Letters From a Yankee Doughboy is a collection of more than 125 letters written by Private 1st Class Raymond W. Maker, to his sister, Eva, a county nurse living in Framingham, Massachusetts, describing his everyday service in combat during World War 1. These letters, edited by Private Maker's grandson, Major Bruce H. Norton (USMC retired) are accompanied by 365 pocket-diary entries that Raymond religiously kept throughout the year 1918. Private Maker was assigned to Company C, 101st Field Signal Battalion, as a wireman, whose duty was to repair and replace the communications lines that were destroyed by artillery and mortar barrages during the horrific battles that took place between German infantry forces and the 26th "Yankee" Division of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), in France, from October of 1917 until the end of the war. Assigned to the 104th Infantry Regiment, Private Maker saw the very worst of ground warfare. He fought at the Battle of Belleau Wood; was gassed by German artillery forces at the Battle of Chateau-Thierry and was wounded by artillery fire outside of Verdun, just one day before the Armistice was signed. The theme of his letters will vividly evoke memories in the tens of thousands of men and women who have served their country and their friends and loved ones. As a postscript, toward the end of the war, Raymond took the key to the North Gate of Verdun as a battlefield keepsake and mailed it home to his sister, instructing her to "keep that key, as someday it will be of value." On November 11, 2018 - the centenary of Armistice Day - the author returned that key to Thierry Hubscher, the Director of the Memorial de Verdun, to be placed on display in that great Museum, closing a 100-year chapter in Raymond's life.

An extraordinary tale, much-neglected by historians, of courage, bravery and eventual tragedy which took place during the First World War in the Middle East. It is the story of a small group of people, of whom Sarah and Aaron Aaronsohn were the core, who were devoted to the Yishuv, the Jewish community in Palestine, and who were convinced that it was in imminent danger of extinction from the Turks.They resolved to help the British in Egypt by collecting military intelligence. Unfortunately, as Peter Calvocoressi points out, their understanding of the British position was quite wrong...[their] miscalculations created the tragedy which this book recounts...'

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with Cummings's Cambridge, Massachusetts upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism and other "modern" movements in the arts. As the United States prepared to enter the First World War, Cummings volunteered as an ambulance driver, was shipped out to Paris and met his first love, Marie Louise Lallemand, who was working in Paris as a prostitute. Soon after reaching the front, however, he was unjustly imprisoned in a brutal French detention centre at La Ferte-Mace. Through this confrontation with arbitrary and sadistic authority, he found the courage to listen to his own voice. Probing an underexamined yet formative time in the poet's life, this deeply researched account illuminates his ideas about love, justice, humanity and brutality. J. Alison Rosenblitt weaves together letters, journal entries and sketches with astute analyses of poems that span Cummings' career, revealing the origins of one of the twentieth century's most famous poets.

World War One was the landmark event of the first quarter of the 20th century. In "The Great War, 1914-1918, " Roy Douglas tells the history of the period through an international collection of over 100 cartoons, many of them previously unknown. This pioneering pan-European approach offers new perspectives of key themes, events and figures, forcing a new reinterpretation of the familiar. Both "establishment" and "subversive" cartoons demonstrate the real concerns of all participants from the governments of the combative powers, to the soldier to those at home.
This unique collection will inform in a fresh way the continued historical debates surrounding the Great War and the implications which reach to the present day.

The Great War is a collection of seven original essays and three critical comments by senior scholars dealing with the greatest conflict in modern history to its time - the 1914-18 World War. The Great War is edited by the distinguished historian of the First World War, R.J.Q.Adams.

Edwin Lutyens' Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval in Northern France, visited annually by tens of thousands of tourists, is arguably the finest structure erected by any British architect in the twentieth century. It is the principal, tangible expression of the defining event in Britain's experience and memory of the Great War, the first day of the Battle of the Somme on 1 July 1916, and it bears the names of 73,000 soldiers whose bodies were never found at the end of that bloody and futile campaign. This brilliant study by an acclaimed architectural historian tells the origin of the memorial in the context of commemorating the war dead; it considers the giant classical brick arch in architectural terms, and also explores its wider historical significance and its resonances today. So much of the meaning of the twentieth century is concentrated here; the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing casts a shadow into the future, a shadow which extends beyond the dead of the Holocaust, to the Gulag, to the 'disappeared' of South America and of Tianenmen. Reissued in a beautiful and striking new edition for the centenary of the Somme.

In the autumn of 1917, the British government established three batallions of infantry for the reception of non-nationalized Russian Jews. Known colloquially as the Jewish Legion, the batallions served in Egypt and Palestine, before their eventual disbandment in the late spring of 1921. By drawing on the testimonies of over 600 veterans, this unique unit is analyzed from within its political and social context, providing fresh insights into Anglo-Jewish relations during the early twentieth century.

"How the War Was Won" describes the major role played by the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front in defeating the German army. In particular, the book explains the methods used in fighting the last year of the war, and raises questions as to whether mechanical warfare could have been more widely used.
Using a wide range of unpublished material from archives in both Britain and Canada, Travers explores the two themes of command and technology as the style of warfare changed from late 1917 through 1918. He describes in detail the British army's defense against the German 1918 spring offensives, analyzes command problems during these offensives, and offers an overriding explanation for the March 1918 retreat. He also fully investigates the role of the tank from Cambrai to the end of the war, and concludes that, properly used, the tank could have made a greater contribution to victory.
"How the War Was Won" explodes many myths and advances new and controversial arguments. It will be essential reading for military historians and strategists, and for those interested in the origins of mechanical warfare.

