This book tells the little-known stories of three all-Jewish battalions formed in the British army as part of the Allies' Middle East campaign, recruiting soldiers from the United States, Canada, England, and Argentina. Many of the soldiers, ranging widely in education level, social class, and combat experience, were displaced immigrants or children of such immigrants. Together, they coalesced into the all-Jewish battalions: "the liberators of the Promised Land." The ranks of the Jewish Legions included some who would become prominent leaders, such as David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, Israel's second president; however, this book focuses on the experiences of ordinary soldiers who served alongside them. Drawing on diaries, memoirs, and letters, the book follows their journey at sea through unrestricted submarine warfare; by trains and trucks through Europe, Egypt, and Palestine; and their battlefield experiences. The authors show how these Yiddish-speaking young men forged a new kind of soldier identity with unique Jewish features, as well as an evolving sense of nationalism.

The Great War of 1914-1918 was fought on the battlefield, on the sea and in the air, and in the heart. Museums Victoria's exhibition World War I: Love and Sorrow exposed not just the nature of that war, but its depth and duration in personal and familial lives. Hailed by eminent scholar Jay Winter as "one of the best which the centenary of the Great War has occasioned", the exhibition delved into the war's continuing emotional claims on descendants and on those who encounter the war through museums today. Contributors to this volume, drawn largely from the exhibition's curators and advisory panel, grapple with the complexities of recovering and presenting difficult histories of the war. In eleven essays the book presents a new, more sensitive and nuanced narrative of the Great War, in which families and individuals take centre stage. Together they uncover private reckonings with the costs of that experience, not only in the years immediately after the war, but in the century since.

'This magnificent, monumental portrait at a stroke makes all others redundant, and re-establishes Lawrence as one of the most extraordinary figures of the 20th century' Sunday Times Michael Korda' s Hero is an epic biography of the mysterious Englishman whose daring exploits made him an object of intense fascination, known the world over as Lawrence of Arabia. An Oxford Scholar and archaeologist, one of five illegitimate sons of a British aristocrat who ran away with his daughters' governess, T.E. Lawrence was sent to Cairo as an intelligence officer in 1916, vanished into the desert in 1917, and re-emerged as one of the most remarkable and controversial figures of the First World War. He united and led the Arab tribes to defeat the Turks and eventually capture Damascus, an adventure he recorded in the classic Seven Pillars of Wisdom. A born leader, utterly fearless and seemingly impervious to pain and danger, he remained modest, and retiring. Farsighted diplomat, brilliant military strategist, the first media celebrity, and acclaimed writer, Lawrence was a visionary whose achievements transcended his time: had his vision for the modern Middle East been carried through, the hatred and bloodshed that have since plagued the region might have prevented. The democratic reforms he would have implemented as British High Commissioner of Egypt, are those the Egyptians are now demanding, 91 years later. Ultimately, as this magisterial work demonstrates, Lawrence remains the paradigm of the hero in modern times.

This book looks at the representations of modern war by analysing texts and examining the ways in which authors relate to the atrocious horrors of war. Rejecting the assumption that violence is simply a denial of reason or, at best, a pathological form of collective sadism, this book considers it 'a cultural act' that needs to be understood as underpinned by a series of shared and accepted norms and values stemming from a society at a given moment of its history and shaped by its language. Traditional vocabulary and language seem inadequate to describe soldiers' experience of modern warfare. The problem for writers is to depict and render intelligible a dramatically unprecedented reality through recourse to something familiar. For some historians and literary critics, the absurdity of the First World War has shaped our ironic and disenchanted reading of the entire twentieth century. Yet these ways of coping with the urge to communicate inexpressible feelings and emotions in most cases are not sufficient to overcome the incoherence of the sentiments felt and the events witnessed. The contributors attempt to address the questions and issues that are posed by the highly ambiguous views, texts, and representations examined in this volume. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal European Review of History: Revue Europeenne d'Histoire.

