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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > First World War
Three accounts of the brave women volunteers of the V.A.Ds during
the Great War
Although the wars of the later 19th century, such as the American
Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War, offered insights into what
warfare would become as the industrial age developed, nothing could
prepare anyone for the global conflict that became the First World
War. Here was a lethal combination of warring nations, whose troops
were armed with the most sophisticated weapons that technology
could devise, each with the means of mass production to manufacture
and deliver them. For the first time it was possible to wage war on
a grand scale on land, in the air and beneath and upon the oceans.
This was a war where millions of men took part in battle and, in
consequence, stripped the production and support services
workforces from their home countries. Women, already impatient for
political reform, stepped forward to make a vital contribution to
the war effort and in so doing changed their status in western
society forever. There were many volunteer organisations who were
relied upon to support the fighting troops, including the Scottish
Women's Hospitals, the F.A.N.Ys, the Y.M.C.A and those who are the
subject of this book-the V.A.Ds-the Voluntary Aid Detachments.
Three quarters of V.A.Ds were women and girls and they became
ambulance drivers, mechanics, cooks, clerks and learned trades
which were normally the province of men. But it is in their role as
nurses during the conflict for which they are especially
remembered. The V.A.Ds included both trained and untrained nurses
who worked principally under the direction of the Red Cross and the
Order of St. John. This special Leonaur book about the V.A.Ds,
published to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the First
World War, contains three essential and riveting first-hand acounts
by those who served, and provides invaluable insights into the
developing role of women during those years of crisis.
Recommended.
Leonaur editions are newly typeset and are not facsimiles; each
title is available in softcover and hardback with dustjacket; our
hardbacks are cloth bound and feature gold foil lettering on their
spines and fabric head and tail bands.
During the First World War approximately 210,000 Irish men and a
much smaller, but significant, number of Irish women served in the
British armed forces. All were volunteers and a very high
proportion were from Catholic and Nationalist communities. This
book is the first comprehensive analysis of Irish recruitment
between 1914 and 1918 for the island of Ireland as a whole. It
makes extensive use of previously neglected internal British army
recruiting returns held at The National Archives, Kew, along with
other valuable archival and newspaper sources. There has been a
tendency to discount the importance of political factors in Irish
recruitment, but this book demonstrates that recruitment campaigns
organised under the auspices of the Irish National Volunteers and
Ulster Volunteer Force were the earliest and some of the most
effective campaigns run throughout the war. The British government
conspicuously failed to create an effective recruiting organisation
or to mobilise civic society in Ireland. While the military
mobilisation which occurred between 1914 and 1918 was the largest
in Irish history, British officials persistently characterised it
as inadequate, threatening to introduce conscription in 1918. This
book also reflects on the disparity of sacrifice between North-East
Ulster and the rest of Ireland, urban and rural Ireland, and
Ireland and Great Britain.
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. .
During the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, the ethnic
tensions between the minority populations within the empire led to
the administration carrying out a systematic destruction of the
Armenian people. This not only brought two thousand years of
Armenian civilisation within Anatolia to an end but was accompanied
by the mass murder of Syriac and Greek Orthodox Christians.
Containing a selection of papers presented at "The Genocide of the
Christian Populations of the Ottoman Empire and its Aftermath
(1908-1923)" international conference, hosted by the Chair for
Pontic Studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, this
book draws on unpublished archival material and an innovative
historiographical approach to analyze events and their legacy in
comparative perspective. In order to understand the historical
context of the Ottoman Genocide, it is important to study, apart
from the Armenian case, the fate of the Greek and Assyrian peoples,
providing a more comprehensive understanding of the complexity of
the situation. This volume is primarily a research contribution but
should also be valued as a supplementary text that would provide
secondary reading for undergraduates and postgraduate students.
