Historical research into the Armenian Genocide has grown tremendously in recent years, but much of it has focused on large-scale questions related to Ottoman policy or the scope of the killing. Consequently, surprisingly little is known about the actual experiences of the genocide's victims. Daily Life in the Abyss illuminates this aspect through the intertwined stories of two Armenian families who endured forced relocation and deprivation in and around modern-day Syria. Through analysis of diaries and other source material, it reconstructs the rhythms of daily life within an often bleak and hostile environment, in the face of a gradually disintegrating social fabric.

The German Empire was founded in January 1871 not only on the basis of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's "blood and iron" policy but also with the support of liberal nationalists. Under Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany became the dynamo of Europe. Its economic and military power were pre-eminent; its science and technology, education, and municipal administration were the envy of the world; and its avant-garde artists reflected the ferment in European culture. But Germany also played a decisive role in tipping Europe's fragile balance of power over the brink and into the cataclysm of the First World War, eventually leading to the empire's collapse in military defeat and revolution in November 1918.
With contributions from an international team of twelve experts in the field, this volume offers an ideal introduction to this crucial era, taking care to situate Imperial Germany in the larger sweep of modern German history, without suggesting that Nazism or the Holocaust were inevitable endpoints to the developments charted here.

Few subjects in naval history have elicited as much romance and disdain as the battlecruiser. And few subjects have gone so grossly misunderstood.

Fundamental errors regarding the battlecruiser's origins and the technology of the times continue to distort hindsight, obscuring the historical context of these powerful, majestic ships. Thunder in Its Courses clears away the misconceptions, with essays establishing the basic facts of the capital-ship cruiser as well as thorny issues regarding individual designs.

Richard Worth writes for the Warship and Warship International journals. His book titles include In the Shadow of the Battleship, Raising the Red Banner (with Vladimir Yakubov), On Seas Contested (edited with Vincent P. O'Hara and W. David Dickson), and Fleets of World War II.

For a brief period, the attention of the international community has focused once again on the plight of religious minorities in Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. In particular, the abductions and massacres of Yezidis and Assyrians in the Sinjar, Mosul, Nineveh Plains, Baghdad, and Hasakah regions in 2007-2015 raised questions about the prevention of genocide. This book, while principally analyzing the Assyrian genocide of 1914-1925 and its implications for the culture and politics of the region, also raises broader questions concerning the future of religious diversity in the Middle East. It gathers and analyzes the findings of a broad spectrum of historical and scholarly works on Christian identities in the Middle East, genocide studies, international law, and the politics of the late Ottoman Empire, as well as the politics of the Ottomans' British and Russian rivals for power in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean basin. A key question the book raises is whether the fate of the Assyrians maps onto any of the concepts used within international law and diplomatic history to study genocide and group violence. In this light, the Assyrian genocide stands out as being several times larger, in both absolute terms and relative to the size of the affected group, than the Srebrenica genocide, which is recognized by Turkey as well as by international tribunals and organizations. Including its Armenian and Greek victims, the Ottoman Christian Genocide rivals the Rwandan, Bengali, and Biafran genocides. The book also aims to explore the impact of the genocide period of 1914-1925 on the development or partial unraveling of Assyrian group cohesion, including aspirations to autonomy in the Assyrian areas of northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and southeastern Turkey. Scholars from around the world have collaborated to approach these research questions by reference to diplomatic and political archives, international legal materials, memoirs, and literary works.

While a plethora of studies have discussed why so many men decided to volunteer for the army during the Great War, the experiences of those who were called up under conscription have received relatively little scrutiny. Even when the implementation of the respective Military Service Acts has been investigated, scholars have usually focused on only the distinct minority of those eligible who expressed conscientious objections. It is rare to see equal significance placed on the fact that substantial numbers of men appealed, or were appealed for, on the grounds that their domestic, business, or occupational circumstances meant they should not be expected to serve. David Littlewood analyses the processes undergone by these men, and the workings of the bodies charged with assessing their cases, through a sustained transnational comparison of the British and New Zealand contexts.

