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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > First World War
This new book contains not only a history of the legendary Lafayette Flying Corps, but also detailed biographies of the 269 volunteer American airmen and gunners of France's Service Aeronautique who flew in sixty-six pursuit and twenty-seven bomber/observation squadrons over the Western Front - also included are the thirty-eight pilots of the Escadrille Lafayette. It is an accurate and absorbing account of the lives and combat experiences of the men who later formed the nucleus of the American Expeditionary Force squadrons. This ground breaking work contains comprehensive research, including details of war casualties and survivors, and many unpublished photographs.
Carshalton in Surrey was deeply affected by the First World War: over 1,900 local men enlisted to fight. Of those men, 243 lost their lives and are commemorated on the war memorial. As we find ourselves commemorating the centenary of the war, it is more important than ever that these men are not forgotten. Drawing on over six years of research, this book brings together the stories of the lives - and deaths - of these men. Utilising a wide variety of sources and complemented by many previously unseen photographs, their stories are told here, from the fourteen sets of brothers who were killed, to the devastating effect of the Somme campaign in which nineteen local men lost their lives on the opening day alone.
The outbreak of the First World War saw an upsurge of patriotism. The Church generally saw the war as justified, and many clergy encouraged the men in their congregations to join the army. There was, however, already a strong strand of anti-war sentiment, opposed to the dominant theology of the Establishment. This was partly based on traditional Christian pacifism, but included other religious, social and political influences. Campaigners and conscientious objectors voiced a growing concern about the huge human cost of a conflict seemingly endlessly bogged down in the mud of the Flanders poppy fields. 'Subversive Peacemakers' recounts the stories of a strong and increasingly organised opposition to war, from peace groups to poets, from preachers to politicians, from women to working men, all of whom struggled to secure peace in a militarised and fragmenting society. Clive Barrett demonstrates that the Church of England provided an unlikely setting for much of this war resistance. Barrett masterfully narrates the story of the peace movement, bringing together stories of war-resistance until now lost, disregarded or undervalued. The people involved, as well as the dramatic events of the conflict themselves, are seen in a new light.
The fall of 2016 saw the release of the widely popular First World War video game Battlefield 1. Upon the game's initial announcement and following its subsequent release, Battlefield 1 became the target of an online racist backlash that targeted the game's inclusion of soldiers of color. Across social media and online communities, players loudly proclaimed the historical inaccuracy of black soldiers in the game and called for changes to be made that correct what they considered to be a mistake that was influenced by a supposed political agenda. Through the introduction of the theoretical framework of the 'White Mythic Space', this book seeks to investigate the reasons behind the racist rejection of soldiers of color by Battlefield 1 players in order to answer the question: Why do individuals reject the presence of people of African descent in popular representations of history?
It is 1915 and the Great War has been raging for a year when Edward Rowbotham, a coal miner from the Midlands, volunteers for Kitchener's Army. Drafted into the newly formed Machine Gun Corps, he is sent to fight in places whose names will forever be associated with mud and blood and sacrifice: Ypres, the Somme and Passchendaele. He is one of the 'lucky' ones, winning the Military Medal for bravery and surviving more than two-and-a-half years of the terrible slaughter, which wiped out all but six of his original company. He wrote these memoirs fifty years later, but found his memories of life in the trenches had not diminished at all. The sights and sounds of battle, the excitement, the terror, the extraordinary comradeship, are all vividly described as if they had happened to him only yesterday.
It was here that Staff officers routinely worked late into the night, weekends really did not exist, leave was intermittent, and those who worked here would have suffered from that additional sense of guilt about being away from the action. An important gap in the understanding of the administration of war is filled by Frank Fox's work in this book first published in 1920. The addition of the never generally published statistical summary of casualties, ammunition and supplies adds to the appreciation of Haig's achievement. Frank Fox was commissioned into the British Army at the age of 41, and back in France by December 1914.He suffered severe injuries during the Battle of the Somme, and spent a year recovering in hospital back in England. Yet still, he wanted to be back to the front,and succeeded in getting himself a job at Haig's HQ at Montreuil-sur-Mer. Includes "THE GAME BOOK" of unpublished statistics.