Museums, Modernity and Conflict examines the history of the
relationship between museums, collections and war, revealing how
museums have responded to and been shaped by war and conflicts of
various sorts. Written by a mixture of museum professionals and
academics and ranging across Europe, North America and the Middle
East, this book examines the many ways in which museums were
affected by major conflicts such as the World Wars, considers how
and why they attempted to contribute to the war effort, analyses
how wartime collecting shaped the nature of the objects held by a
variety of museums, and demonstrates how museums of war and of the
military came into existence during this period. Closely focused
around conflicts which had the most wide-ranging impact on museums,
this collection includes reflections on museums such as the Louvre,
the Stedelijk in the Netherlands, the Canadian War Museum and the
State Art Collections Dresden. Museums, Modernity and Conflict will
be of interest to academics and students worldwide, particularly
those engaged in the study of museums, war and history. Showing how
the past continues to shape contemporary museum work in a variety
of different and sometimes unexpected ways, the book will also be
of interest to museum practitioners.
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.
Tense Future falls into two parts. The first develops a critical
account of total war discourse and addresses the resistant
potential of acts, including acts of writing, before a future that
looks barred or predetermined by war. Part two shifts the focus to
long interwar narratives that pit both their scale and their formal
turbulence against total war's portrait of the social totality,
producing both ripostes and alternatives to that portrait in the
practice of literary encyclopedism. The book's introduction grounds
both parts in the claim that industrialized warfare, particularly
the aerial bombing of cities, intensifies an under-examined form of
collective traumatization: a pretraumatic syndrome in which the
anticipation of future-conditional violence induces psychic wounds.
Situating this claim in relation to other scholarship on "critical
futurities," Saint-Amour discusses its ramifications for trauma
studies, historical narratives generally, and the historiography of
the interwar period in particular. The introduction ends with an
account of the weak theory of modernism now structuring the field
of modernist studies, and of weak theory's special suitability for
opposing total war, that strongest of strong theories.
On April 25th 1915, during the First World War, the famous Anzacs
landed ashore at Gallipoli. At the exact same moment, leading
figures of Armenian life in the Ottoman Empire were being arrested
in vast numbers. That dark day marks the simultaneous birth of a
national story - and the beginning of a genocide. When We Dead
Awaken - the first narrative history of the Armenian Genocide in
decades - draws these two landmark historical events together.
James Robins explores the accounts of Anzac Prisoners of War who
witnessed the genocide, the experiences of soldiers who risked
their lives to defend refugees, and Australia and New Zealand's
participation in the enormous post-war Armenian relief movement. By
exploring the vital political implications of this unexplored
history, When We Dead Awaken questions the national folklore of
Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey - and the mythology of Anzac Day
itself.
This book is based on original research into intimidation and
violence directed at civilians by combatants during the
revolutionary period in Ireland, considering this from the
perspectives of the British, the Free State and the IRA. The book
combines qualitative and quantitative approaches, and focusses on
County Kerry, which saw high levels of violence. It demonstrates
that violence and intimidation against civilians was more common
than clashes between combatants and that the upsurge in violence in
1920 was a result of the deployment of the Black and Tans and
Auxiliaries, particularly in the autumn and winter of that year.
Despite the limited threat posed by the IRA, the British forces
engaged in unprecedented and unprovoked violence against civilians.
This study stresses the increasing brutality of the subsequent
violence by both sides. The book shows how the British had similar
methods and views as contemporary counter-revolutionary groups in
Europe. IRA violence, however, was, in part, an attempt to impose
homogeneity as, beneath the Irish republican narrative of popular
approval, there lay a recognition that universal backing was never
in fact present. The book is important reading for students and
scholars of the Irish revolution, the social history of Ireland and
inter-war European violence.
During the last two centuries, ethnolinguistic nationalism has been
the norm of nation building and state building in Central Europe.
The number of recognized Slavic languages (in line with the
normative political formula of language = nation = state) gradually
tallied with the number of the Slavic nation-states, especially
after the breakups of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union and
Yugoslavia. But in the current age of borderless cyberspace,
regional and minority Slavic languages are freely standardized and
used, even when state authorities disapprove. As a result, since
the turn of the 19th century, the number of Slavic languages has
varied widely, from a single Slavic language to as many as 40.