International contributors from the fields of political science, cultural studies, history, and literature grapple with both the local and global impact of World War I on marginal communities in China, Syria, Europe, Russia, and the Caribbean. Readers can uncover the neglected stories of this World War I as contributors draw particular attention to features of the war that are underrepresented such as Chinese contingent labor, East Prussian deportees, remittances from Syrian immigrants in the New World to struggling relatives in the Ottoman Empire, the war effort from Serbia to Martinique, and other war experiences. By redirecting focus away from the traditional areas of historical examination, such as battles on the Western Front and military strategy, this collection of chapters, international and interdisciplinary in nature, illustrates the war's omnipresence throughout the world, in particular its effect on less studied peoples and regions. The primary objective of this volume is to examine World War I through the lens of its forgotten participants, neglected stories, and underrepresented peoples.

This book explores the Kuki uprising against the British Empire during the First World War in the northeast frontier of India (then the Assam-Burma frontier). It sheds light on how the three-year war (1917-1919), spanning over 6,000 square miles, is crucial to understanding present-day Northeast India. Companion to the seminal The Anglo-Kuki War, 1917-1919, the chapters in this volume: * Examine several aspects of the Anglo-Kuki War, which had far-reaching consequences for the indigenous Kuki population, including economy, politics, identity, indigenous culture and belief systems, and traditional institutions during and after the First World War itself; * Highlight finer themes such as the role of the chiefs and war councils, symbols of communication, indigenous interpretation of the war, remembrance, and other policies which continued to confront the Kuki communities; * Interrogate themes of colonial geopolitics, colonialism and the missionaries, state making, and the frontier dimensions of the First World War. Moving away from colonial ethnographies, the volume taps on a variety of sources - from civilisational discourse to indigenous readings of the war, from tour diaries to oral accounts - meshing together the primitive with the modern, the tribal and the settled. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of South and Southeast Asian Studies, area studies, modern history, military and strategic studies, insurgency and counterinsurgency studies, tribal warfare, and politics.

The International Society for First World War Studies' ninth conference, 'War Time', drew together emerging and leading scholars to discuss, reflect upon, and consider the ways that time has been conceptualised both during the war itself and in subsequent scholarship. War Time: First World War Perspectives on Temporality, stemming from this 2016 conference, offers its readers a collection of the conference's most inspiring and thought-provoking papers from the next generation of First World War scholars. In its varied yet thematically-related chapters, the book aims to examine new chronologies of the Great War and bring together its military and social history. Its cohesive theme creates opportunities to find common ground and connections between these sub-disciplines of history, and prompts students and academics alike to seriously consider time as alternately a unifying, divisive, and ultimately shaping force in the conflict and its historiography. With content spanning land and air, the home and fighting fronts, multiple nations, and stretching to both pre-1914 and post-1918, these ten chapters by emerging researchers (plus an introductory chapter by the conference organisers, and a foreword by John Horne) offer an irreplaceable and invaluable snapshot of how the next generation of First World War scholars from eight countries were innovatively conceptualising the conflict and its legacy at the midpoint of its centenary.

Eric Bogle has written many iconic songs that deal with the futility and waste of war. Two of these in particular, 'And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda' and 'No Man's Land (a.k.a. The Green Fields of France)', have been recorded numerous times in a dozen or more languages indicating the universality and power of their simple message. Bogle's other compositions about the First World War give a voice to the voiceless, prominence to the forgotten and personality to the anonymous as they interrogate the human experience, celebrate its spirit and empathise with its suffering. This book examines Eric Bogle's songs about the Great War within the geographies and socio-cultural contexts in which they were written and consumed. From Anzac Day in Australia and Turkey to the 'The Troubles' in Northern Ireland and from small Aboriginal communities in the Coorong to the influence of prime ministers and rock stars on a world stage, we are urged to contemplate the nature and importance of popular culture in shaping contemporary notions of history and national identity. It is entirely appropriate that we do so through the words of an artist who Melody Maker described as 'the most important songwriter of our time'.