One of the primary triggers of the outbreak of World War I was undoubtedly the myriad alliances and suspicions that existed between the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires in the early 20th century. Yet much of the actual fighting between these nations has been largely forgotten in the West. Driven by first-hand accounts and detailed archival research, Collision of Empires seeks to correct this imbalance. The first in a four-book series on the Eastern Front in World War I, Prit Buttar's dynamic retelling examines the tumultuous events of the first year of the war and reveals the chaos and destruction that reigned when three powerful empires collided. A war that was initially seen by all three powers as a welcome opportunity to address both internal and external issues would ultimately bring about the downfall of them all.
The Zeebrugge Raid is one of the most exciting small actions, not just of the First World War but in British history. The purpose was to counter the U-boat menace. Submarine attacks on Allied shipping caused great difficulty. The Admiralty claimed that the war would be lost unless the submarine attacks were curtailed. Admiral Keyes proposed blocking the ports. At Zeebrugge, a diversionary landing on the Mole - an enormous breakwater - would divert attention from the blockships as they entered the harbour. The defences were extremely strong. Surprise and daring were essential. Despite over 600 casualties, the attacks were a great boost to civilian morale in Britain. Eleven Victoria Crosses were awarded, eight of them for the Zeebrugge raid alone. Some recipients were chosen by the survivors, one of the very few times this has been done.
"One of Hungary's most important twentieth-century writers" New York Times "Magda Szabo's fiction shows the travails of modern Hungarian history from oblique but sharply illuminating angles" Economist Eszter Encsy is an acclaimed actress, funny and outrageous, quick-witted but callous. Yet even flushed with the success of adulthood, Eszter craves acceptance of herself as she really is and of the person she has been. The only child of an impoverished aristocrat and a harried music teacher failing to make ends meet, Eszter grew up poor and painfully aware of it in a provincial Hungarian town. The feelings of resentment and envy acquired during her fraught childhood have hardened into an obsessional hatred for one person, the beautiful, saintly and pampered Angela, Eszter's former classmate and the wife of the man who becomes her lover. Set against newly communist 1950s Hungary, The Fawn embraces the lies and falsehoods people were obliged to live with in those nightmarish times, and displays Szabo's uncanny ability to convey how the past can haunt and consume us. Translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix.
The story of propaganda and patriotism in First World War Britain too often focuses on the cliches of Kitchener, 'over by Christmas' and the deaths of patriotic young volunteers at the Somme and elsewhere. A common assumption is that familiar forms of patriotism did not survive the war. However, the activities of the National War Aims Committee in 1917-18 suggest that propaganda and patriotism remained vigorous in Britain in the last years of the war. The NWAC, a semi-official Parliamentary organisation responsible for propaganda to counteract civilian war-weariness, produced masses of propaganda material aimed at re-stimulating civilian patriotism and yet remains largely unknown and rarely discussed. This book provides the first detailed study of the NWAC's activities, propaganda and reception. It demonstrates the significant role played by the NWAC in British society after July 1917, illuminating the local network of agents and committees which conducted its operations and the party political motivations behind these. At the core of the book is a comprehensive analysis of the Committee's propaganda. NWAC propaganda contained an underlying patriotic narrative which re-presented many familiar pre-war patriotic themes in ways that sought to encompass the experiences of civilians worn down by years of total war. By interpreting propaganda through the purposes it served, rather than the quantity of discussion of particular aspects, the book rejects common and reductive interpretations which depict propaganda as being mainly about the vilification of enemies. Through this analysis, the book makes a wider plea for deeper attention to the purposes behind patriotic language.