Through the story of Slavic languages, this timely book illustrates
that decisions on what counts as a language are neither permanent
nor stable, arguing that the politics of language is the politics
in Central Europe. The monograph will prove to be an essential
resource for scholars of linguistics and politics in Central
Europe.
First World War-based ex-servicemen's organisations found
themselves facing an existential crisis with the onset of the
Second World War. This book examines how two such groups, the
British and American Legions, adapted cognitively to the emergence
of yet another world war and its veterans in the years 1938 through
1946. With collective identities and socio-political programmes
based in First World War memory, both Legions renegotiated existing
narratives of that war and the lessons they derived from those
narratives as they responded to the unfolding Second World War in
real time. Using the previous war as a "learning experience" for
the new one privileged certain understandings of that conflict over
others, inflecting its meaning for each Legion moving forward.
Breaking the Second World War down into its constituent events to
trace the evolution of First World War memory through everyday
invocations, this unprecedented comparison of the British and
American Legions illuminates the ways in which differing
international, national, and organisational contexts intersected to
shape this process as well as the common factors affecting it in
both groups. The book will appeal most to researchers of the
ex-service movement, First World War memory, and the cultural
history of the Second World War.
A noted World War I scholar examines the critical decisions and
events that led to Germany's defeat, arguing that the German loss
was caused by collapse at home as well as on the front. Much has
been written about the causes for the outbreak of World War I and
the ways in which the war was fought, but few historians have
tackled the reasons why the Germans, who appeared on the surface to
be winning for most of the war, ultimately lost. This book, in
contrast, presents an in-depth examination of the complex interplay
of factors-social, cultural, military, economic, and
diplomatic-that led to Germany's defeat. The highly readable work
begins with an examination of the strengths and weaknesses of the
two coalitions and points out how the balance of forces was clearly
on the side of the Entente in a long and drawn-out war. The work
then probes the German plan to win the war quickly and the
resulting campaigns of August and September 1914 that culminated in
the devastating defeat in the First Battle of the Marne. Subsequent
chapters discuss the critical factors and decisions that led to
Germany's loss, including the British naval blockade, the role of
economic factors in maintaining a consensus for war, and the social
impact of material deprivation. Starts a new and fuller discussion
of Germany's defeat that goes beyond the battlefields of the
Western Front Argues that Germany's defeat was caused by a complex
interplay of domestic, social, and economic forces as well as by
military and diplomatic factors Integrates the internal problems
the German people experienced with Germany's defeats at sea and on
land Highlights the critical role played by Britain and the United
States in bringing about Germany's defeat Discusses the failures of
German military planning and the failure of the nation's political
leaders and military leaders to understand that war is the
continuation of diplomacy by other means
Organised chronologically by type, German Aircraft of World War I
offers a highly-illustrated guide to the main types of aircraft
used by the German Air Force during World War I. The book offers a
comprehensive survey of German aircraft, from the Albatros B.1 and
Fokker E.II of the early years, to the more sophisticated Fokker
D.VII and Junkers CL.1 of the final months of the war. All the
major and many minor types are featured, including monoplanes,
biplanes, single-seater fighters, two-seater fighters, bombers,
ground attack aircraft, night bombers, giant bombers and
floatplanes. This includes both well-known and lesser- known
models, such as the LVG and Pfalz single-seater fighters, the Gotha
and Zeppelin Staaken large bombers, AEG ground attack aircraft, and
the Albatross, Halberstadt and Brandenburg two-seater biplanes.
Each featured profile includes authentic markings and colour
schemes, while every separate model is accompanied by exhaustive
specifications. Packed with 110 full-colour artworks with detailed
specifications, German Aircraft of World War I is a key reference
guide for military modellers and World War I enthusiasts.
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