"An illustrated analytical study, Words and the First World War considers the situation at home, at war, and under categories such as race, gender and class to give a many-sided picture of language used during the conflict." The Spectator First World War expert Julian Walker looks at how the conflict shaped English and its relationship with other languages. He considers language in relation to mediation and authenticity, as well as the limitations and potential of different kinds of verbal communication. Walker also examines: - How language changed, and why changed language was used in communications - Language used at the Front and how the 'language of the war' was commercially exploited on the Home Front - The relationship between language, soldiers and class - The idea of the 'indescribability' of the war and the linguistic codes used to convey the experience 'Languages of the front' became linguistic souvenirs of the war, abandoned by soldiers but taken up by academics, memoir writers and commentators, leaving an indelible mark on the words we use even today.

This book explores how print journalism was a powerful and persistent influence on public attitudes to, and memories of, the First World War in a range of participant nations, including Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, the United States and Australia. With contributions from an international group of history, journalism and literary studies scholars, the book identifies and analyses five distinct roles played by the print media: producing and narrating histories of the war or its constituent episodes; serialising and reviewing memoirs or fictional accounts written by participants; reporting and framing the rituals and ceremonies of local and national commemoration; providing a platform for various war-related advocacy groups or campaigns, from veterans' associations to early Civil Rights movements; and using the war as a lens through which to interpret future conflicts. This innovative collection demonstrates the significance of journalism in shaping the public understanding of the First World War after 1918, and shows how the representations and narratives of the conflict reflected the political and social changes of the post-war decades. This book was originally published as a special issue of Journalism Studies.

This title offers an authoritative chronological account of the military and political events of The Great War, with more than 350 photographs and maps. It provides a highly readable history of the military and political events of World War I, described chronologically, from the state of Europe before the declaration of war by Germany to the triumph of the allies and the armistice. It chronicles the course of the war a year at a time and details the major events including the battle of the Marne, the first day of the Somme, the race to the sea, and the stalemate on the Italian front. There are fascinating fact boxes that highlight the lives of the important political leaders and generals, such as Alexei Brusilov, Henri-Philippe Petain, Douglas Heid, David Lloyd George and President Woodrow Wilson. This fascinating book is divided into seven chapters, one on each of the five years of the war, plus an introductory chapter on the causes of the war, and a concluding chapter on its aftermath and long-term legacy. Each chapter covers the war's battles and campaigns, and there are special feature boxes on a variety of subjects including key personalities and points of special interest. The history of the Great War is told in an accessible style and supplemented with over 350 photographs, maps and battle plans, making this a perfect book for both general and specialist readers.

Bill Lambert: World War I Flying Ace is a detailed scholarly biography of a World War I pilot who ""lived at the edge of greatness, but could never get there."" From late March to mid-August 1918, William C. Lambert from Ironton, Ohio, flew as a fighter pilot for the R.A.F. in World War I. A surprising number of Americans went to Canada and joined the British flying services. Unfortunately, for the most part, their life stories have never been told. Several of them went on to have distinguished records. Unbeknownst to anyone, when Lambert left the war his twenty-two victories were the largest total among any American pilot in the war. By the Armistice, Lambert's total would be surpassed by Eddie Rickenbacker, the former race car driver from Columbus, Ohio, with twenty-six victories. Lambert survived the war and lived into his eighties; however, until late in life, he was unwilling to take advantage of his war record to achieve public acclaim. This book is an examination of the entire life of a distinct individual who took part in a war that destroyed individuality and served to define him for the rest of his life.

Although civilian internment has become associated with the Second World War in popular memory, it has a longer history. The turning point in this history occurred during the First World War when, in the interests of 'security' in a situation of total war, the internment of 'enemy aliens' became part of state policy for the belligerent states, resulting in the incarceration, displacement and, in more extreme cases, the death by neglect or deliberate killing of hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world. This pioneering book on internment during the First World War brings together international experts to investigate the importance of the conflict for the history of civilian incarceration.