Most of the Cypriot population, especially the lower classes, remained loyal to the British cause during the Great War and the island contributed significantly to the First World War, with men and materials. The British acknowledged this yet failed to institute political and economic reforms once the war ended. The obsession of Greek Cypriot elites with enosis (union with Greece), which only increased after the war, and the British dismissal of increasing the role of Cypriots in government, bringing the Christian and Muslim communities closer, and expanding franchise to all classes and sexes, led to serious problems down the line, not least the development of a democratic deficit. Andrekos Varnava studies the events and the impact of this crucial period.

A new interpretation of the Sarajevo assassination and the origins of World War I that places focus on the Balkans and the prewar period. The story has so often been told: Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, was shot dead on June 28, 1914, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. Thirty days later, the Archduke's uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph, declared war on the Kingdom of Serbia, producing the chain reaction of European powers entering the First World War. In Misfire, Paul Miller-Melamed narrates the history of the Sarajevo assassination and the origins of World War I from the perspective of the Balkans. Rather than focusing on the bang of assassin Gavrilo Princip's gun or reinforcing the mythology that has arisen around this act, Miller-Melamed embeds the incident in the longer-term conditions of the Balkans that gave rise to the political murder. He thus illuminates the centrality of the Bosnian Crisis and the Balkan Wars of the early twentieth century to European power politics, while explaining how Serbs, Bosnians, and Habsburg leaders negotiated their positions in an increasingly dangerous geopolitical environment. Despite the absence of evidence tying official Serbia to the assassination conspiracy, Miller-Melamed shows how it spiraled into a diplomatic crisis that European statesmen proved unable to resolve peacefully. Contrasting the vast disproportionality between a single deadly act and an act of war that would leave ten million dead, Misfire contends that the real causes for the world war lie in "civilized" Europe rather than the endlessly discussed political murder.

Because all wars in the twenty-first century are potentially global wars, the centenary of the first global war is the occasion for reflection. This volume offers an unprecedented account of the lives, stories, letters, games, schools, institutions (such as the Boy Scouts and YMCA), and toys of children in Europe, North America, and the Global South during the First World War and surrounding years. By engaging with developments in Children's Literature, War Studies, and Education, and mining newly available archival resources (including letters written by children), the contributors to this volume demonstrate how perceptions of childhood changed in the period. Children who had been constructed as Romantic innocents playing safely in secure gardens were transformed into socially responsible children actively committing themselves to the war effort. In order to foreground cross-cultural connections across what had been perceived as 'enemy' lines, perspectives on German, American, British, Australian, and Canadian children's literature and culture are situated so that they work in conversation with each other. The multidisciplinary, multinational range of contributors to this volume make it distinctive and a particularly valuable contribution to emerging studies on the impact of war on the lives of children.

This volume provides the English-speaking reader with little-known perspectives of Central and Eastern European historians on the topic of the Russian Revolution. Whereas research into the Soviet Union's history has flourished at Western universities, the contribution of Central and Eastern European historians, during the Cold War working in conditions of imposed censorship, to this field of academic research has often been seriously circumscribed. Bringing together perspectives from across Central and Eastern Europe alongside contributions from established scholars from the West, this significant volume casts the year 1917 in a new critical light.

A vigorous reappraisal of American literature inspired by the First World War. American World War I literature has long been interpreted as an alienated outcry against modern warfare and government propaganda. This prevailing reading ignores the US army's unprecedented attempt during World War I to assign men-except, notoriously, African Americans-to positions and ranks based on merit. And it misses the fact that the culture granted masculinity only to combatants, while the noncombatant majority of doughboys experienced a different alienation: that of shame. Drawing on military archives, current research by social-military historians, and his own readings of thirteen major writers, Keith Gandal seeks to put American literature written after the Great War in its proper context-as a response to the shocks of war and meritocracy. The supposedly antiwar texts of noncombatant Lost Generation authors Dos Passos, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Cummings, and Faulkner addressed-often in coded ways-the noncombatant failure to measure up. Gandal also examines combat-soldier writers William March, Thomas Boyd, Laurence Stallings, and Hervey Allen. Their works are considered straight-forward antiwar narratives, but they are in addition shaped by experiences of meritocratic recognition, especially meaningful for socially disadvantaged men. Gandal furthermore contextualizes the sole World War I novel by an African American veteran, Victor Daly, revealing a complex experience of both army discrimination and empowerment among the French. Finally, Gandal explores three women writers-Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, and Ellen La Motte-who saw the war create frontline opportunities for women while allowing them to be arbiters of masculinity at home. Ultimately, War Isn't the Only Hell shows how American World War I literature registered the profound ways in which new military practices and a foreign war unsettled traditional American hierarchies of class, ethnicity, gender, and even race.