Once the steel storm of the industrial war had passed, the idyllic Flanders Fields region in Belgium was left as a desolate moon landscape. The First World War had wiped dozens of villages and cities completely off the map. The fields had been destroyed by grenades, mine craters, scrap, trenches, bunkers, railways and infrastructure of the war machine. But Flanders Fields rose again, like a Phoenix from the ashes. Even before the end of the war, the first people returned to their previous homes. A traditional architecture was supposed to remove all traces from the war and restore the former beauty of the area. With the first fairs and processions from 1919 onwards, the social fabric started to heal. Pilgrims started to come from all the corners of the earth to visit the many memorials and cemeteries. By the end of the twenties the reconstruction was largely finished. It is this post-war reconstruction that continues to define the characteristics of the region to this very day. This book has been published to commemorate the centenary of the recovery as guide for iconic sites of reconstruction, thematic exhibitions, public events, and walking and cycle routes that will take you to many striking sites of the reconstruction in the Westhoek. It also contains an historical overview of the revival of a region so heavily scourged by the Great War and new insights a century on.
"A vivid account of how Sigmund Freud coped with the great 'pandemics' of his time, from the Great War and Spanish Flu to cancer and the Nazis. By assessing how my great-grandfather might have addressed COVID-19 - the pandemic of our own times - Professor Kahr opens up a series of insights into the life of the man who championed the radical innovation of actually listening to people suffering from mental affliction. Meticulously researched, and written with real pace, this book is a timely reminder of the psychological roots of our response to national trauma." - Lord Freud, great-grandson of Sigmund Freud and President of the Freud Museum London In this compelling book, the first in the new Freud Museum London series, Professor Brett Kahr describes how Sigmund Freud endured innumerable emotional pandemics during his eighty-three years of life, ranging from unsubstantiated accusations by medical colleagues to anti-Semitic abuse, the loss of one daughter to Spanish flu and the arrest of another child by the Gestapo, to his own painful cancer treatments and his final flight from Adolf Hitler's Austria. Freud navigated these personal and political tragedies while simultaneously creating a method of healing which has helped countless millions deal with unbearable trauma and distress. Through founding psychoanalysis, Kahr argues that Freud not only saved himself from destruction but also provided the rest of the world with the means to achieve a form of psychological vaccination against emotional and mental distress. The Freud Museum London and Karnac Books have joined forces to publish a new book series devoted to an examination of the life and work of Sigmund Freud alongside other significant figures in the history of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and depth psychology more broadly. The series will feature works of outstanding scholarship and readability, including biographical studies, institutional histories, and archival investigations. New editions of historical classics as well as translations of little-known works from the early history of psychoanalysis will also be considered for inclusion.
In the midst of the First World War concern arose as to the virtues of pursuing intoxication at a time of national emergency. As the military front was supposedly let down by drinkers and shirkers at home, attention quickly turned to British drinking practices. Britain, it seemed, was under the duress of a widespread addiction to boozing. When prohibition was deemed too extreme to contemplate, and nationalisation too impractical, the government created an organisation known as the Central Control Board (CCB). This body soon set about reforming the drinking habits of a nation. Loved by a few, but disliked by most, this group was responsible for the most radical and unique experiment in alcohol control ever conducted in Britain. The story of the CCB, how and why it was formed, its history and its legacy upon the British war effort are told within Pubs and Patriots: The Drink Crisis in Britain during World War One.
Poised to become a significant player in the new world order, the United States truly came of age during and after World War I. Yet many Americans think of the Great War simply as a precursor to World War II. Americans, including veterans, hastened to put experiences and memories of the war years behind them, reflecting a general apathy about the war that had developed during the 1920s and 1930s and never abated. In Remembering World War I in America Kimberly J. Lamay Licursi explores the American public's collective memory and common perception of World War I by analyzing the extent to which it was expressed through the production of cultural artifacts related to the war. Through the analysis of four vectors of memory-war histories, memoirs, fiction, and film-Lamay Licursi shows that no consistent image or message about the war ever arose that resonated with a significant segment of the American population. Not many war histories materialized, war memoirs did not capture the public's attention, and war novels and films presented a fictional war that either bore little resemblance to the doughboys' experience or offered discordant views about what the war meant. In the end Americans emerged from the interwar years with limited pockets of public memory about the war that never found compromise in a dominant myth.