This book analyzes the development of the Lost Generation narrative following the First World War. The author examines narratives that illustrate the fracture of upper-class identity, including well-known examples of the Lost Generation-Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Vera Brittain-as well as other less typical cases-George Mallory and JRR Tolkien-to demonstrate the effects of the First World War on British society, culture, and politics.

During the last few decades there has been a growing recognition of the great role that remembering and collective memory play in forming the historical awareness. In addition, the dominant national form of history writing also met some challenges on the side of a transnational approach to the past. In A Nation Divided by History and Memory, a prominent Hungarian historian sheds light on how Hungary's historical image has become split as a consequence of the differences between the historian's conceptualisation of national history and its diverse representations in personal and collective memory. The book focuses on the shocking experiences and the intense memorial reactions generated by a few key historical events and the way in which they have been interpreted by the historical scholarship. The argument of A Nation Divided by History and Memory is placed into the context of an international historical discourse. This pioneering work is essential and enlightening reading for all historians, many sociologists, political scientists, social psychologists and university students.

In reading this memoir a person can learn first hand what it was like to be a soldier in the American army during World War I. It is a vivid account of one man's experience of being inducted into the army; his basic training; and being sent to France where he and his fellow soldiers were then taken to the front to begin their part in the fighting of the war. This is the story of friendships formed during this time; frightening, difficult situations; loss of friends on the battlefield; the seemingly endless fight for survival, and finally because of an injury being able to leave the battlefield-thus ending his part in the war. In spite of all the seriousness, this is a personal and compelling memoir that is hard to put down. You get to know this young man from Louisiana; his thoughts and beliefs about this war and life. Undoubtedly the whole experience stayed with him all his life. One cannot read this memoir without learning more about World War I--the so called Great World War.

Anarchism 1914-18 is the first systematic analysis of anarchist responses to the First World War. It examines the interventionist debate between Peter Kropotkin and Errico Malatesta which split the anarchist movement in 1914 and provides a historical and conceptual analysis of debates conducted in European and American movements about class, nationalism, internationalism, militarism, pacifism and cultural resistance. Contributions discuss the justness of war, non-violence and pacifism, anti-colonialism, pro-feminist perspectives on war and the potency of myths about the war and revolution for the reframing of radical politics in the 1920s and beyond. Divisions about the war and the experience of being caught on the wrong side of the Bolshevik Revolution encouraged anarchists to reaffirm their deeply-held rejection of vanguard socialism and develop new strategies that drew on a plethora of anti-war activities. -- .

Winner of the Urban History Association's 2005 Best Book in Non-North American Urban History Award.
In traditional Chinese cities, a lively street culture was an important part of popular culture, and street life was central to the daily lives of city dwellers, especially the lower classes. This book examines street culture in Chengdu, an under-studied inland city, during the transformative decades between 1870 and 1930, in order to explore various topics: the relationship between urban commoners and public space; the role that community and neighborhood played in public life; how the reform movement and the Republican revolution changed everyday life; and how popular culture and local politics interacted. Drawing on a rich array of Chinese and Western sources--including archives, local newspapers, gazetteers, personal records, folk literature, and field investigation--the author argues that life in public spaces was radically transformed in Chengdu during these eventful years.

One of the central events of modern history, World War I has been poorly presented in English language films. Torn between the powerful isolationist movement in the U.S. and a growing hatred of the "Hun", contemporary films were mainly propaganda calling citizens to arms. Spurred partly by a patriotism, the American film industry used the outbreak of the war and the government's interest in promoting patriotic sacrifice as a means to expand and take the lead in the film industry worldwide. More a business model than an art form, these early efforts claimed a place of respectability for film among the arts. Twenty years later, though films produced about the war were few, they were technically superior and generally carried conflicting messages about the war's mission and value, while focusing more on storyline than history. This study of English Language World War I films examines nearly 350 films from 1914 to 2014. Descriptions and critiques of each of the films are included, with stories and details about the actors and directors.

