of war on his community. These fascinating contemporary papers paint a highly personal and immediate picture of the war as it happened. Fear, anger, death and sorrow are always present, but so too are idealism, excitement, humour, boredom and even beauty.

In The Last Great Safari: East Africa in World War I, military historian Corey W. Reigel explores a fascinating and misunderstood theater of operations in the history of the First World War. Unprepared for the Great War, colonial units combined modern industrial weapons and equipment with traditional African methods to produce a hybrid force. Throughout The Last Great Safari, Reigel challenges myth after myth. Were really one million Allied soldiers pulled up from Europe to toil in the tropical sun only to fall victim to local diseases? Did the Germans truly become masters of guerrilla warfare and humiliate the British Empire in what appeared a David versus Goliath conflict? Reigel brings together traditional military studies and African history to explore the myths, fables, and stereotypes that have long characterized examinations of this topic, from questions as to how German East Africa contributed to the fate of the war to claims respecting significant diversion of resources. Racism played a significant role in then prevalent definitions of what constituted military success and in how Africans and Indians were recruited, holding more sway in the minds of white armies as a success factor than differences in weapons. Reigel points out how modern methods of medicine and transportation ultimately failed, only to be replaced by a hybrid of industrial Europe and traditional African solutions for dealing with an especially difficult climate. In the end, when necessity came to outweigh then current ideas of professionalism did German forces outfight their opponents. The Last Great Safari: East Africa in World War I will interest students of military history, African studies, and World War I, as this tale of colonial warfare within a war of attrition shaped part of Africa's colonial future.

A fascinating, beautifully illustrated study of the daring war in East Africa waged by German colonial forces under Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck against the wide array of colonial and expeditionary forces of the Allied Powers. The East African Campaign in World War I comprised a series of battles and guerrilla actions which began in German East Africa in 1914 and spread to portions of Portuguese Mozambique, northern Rhodesia, British East Africa, the Uganda Protectorate, and the Belgian Congo. German colonial forces under Lieutenant-Colonel Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck attempt to divert Allied forces from the Western Front. Despite the efforts of the Allied forces, Lettow-Vorbeck's troops remained undefeated at the end of the war. In this fascinating work, David Smith documents how a wide array of British, Indian, South African, Belgian, Portuguese and local native forces invaded German East Africa and slowly ousted the German forces, a process made tortuous by Lettow-Vorbeck's masterful management of the campaign. Among the events covered in this work are the Battle of Tanga, the scuttling of the Koenigsberg, the German railway campaign, and the battles at Salaita Hill, Kondoa-Irangi, Mahenge, Mahiwa and Namacurra. Colourful period and specially commissioned illustrations bring to life a wide-ranging and eventful campaign in which a high price was extracted for every inch of ground given up.

Fighting Hoosiers: Indiana in Two World Wars tells the compelling, heartbreaking, and breathtaking stories of some of the hundreds of thousands of Hoosiers who served their country during the First and Second World Wars. Drawn from the rich holdings of the Indiana Magazine of History, a journal of state and midwestern history published since 1905, the collection includes original diaries, letters and memoirs, as well as research essays-all of them focused on Hoosiers in the two world wars. Readers will meet Alex Arch, a Hungarian-born immigrant who was the first American to fire a shot in World War I; Maude Essig, a nurse serving with the American Red Cross in wartime France; Kenneth Baker, a soldier in the Army Signal Corps, who crawled across French fields (sometimes over and around dead bodies) to lay phone lines for military communications; and Bernard Rice, a combat medic who witnessed the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945. Indiana's brave men and women like these have served with distinction in the armed forces since the earliest days of the Indiana Territory. Fighting Hoosiers offers a compelling glimpse at some of their remarkable stories.

This volume gathers an international cast of scholars to examine the unprecedented range of colonial encounters during the First World War. More than four million men of color, and an even greater number of white Europeans and Americans, crisscrossed the globe. Others, in occupied areas, behind the warzone or in neutral countries, were nonetheless swept into the maelstrom. From local encounters in New Zealand, Britain and East Africa to army camps and hospitals in France and Mesopotamia, from cafes and clubs in Salonika and London, to anticolonial networks in Germany, the USA and the Dutch East Indies, this volume examines the actions and experiences of a varied company of soldiers, medics, writers, photographers, and revolutionaries to reconceptualize this conflict as a turning point in the history of global encounters. How did people interact across uneven intersections of nationality, race, gender, class, religion and language? How did encounters - direct and mediated, forced and unforced - shape issues from cross-racial intimacy and identity formation to anti-colonial networks, civil rights movements and visions of a post-war future? The twelve chapters delve into spaces and processes of encounter to explore how the conjoined realities of war, race and empire were experienced, recorded and instrumentalized.

The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1890-1940: Psyche, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis is the first volume of a meticulously researched two-part biography of the Russian-American psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg and chronicles the period from his birth as a Jew in Tsarist Russia to his prominence as a New York psychoanalyst on the eve of the Second World War. Educated in Kiev and Saint Petersburg, Zilboorg served as a young physician during the First World War and, after the revolution, as secretary to the minister of labour in Kerensky's provisional government. Having escaped following Lenin's takeover, Zilboorg requalified in medicine at Columbia University and underwent analysis with Franz Alexander at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. His American patients ranged from wealthy and artistic figures such as George Gershwin and Lillian Hellman to prison inmates. His writing includes important histories of psychiatry, for which he is still known, as well as examinations of gender, suicide, and the relationship between psychiatry and the law. His socialist politics and late work on Freud's (mis)understanding of religious belief created a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, from members of the Warburg banking family to the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Drawing on previously unpublished sources, including family papers and archival material, The Life of Gregory Zilboorg, 1890-1940: Psyche, Psychiatry, and Psychoanalysis offers a dramatic narrative that will appeal to general readers as well as scholars interested in the First World War, the Russian revolution, the Jewish diaspora, and the history of psychoanalysis.