This is the story of the career of the author's mysterious great uncle Raymond de Candolle, who had apparently disappeared into the bowels of London, at the turn of the twentieth century. It begins when he joins a group of enterprising bankers, engineers and tycoons, fascinated by international railway opportunities. They build railroads in Mexico, Spain, China, Columbia, and eventually Raymond heads up Argentina's leading railway. Just as the First World War is about to break out, he is sent to solve a dispute with Germany's Baghdad Railway in Anatolia. He is recruited by the British War Cabinet in 1916 to help stop the German advance in Romania. As chaos erupts in Russia they send him to deal with the Trans-Siberian Railway, the rise of the Bolsheviks, and finally the capture of Mosul in 1918. He is active at the Paris Peace Conference in settling Romania's reparations and the take-over of the Baghdad railway. In 1921 it is back to Anatolia to deal with its dilapidated railway, and the eventual horrors of the Smyrna genocide. He shakes hands with a victorious Kemal Ataturk. Raymond's story concludes with his family, and their good friend Ian Fleming, listening to his conclusions about the future.
This new study looks at the ways in which the years surrounding the First World War shaped the lives of the rural workforce in Britain and how the patriotism unleashed by the war was used by those in power to blur class divisions and build conservative attitudes in rural communities. Using the area of Shropshire and the Marches as a focus, the book looks at farmworkers and their trade unions, the structures of agrarian economy, class divisions, local loyalties, cultural institutions and political organisations. From 1917 the growing power of the farmworkers' unions and the rural labour movement mounted a challenge to the landed elites and sought a radical change from rural poverty. The author shows how the elites met this threat dynamically by creating a range of new village institutions, such as ploughing matches, Women's Institutes, village halls, war memorials and the British Legion. The extraordinary growth of rural radicalism at the end of the war was diffused by popular conservatism and local patriotism. Influenced by wartime experiences, the period 1900-1930 saw a change in rural society from parochial concerns to a new sense of loyalty to county and to the English nation.
A rethinking of the factors which led to the American entry into the war. The complicated situation which led to the American entry into the First World War in 1917 is often explained from the perspective of public opinion, US domestic politics, or financial and economic opportunity. This book, however,reasserts the importance of diplomats and diplomacy. Based on extensive original research, the book provides a detailed examination of British, German, and American diplomacy in the period 1914-17. It argues that British and German diplomacy in this period followed the same patterns as had been established in the preceding decades. It goes on to consider key issues which concerned diplomats, including the international legality of Britain's economic blockade of Germany, Germany's use of unrestricted submarine warfare, peace initiatives, and Germany's attempt to manipulate in its favour the long history of distrust in Mexican-American relations. Overall, the book demonstrates thatdiplomats and diplomacy played a key role, thereby providing a fresh and original approach to this crucially important subject. JUSTIN QUINN OLMSTEAD is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Central Oklahoma.
Memory, Narrative and the Great War provides a detailed examination of the varied and complex war writings of a relatively marginal figure, Patrick MacGill, within a general framework of our current pre-occupation with blood, mud and suffering. In particular, it seeks to explain how his interpretation of war shifted from the heroic wartime autobiographical trilogy, with its emphasis on 'the romance of the rifleman' to the pessimistic and guilt-ridden interpretations in his post-war novel, Fear!, and play, Suspense. Through an exploration of the way in which war-time experiences were remembered (and re-remembered) and retold in strikingly different narratives, and using insights from cognitive psychology, it is argued that there is no contradiction between these two seemingly opposing views. Instead it is argued that, given the present orientation and problem-solving nature of both memory and narrative, the different interpretations are both 'true' in the sense that they throw light on the ongoing way in which MacGill came to terms with his experiences of war. This in turn has implications for broader interpretations of the Great War, which has increasingly be seen in terms of futile suffering, not least because of the eloquent testimony of ex-Great War soldiers, reflecting on their experiences many years after the event. Without suggesting that such testimony is invalid, it is argued that this is one view but not the only view of the war. Rather wartime memory and narrative is more akin to an ever-changing kaleidoscope, in which pieces of memory take on different (but equally valid) shapes as they are shaken with the passing of time.
