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.

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Using a wide range of unpublished material from archives in both Britain and Canada, Travers explores the two themes of command and technology as the style of warfare changed from late 1917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.

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. .

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.

Originally published in 1994, This Working-Day World is lively collection of essays presenting a social, political and cultural view of British women's lives in the period 1914-45. The volume describes women's activities in many different areas, ranging from the weekly wash to the rescue of child refugees. Each essay, from an international list of contributors, is based on new research which will complement existing studies in a range of disciplines by adding information on, among other topics, women's teacher training colleges, and women in the BBC, in medical laboratories and in Art schools. The book does not, however, idealise women: the militarism and racism of the period infected women too, and this is revealed in the account of women in the British Union of Fascists, and the analysis of the Pankhursts' merging of patriotism and gender issues. Through studies and personal accounts, This Working-Day World reveals past issues that are still pertinent to debates in today's society. As we read the chapter on the recently discovered Diary of Doreen Bates which outlines possibly the first female civil servant campaign for rights as a single mother, we hear echoes of issues being discussed today. Indeed, as we approach the end of the century it is a good moment to look back and re-evaluate areas and degrees of progress - or the reverse - in society, and in British women's lives in particular. With its unusual photographs, this accessible and informative collection provides a rich resource for students in twentieth century social and cultural history, and women's studies courses, and an enlightening volume for general readers.

"Riveting . . . There is a wealth of new information here that adds considerable texture and nuance to his story and helps to set Russia apart from previous works."-The Wall Street Journal An epic new account of the conflict that reshaped Eastern Europe and set the stage for the rest of the twentieth century. Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. The doomed White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky's Red Army and the single-minded Communist dictatorship under Lenin. In the savage civil war that followed, terror begat terror, which in turn led to ever greater cruelty with man's inhumanity to man, woman and child. The struggle became a world war by proxy as Churchill deployed weaponry and troops from the British empire, while contingents from the United States, France, Italy, Japan, Poland, and Czechoslovakia played rival parts. Using the most up to date scholarship and archival research, Antony Beevor assembles the complete picture in a gripping narrative that conveys the conflict through the eyes of everyone from the worker on the streets of Petrograd to the cavalry officer on the battlefield and the doctor in an improvised hospital.

Woodbine Willie was the affectionate nickname of the Reverend Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy, an Anglican priest who volunteered as a chaplain on the Western Front during the First World War. Renowned for offering both spiritual support and cigarettes to injured and dying soldiers, he won the Military Cross for his reckless courage, running into No Man's Land to help the wounded in the middle of an attack. After the war, Kennedy was involved in the Industrial Christian Fellowship, and he wrote widely. This superb biography is based on original interviews with those who knew and loved him. A deep and real concern for his fellow men drove him relentlessly, and this book shows how vital was the role he played, on the battlefields of the trenches and then the slums. Bob Holman, described by the "Daily Telegraph" as 'the good man of Glasgow, ' has made a mission of living alongside the disadvantaged of British society. An accomplished writer, who contributes regularly to the "Guardian," he is the author of several books, including "Keir Hardie" (Lion).

SHORTLISTED FOR THE HISTORICAL WRITERS' ASSOCIATION CROWN AWARDS 2022 'Compelling and often horrifying' THE TIMES Best Paperbacks of 2022 The epic, moving stories of Britain's search to recover, identify and honour the missing soldiers of the First World War By the end of the First World War, the whereabouts of more than half a million British soldiers were unknown. Most were presumed dead, lost forever under the battlefields of northern France and Flanders. In The Searchers, Robert Sackville-West brings together the extraordinary, moving accounts of those who dedicated their lives to the search for the missing. These stories reveal the remarkable lengths to which people will go to give meaning to their loss: Rudyard Kipling's quest for his son's grave; E.M. Forster's conversations with traumatised soldiers in hospital in Alexandria; desperate attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead; the campaign to establish the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior; and the exhumation and reburial in military cemeteries of hundreds of thousands of bodies. It was a search that would span a century: from the department set up to investigate the fate of missing comrades in the war's aftermath to the present day, when DNA profiling continues to aid efforts to recover, identify and honour these men. As the rest of the country found ways to repair and move on, countless families were consumed by this mission, undertaking arduous, often hopeless, journeys to discover what happened to their husbands, brothers and sons. Giving prominence to the personal battles of those left behind, The Searchers brings the legacy of war vividly to life in a testament to the bravery, compassion and resilience of the human spirit.

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?