Although the United States did not enter the First World War until April 1917, Canada enlisted the moment Great Britain engaged in the conflict in August 1914. The Canadian contribution was great, as more than 600,000 men and women served in the war effort 400,000 of them overseas out of a population of 8 million. More than 150,000 were wounded and nearly 67,000 gave their lives. The war was a pivotal turning point in the history of the modern world, and its mindless slaughter shattered a generation and destroyed seemingly secure values. The literature that the First World War generated, and continues to generate so many years later, is enormous and addresses a multitude of cultural and social matters in the history of Canada and the war itself. Although many scholars have brilliantly analyzed the literature of the war, little has been done to catalog the writings of ordinary participants: men and women who served in the war and wrote about it but are not included among well-known poets, novelists, and memoirists. Indeed, we don t even know how many titles these people published, nor do we know how many more titles were added later by relatives who considered the recollections or collected letters worthy of publication. Brian Douglas Tennyson s The Canadian Experience of the Great War: A Guide to Memoirs is the first attempt to identify all of the published accounts of First World War experiences by Canadian veterans."

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.

In World War I and the Origins of U.S. Military Intelligence, military historian James L. Gilbert provides an authoritative overview of the birth of modern Army intelligence. Following the natural division of the intelligence war, which was fought on both the home front and overseas, Gilbert traces the development and use of intelligence and counterintelligence through the eyes of their principal architects: General Dennis E. Nolan and Colonel Ralph Van Deman. Gilbert explores how on the home front, US Army counterintelligence faced both internal and external threats that began with the Army's growing concerns over the loyalty of resident aliens who were being drafted into the ranks and soon evolved into the rooting out of enemy saboteurs and spies intent on doing great harm to America's war effort. To achieve their goals, counterintelligence personnel relied upon major strides in the areas of code breaking and detection of secret inks. Overseas, the intelligence effort proved far more extensive in terms of resources and missions, even reaching into nearby neutral countries. Intelligence within the American Expeditionary Forces was heavily indebted to its Allied counterparts who not only provided an organizational blueprint but also veteran instructors and equipment needed to train newly arriving intelligence specialists. Rapid advances by American intelligence were also made possible by the appointment of competent leaders and the recruitment of highly motivated and skilled personnel; likewise, the Army's decision to assign the bulk of its linguists to support intelligence proved critical. World War I would witness the linkage between intelligence and emerging technologies-from the use of cameras in aircraft to the intercept of enemy radio transmissions. Equally significant was the introduction of new intelligence disciplines-from exploitation of captured equipment to the translation of enemy documents. These and other functions that emerged from World War I would continue to the present to provide military intelligence with the essential tools necessary to support the Army and the nation. World War I and the Origins of U.S. Military Intelligence is ideal not only for students and scholars of military history and World War I, but will also appeal to any reader interested in how modern intelligence operations first evolved.

In the horrific conflict of 1914-1918 known first as "The Great War" and later as World War I, Latin American nations were peripheral players. Only after the U.S. entered the fighting in 1917 did eight of the twenty republics declare war. Five others broke diplomatic relations with Germany, while seven maintained strict neutrality. These diplomatic stances, even those of the two actual belligerents-Brazil and Cuba-did little to tip the balance of victory in favor of the allies, and perhaps that explains why historians have paid scant attention to events in Latin America related to the war. Nevertheless, it is still remarkable that Percy Alvin Martin's classic account, Latin American and the War, first published in 1925, remains the standard text on the topic. This book attempts to redress this gap by taking a fresh look at developments between 1914 and 1921 in one of the neutral nations-Colombia. This period, which coincides with the presidency of Jose Vicente Concha (1914-1918) and his successor, Marco Fidel Suarez (1918-1921), is filled with momentous developments not only in foreign policy, when Colombian diplomats pressured by German, British and U.S. propaganda struggled to maintain strict neutrality, but also on the domestic scene as the newly installed Conservative regime faced political and economic crises that sparked numerous and violent protests. Rausch's examination of the administrations of Concha and Suarez supports Martin's assertion that even those countries neutral in the Great War were not immune from its effects.