This analysis of British war policy considers alterations to the grand strategy during the last years of World War I. The argument is that war policy in this period was strongly affected by pessimism, even defeatism. In the aftermath of the defeats and disappointments of 1917, many could understand how the war could be lost, less how victory could be achieved. By the end of 1917, war policy had been revised so that it aimed less to win the war outright than to bring Germany to the conference table in a less exultant mood, whilst laying the bases for a peripheral war, essentially victorious on the continent, either in the last stages of World War I or during the ancicipated World War II. The major feature of this revised policy was that the focus of the war was to be shifted to the Eastern stage. It was hoped that Britain would be able to gain victories here to off-set Germany's conquests in Europe, and the jump-off points for periperal war. It was not believed that peace could be achieved before 1919. When, therefore, Britain tumbled into peace in 1918, policies had been undertaken in the East which were to have profound consequences.
The story of propaganda and patriotism in First World War Britain too often focuses on the cliches of Kitchener, 'over by Christmas' and the deaths of patriotic young volunteers at the Somme and elsewhere. A common assumption is that familiar forms of patriotism did not survive the war. However, the activities of the National War Aims Committee in 1917-18 suggest that propaganda and patriotism remained vigorous in Britain in the last years of the war. The NWAC, a semi-official Parliamentary organisation responsible for propaganda to counteract civilian war-weariness, produced masses of propaganda material aimed at re-stimulating civilian patriotism and yet remains largely unknown and rarely discussed. This book provides the first detailed study of the NWAC's activities, propaganda and reception. It demonstrates the significant role played by the NWAC in British society after July 1917, illuminating the local network of agents and committees which conducted its operations and the party political motivations behind these. At the core of the book is a comprehensive analysis of the Committee's propaganda. NWAC propaganda contained an underlying patriotic narrative which re-presented many familiar pre-war patriotic themes in ways that sought to encompass the experiences of civilians worn down by years of total war. By interpreting propaganda through the purposes it served, rather than the quantity of discussion of particular aspects, the book rejects common and reductive interpretations which depict propaganda as being mainly about the vilification of enemies. Through this analysis, the book makes a wider plea for deeper attention to the purposes behind patriotic language.
This book tackles cultural mobilization in the First World War as a plural process of identity formation and de-formation. It explores eight different settings in which individuals, communities and conceptual paradigms were mobilized. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, it interrogates one of the most challenging facets of the history of the Great War, one that keeps raising key questions on the way cultures respond to times of crisis. Mobilization during the First World War was a major process of material and imaginative engagement unfolding on a military, economic, political and cultural level, and existing identities were dramatically challenged and questioned by the whirl of discourses and representations involved.
Recent scholarship has broadened definitions of war and shifted from the narrow focus on battles and power struggles to include narratives of the homefront and private sphere. To expand scholarship on textual representations of war means to shed light on the multiple theaters of war, and on the many voices who contributed to, were affected by, and/or critiqued German war efforts. Engaged women writers and artists commented on their nations' imperial and colonial ambitions and the events of the tumultuous beginning of the twentieth century. In an interdisciplinary investigation, this volume explores select female-authored, German-language texts focusing on German colonial wars and World War I and the discourses that promoted or critiqued their premises. They examine how colonial conflicts contributed to a persistent atmosphere of Kriegsbegeisterung (war enthusiasm) that eventually culminated in the outbreak of World War I, or a Kriegskritik (criticism of war) that resisted it. The span from German colonialism to World War I brings these explosive periods into relief and challenges readers to think about the intersection of nationalism, violence and gender and about the historical continuities and disruptions that shape such events.
There have been many narratives of World War I and World War II;
"World in Conflict," however, is a chronology spanning the entire
period of 41 years, complemented by more than 900 photographs and
maps. It presents not only the events of the two world wars, but
also of the interwar period, when there was fighting and political
upheaval in many areas of the world, from Russia to Spain to China.
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