In the English-speaking world the Great War maintains a tenacious grip on the public imagination, and also continues to draw historians to an event which has been interpreted variously as a symbol of modernity, the midwife to the twentieth century and an agent of social change. Although much ‘common knowledge’ about the war and its aftermath has included myth, simplification and generalisation, this has often been accepted uncritically by popular and academic writers alike.
While Britain may have suffered a surfeit of war books, many telling much the same story, there is far less written about the impact of the Great War in other combatant nations. Its history was long suppressed in both fascist Italy and the communist Soviet Union: only recently have historians of Russia begun to examine a conflict which killed, maimed and displaced so many millions. Even in France and Germany the experience of 1914-18 has often been overshadowed by the Second World War.
The war’s social history is now ripe for reassessment and revision. The essays in this volume incorporate a European perspective, engage with the historiography of the war, and consider how the primary textural, oral and pictorial evidence has been used – or abused. Subjects include the politics of shellshock, the impact of war on women, the plight of refugees, food distribution in Berlin and portrait photography, all of which illuminate key debates in war history.
Tabella dei contenuti
List of Illustrations
Note on Terminology
Introduction
Chapter 1. ‘Though in a Picture Only’: Portrait Photography and the Commemoration of the First World War
Catherine Moriarty
Chapter 2. Making Spectaculars: Museums and how we remember Gender in Wartime
Deborah Thom
Chapter 3. British ‘War Enthusiasm’ in 1914: a Reassessment
Adrian Gregory
Chapter 4. Winners or Losers: Women’s Symbolic Role in the War Story
Gail Braybon
Chapter 5. Liberating Women? Examining Gender, Morality and Sexuality in First World War Britain and France
Susan Grayzel
Chapter 6. The Great War and Gender Relations: the Case of French Women and the First World War Revisited
James Mc Millan
Chapter 7. Mental Cases: British Shellshock and the Politics of Interpretation
Laurinda Stryker
Chapter 8. Food and the German Home Front: Evidence from Berlin
Keith Allen
Chapter 9. The Epic and the Domestic: Women and War in Russia, 1914–1917
Peter Gatrell
Chapter 10. Italian Women During the Great War
Simonetta Ortaggi
Notes on Contributors
Index
Circa l’autore
Gail Braybon (1952-2008) was an independent historian. She was the author of Women Workers in the First World War and also wrote, with Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars.
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