The Zionist Masquerade is a new history of the birth of the Anglo-Zionist alliance during the Great War - a critical chapter in the history of the Zionist-Palestinian conflict. James Renton argues that the Balfour Declaration was the result of a wider phenomenon of British propaganda policies during World War I that were driven by mistaken conceptions of ethnicity, ethnic power and nationalism. From this vantage point, Renton contends that while a number of Zionist activists played a crucial role in the making of the Balfour Declaration, the end result was not the great Zionist victory that has been widely assumed. Although the Declaration came to be the basis for the British Mandate for Palestine, which made a Jewish State possible thirty years later, this was far from being the original intention of the British Government. The primary purpose of Britain's wartime support for Zionism was to secure Jewish backing for the war effort. The unintended consequences of this policy, however, were to be explosive and far-reaching.

This book assesses Lloyd George's attempt to shape the history of 1914-18 through his War Memoirs. His account of the British conduct of the war focused on the generals' incompetence, their obsession with the Western Front, and their refusal to consider alternatives to the costly trench warfare in France and Belgium. Yet as War Minister and Prime Minister Lloyd George presided over the bloody offensives of 1916-17, and had earlier taken a leading role in mobilising industrial resources to provide the weapons which made them possible. Rewriting the First World War examines how Lloyd George addressed this paradox.

An ace over the Western Front-in his own words
The Canadian author of this book, William Bishop, volunteered for imperial service as a cavalryman as the Great War called its colonial men to the colours. A brief encounter with aircraft-the cavalry of the clouds-and a prolonged encounter with mud persuaded him that his war should instead be fought in the skies with the RFC. Bishop flew first as an observer and eventually, on winning his double wings, as the pilot of a 'scout'-the famous early fighter aircraft of the pioneering 'dogfight days' of aerial combat. Most of us know that the lives of pilots over the Western Front were perilously short, but Bishop had found his vocation and he began destroying enemy aircraft with a ruthless efficiency. His final total of 47 kills established him as a notable allied 'ace' and earned him a succession of decorations including the Victoria Cross. Remarkably, through a combination of skill and good luck, he survived his combat experiences to be the author of this excellent first-hand account, written while the war still raged, of the First World War in the air from a pilots perspective. Readers can be assured that this exciting book is everything one could hope for, with vital descriptions of duels with the 'Red Baron' and his Flying Circus together with many other riveting experiences. Available in paperback and hardcover with dustjacket.

Marianne or Germania is the first comprehensive study of modern Alsatian history using gender as a category of historical analysis, and the first to record the experiences of the region's women from 1870 to 1946. Relying on an extensive array of documentary, visual and literary material, national and regional publications, oral testimonies, and previously unused archival sources gathered in France, Germany, and Britain, the book contributes to the growing literature on the relationship between gender, the nation and citizenship, and between nationalism and feminism. It does so by focusing on the roles, both passive and active, that women played in the process of German and French nation-building in Alsace.
The work also critiques and corrects the long-held assumptions that Alsatian women were the preservers, after 1871, of a French national heritage in the region, and that women were neglected or disregarded by policy-makers concerned with the consolidation of German, and later French, loyalties. Women were in fact seen as important agents of nation-formation and treated as such. In addition, all the categories of social action implicated in the nation-building process - confession, education, socialization, the public sphere, the domestic setting, the iconography of regional and national belonging - were themselves gendered. Thus nation-building projects impacted asymmetrically on men and women, with far-reaching consequences. Having been 'nationalized' through different 'rounds of restructuring' than men, the women of Alsace were, and continue to be, excluded from national and regional histories, as well as from public memory and official commemoration. Marianne or Germania questions, and ultimately challenges, these practices.

For centuries, battleships provided overwhelming firepower at sea. They were not only a major instrument of warfare, but a visible emblem of a nation's power, wealth and pride. The rise of the aircraft carrier following the Japanese aerial strike on Pearl Harbor in 1941 highlighted the vulnerabilities of the battleship, bringing about its demise as a dominant class of warship. This book offers a detailed guide to the major types of battleships to fight in the two World Wars. Explore HMS Dreadnought, the first of a class of fast, big-gun battleships to be developed at the beginning of the 20th century; see the great capital ships that exchanged salvos at the battle of Jutland, including the German battlecruiser Derfflinger, which sank the British battleship Queen Mary; find out about the destruction of HMS Hood, which exploded after exchanging fire with the Bismarck, which itself was sunk after a trans-Atlantic chase by a combination of battery fire and aircraft-launched torpedoes; and be amazed at the 'super-battleship' Yamato, which despite its size and firepower, made minimal contribution to Japan's war effort and was sunk by air attack during the defence of Okinawa. Illustrated with more than 120 vivid artworks and photographs, Technical Guide: Battleships of World War I and World War II is an essential reference guide for modellers and naval warfare enthusiasts.

Humor and entertainment were vital to the war effort during World War I. While entertainment provided relief to soldiers in the trenches, it also built up support for the war effort on the home front. This book looks at transnational war culture by examining seemingly light-hearted discourses on the Great War.

Chasseur of 1914 - The first months of war through the eyes of a French regular cavalry officer. This is a fascinating and unusual book. Written in the early years of the Great War in Europe by a young professional officer of Chasseurs a Cheval, this is a lyrical work full of enthusiasm, idealism and conviction in the spirit of the Light Cavalry. In places the reader can easily imagine it is the account of a Napoleonic or 2nd Empire cavalryman - so similar are the scenes of campaigning against the common Prussian enemy. Dupont's regiment is brigaded with the Chasseurs de Afrique engaged in mounted warfare at the Battle of the Marne and after. As 1915 approaches they are dismounted to fight as infantry in Belgium where Dupont takes part in the Battle of the Yser. This book offers a 'snapshot' in time - a view of war in which the writer still dreams of Lasalle and Murat untarnished by the war of attrition to come. .

An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe--a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like.
In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund's collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling." Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, "The Beauty and Sorrow" brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.