Matters of Conflict looks at the definitive invention of the twentieth century - industrialised war - and its vast and varied material legacy. From trench art and postcards through avant-garde art, museum collections and prosthetic limbs to battlefield landscapes, the book examines the First World War and its significance through the things it left behind. The contributions come from a multidisciplinary perspective, uniting previously compartmentalized disciplines such as anthropology, archaeology, cultural history, museology and art history in their focus on material culture. This innovative, hybrid approach investigates the 'social life' of objects in order to understand them as they move through time and space and intersect the lives of all who came in contact with them.
The resulting survey sets a new agenda for study of the First World War, and ultimately of all twentieth-century conflict.

This two-volume series serves as a unique window to view the U.S. Army's entry onto the world stage. Faced with entry into the "Great War," the country called upon its military leaders to prepare the Army for combat. What follows is the in-depth story of how the American military and civilian leadership created and trained the Doughboys. In less than eighteen months, America's Army would grow from its humble beginning to fielding over a million soldiers in the Meuse-Argonne campaign. Training and leading this force into battle against the Imperial German Army were some of the great names in American military history, including such stalwarts as John J. Pershing, George Marshall, and Leonard Wood. Here is the story of their perseverance and courage that ultimately defeated the enemy and helped to win the war.

This is the first book to bring together an interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged and global perspective on the First World War through the lens of historical and cultural geography. Reflecting the centennial interest in the conflict, the collection explores the relationships between warfare and space, and pays particular attention to how commemoration is connected to spatial elements of national identity, and processes of heritage and belonging. Venturing beyond military history and memory studies, contributors explore conceptual contributions of geography to analyse the First World War, as well as reflecting upon the imperative for an academic discussion on the War's centenary. This book explores the War's impact in more unexpected theatres, blurring the boundary between home and fighting fronts, investigating the experiences of the war amongst civilians and often overlooked combatants. It also critically examines the politics of hindsight in the post-war period, and offers an historical geographical account of how the First World War has been memorialised within 'official' spaces, in addition to those overlooked and often undervalued 'alternative spaces' of commemoration. This innovative and timely text will be key reading for students and scholars of the First World War, and more broadly in historical and cultural geography, social and cultural history, European history, Heritage Studies, military history and memory studies.

After the World War ended, the families of the American war dead were faced with a difficult choice. Political leaders like former President Theodore Roosevelt were encouraging families to leave the dead with their comrades in European cemeteries to create stronger political ties between the United States and Europe. Grieving families found that their decision on where to bury the dead had become a political choice. How did families advocate for their own views? How were disputes within families resolved? And how did families make their final decisions about where the dead should be buried? Through an in-depth examination of the correspondence between the United States government and the families of the dead, this book will examine how families fought to ensure that the government gave them what they needed. As the months stretched into years before the war dead were given final burials, the families of the dead demanded that the government give them the respect and honor they felt they deserved as the next of kin of those who had given their lives for the nation. The practices and traditions that the government developed in response to these demands set patterns that still guide the way that the military treats the families of the war dead today.

The Great War was a turning point of the twentieth century, giving birth to a new, modern, and industrial approach to warfare that changed the world forever. The remembrance, awareness, and knowledge of the conflict and, most importantly, of those who participated and were affected by it, altered from country to country, and in some cases has been almost entirely forgotten. New research strategies have emerged to help broaden our understanding of the First World War. Multidisciplinary approaches have been applied to material culture and conflict landscapes, from archive sources analysis and aerial photography to remote sensing, GIS and field research. Working within the context of a material and archival understanding of war, this book combines papers from different study fields that present interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches towards researching the First World War and its legacies, with particular concentration on the central and eastern European theatres of war.

This volume synthesises the latest scholarship on First World War veterans in post-war Britain and Ireland, investigating the topic through its political, social and cultural dynamics. It examines the post-war experiences of those men and women who served and illuminates the nature of the post-war society for which service had been given. Complicating the homogenising tendency in existing scholarship it offers comparison of the experiences of veterans in different regions of Britain, including perspectives drawn from Ireland. Further nuance is offered by the assessment of the experiences of ex-servicewomen alongside those of ex-servicemen, such focus deeping understanding into the gendered specificities of post-war veteran activities and experiences. Moreover, case studies of specific cohorts of veterans are offered, including focus on disabled veterans and ex-prisoners of war. In these regards the collection offers vital updates to existing scholarship while bringing important new departures and challenges to the current interpretive frameworks of veteran experiences in post-war Britain and Ireland.

Between 1918 and 1933 the German interwar avant-garde was a primary force driving European cultural innovation and modernism. These innovations continue to influence artistic practice, theory, and arts education today, thus making a comprehensive study of the relationship between individual war experience and the immediate response of avant-garde architects after the war all the more important. The Break with the Past pursues several important, interrelated questions. What were the disparate war experiences of German architects, and did they have different effects on Weimar cultural production? Did political orientation play a part in support for the war? In aesthetic choices? What changes occurred in avant-garde architectural practice after 1918? How do they compare with pre-war positions and practices, and expectations for post-war outcomes? In order to address these questions, the book uses individual case studies of four leading architects: Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, and Hans Scharoun. This is a valuable resource for academics and students in the areas of Art and Architecture History, German history and Cultural Studies, European Culture and Modernism.

This book provides an overview of the history of allied medicine in the Great War. Based on both primary research and secondary literature, it offers a clear and concise account of medical treatment during the Great War, exploring the advancements of the period and the human experience of the medical war.As well as covering European medical work, the book draws on a range of American primary sources and texts in order to address the American medical experience of the First World War, an area that has been neglected by the existing literature. This is an accessible exploration of the medical war, the people involved, and its impact. It is an essential text for undergraduate and postgraduate students of history taking courses on medicine in war, the history of medicine or the Great War.

The Great War and the Moving Image focuses upon the Allied war effort on the Western Front and in the Mediterranean. In doing so, the book addresses topics ranging from how carefully selected images projected a positive portrayal of ambulance trains, through film's instructional role promoting self-sufficiency on the home front, to the vital role of makeshift YMCA cinemas both sides of the Channel. With editors and contributors who are authorities on cinema in wartime Britain and on the British response to the challenge of 'total war', the volume highlights the power that the moving image had during the Great War. In the introduction, the editors consider why the First World War can be seen as the first uniquely cinematic conflict. Later, historians from Britain, Australia, and America go on to explore film's pioneering role as a powerful vehicle for propaganda at home and abroad, and its contribution to maintaining morale among soldiers on the front line as well as across civilian audiences back home. The book concludes by considering the representation of trench warfare in today's hi-tech computer games. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television.

Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Daniel Reid was killed on the first day of the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917. His body was never recovered; however, there is nothing singular about that. What is remarkable is that his eloquent journal has survived untouched for 100 years. The context for Alexander Daniel Reid's contemporary account of the Great War are provided partly by the memoirs of his brother, Harry, who was the transport officer in the same battalion, and partly from historical research. Although it is essentially a biography of two Scottish-born brothers in an Irish battalion on the Western Front, Harvest of Battle: Brother Officers of the 7th Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers in the First World War is unique in that it reaches to the corners of the Empire and tells of conflicts from German South-West Africa to the Rand Rebellion of 1922. Alexander Daniel Reid was a professional soldier and served with the Indian Army before migrating to Canada. Harry began a career working for one of the wealthiest mining magnates in Johannesburg. Both knew that their chances of survival in the 'Fighting Seventh' Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers were slim. Theirs is a narrative common enough to serve as a general introduction to the First World War for a new generation of readers, yet it contains valuable new material to add to the historical record in this Centenary year of the outbreak of war.

In a 1934 speech, marking the Twenty-fifth Reunion of his high school class, Martin Heidegger spoke eloquently of classmates killed in the Great War and called on his audience to recognize that the national rebirth now occuring in Hitler's Germany must continue to draw inspiration from the war dead. In this process, he refers to the war of 1914-1918 as "the First World War." Since the condition for the possibility of "the First" is a Second World War, Martin Heidegger and the First World War raises the question: how could Heidegger have already known in 1934 that another war was coming? The answer is to be found by reading Being and Time (1927) as a funeral oration for the warriors of the Great War, a reading that validates Heidegger's paradoxical claim that the genuinely historical must emerge from the future. By using Lincoln's "Gettysburg Address" as an archetype of the genre, William H. F. Altman shows that Heidegger's concept of temporality in Being and Time replicates the way past, present, and future interweave in the classic funeral oration and argues that if there is a visible path connecting Being and Time to its author's subsequent decision for National Socialism, it runs through the trenches of the Great War and its author's successful attempt to evade them. The analysis and conclusions in this book will be of great value to students and scholars interested in philosophy, history, intellectual history, German studies, and political science.

The civilian police during the First World War in Great Britain were central to the control of the population at home. This book will show the detail and challenges of police work during the First World War and how this impacted on ordinary people's daily lives. The aim is to tell the story of the police as they saw themselves through the pages of their best-known journal, The Police Review and Parade Gossip, in addition to a wide range of other published, archival and private sources.

Explore the Eastern Front battle that resulted in one of the greatest defeats of World War I, in which an entire Russian army was annihilated by German arms. Tannenberg is a major battle that deserves a fully illustrated treatment all of its own, and for the first time this book brings the epic Eastern Front clash to life in visual detail. No other book on this topic walks you through the action like this one, using detailed maps to provide unit locations and movements and help explain key command decisions, while period photographs and colour battlescenes put soldiering back at the core of the events by revealing the military material culture of the opposing sides. Michael McNally guides you through the initial border engagements and the battles of Gumbinnen and Stallupoenen, before moving on to explore the massive, often confused running battle of Tannenberg in easy to follow and concise detail. This work helps you understand how the Germans managed to maul Samsonov's Second Army and all but destroyed the Russians as a fighting force. The Russian war plan of using overwhelming numbers to gain a quick victory before conducting further operations would soon lie in pieces on the ground. It also assesses the contribution modern technology - such as railways, aerial reconnaissance, radio and telegraphy - made to the emphatic German victory.

Our view of the First World War is dominated by the twin images of the fronts and the home fronts, yet the war also generated a third type of 'front', that of military occupation. Vast areas of Europe experienced the war under a military regime and this book deals with the occupations by the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Their conquests ranged from Lille in the West to the Don River in the East, and from Courland in the north to Friuli and Montenegro in the south. They encompassed capital cities such as Brussels, Warsaw, Belgrade and Bukarest, as well as areas of crucial economic importance. Millions of people experienced military occupation and, even though they were civilians, the war had a deep impact on their lives. Conversely, occupied territories influenced the states that had conquered them and the way these states waged war. The chapters in this book analyze military occupation in 1914-1918 both from the point of view of the occupied and from the point of view of the occupier. They study counter-insurgency warfare, forced labour, food regimes, underground patriotism, and cultural policies. They demonstrate that military occupation was an essential dimension of the Great War. This book was originally published as a special issue of First World War Studies.

Literature is at the heart of popular understandings of the First World War in Britain, and has perpetuated a popular memory of the conflict centred on disillusionment, horror and futility. This book examines how and why literature has had this impact, exploring the role played by authors, publishers and readers in constructing the memory of the war since 1918. It demonstrates that publishers were as influential as authors in shaping perceptions of the conflict, and it provides a detailed analysis of critical and popular responses to war books, tracing the evolution of readers' attitudes to the war between 1918 and 2014. By exploring the cultural legacy of the war from these two previously overlooked perspectives, Vincent Trott offers fresh insights regarding the emergence of a collective memory of the First World War in Britain. Drawing on a broad range of primary source material, including publishers' correspondence, dust jackets, adverts, book reviews and diary entries, and examining canonical authors such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Vera Brittain alongside long-forgotten texts and more recent autobiographical works by Harry Patch and Henry Allingham, Publishers, Readers and the Great War provides a rich and nuanced analysis of the climate within which First World War literature was written, published and received since 1918.