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  3. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare

In recent years the field of modern history has been enriched by the exploration of two parallel histories. These are the social and cultural history of armed conflict, and the impact of military events on social and cultural history.Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare presents the fruits of this growing area of research, reflecting both the colonization of military history by cultural historians and the reciprocal interest of military historians in social and cultural history, to the benefit of both. The series offers the latest scholarship in European and non-European events from the 1850s to the present day.

  • General Editors: Robert Gerwarth, University College Dublin, Jay Winter, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Advisory Editors: Heather Jones, University College London, Rana Mitter, University of Oxford, Michelle Moyd, Michigan State University, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter

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67 results in Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare

Page 3 of 4

Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War
  • Australia's Greek Immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War
  • Joy Damousi
  • Published online:
    05 November 2015
    Print publication:
    12 November 2015
  • In an engaging and original contribution to the field of memory studies, Joy Damousi considers the enduring impact of war on family memory in the Greek diaspora. Focusing on Australia's Greek immigrants in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Greek Civil War, the book explores the concept of remembrance within the larger context of migration to show how intergenerational experience of war and trauma transcend both place and nation. Drawing from the most recent research in memory, trauma and transnationalism, Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War deals with the continuities and discontinuities of war stories, assimilation in modern Australia, politics and activism, child migration and memories of mothers and children in war. Damousi sheds new light on aspects of forgotten memory and silence within families and communities, and in particular the ways in which past experience of violence and tragedy is both negotiated and processed.

British Art and the First World War, 1914–1924
  • James Fox
  • Published online:
    05 August 2015
    Print publication:
    30 July 2015
  • The First World War is usually believed to have had a catastrophic effect on British art, killing artists and movements, and creating a mood of belligerent philistinism around the nation. In this book, however, James Fox paints a very different picture of artistic life in wartime Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he examines the cultural activities of largely forgotten individuals and institutions, as well as the press and the government, in order to shed new light on art's unusual role in a nation at war. He argues that the conflict's artistic consequences, though initially disruptive, were ultimately and enduringly productive. He reveals how the war effort helped forge a much closer relationship between the British public and their art - a relationship that informed the country's cultural agenda well into the 1920s.

Catholicism and the Great War
  • Religion and Everyday Life in Germany and Austria-Hungary, 1914–1922
  • Patrick J. Houlihan
  • Published online:
    05 May 2015
    Print publication:
    16 April 2015
  • This transnational comparative history of Catholic everyday religion in Germany and Austria-Hungary during the Great War transforms our understanding of the war's cultural legacy. Challenging master narratives of secularization and modernism, Houlihan reveals that Catholics from the losing powers had personal and collective religious experiences that revise the decline-and-fall stories of church and state during wartime. Focusing on private theologies and lived religion, Houlihan explores how believers adjusted to industrial warfare. Giving voice to previously marginalized historical actors, including soldiers as well as women and children on the home front, he creates a family history of Catholic religion, supplementing studies of the clergy and bishops. His findings shed new light on the diversity of faith in this period and how specifically Catholic forms of belief and practice enabled people from the losing powers to cope with the war much more successfully than previous cultural histories have led us to believe.

Allies in Memory
  • World War II and the Politics ofTransatlantic Commemoration, c.1941–2001
  • Sam Edwards
  • Published online:
    05 March 2015
    Print publication:
    02 March 2015
  • Amidst the ruins of postwar Europe, and just as the Cold War dawned, many new memorials were dedicated to those Americans who had fought and fallen for freedom. Some of these monuments, plaques, stained-glass windows and other commemorative signposts were established by agents of the US government, partly in the service of transatlantic diplomacy; some were built by American veterans' groups mourning lost comrades; and some were provided by grateful and grieving European communities. As the war receded, Europe also became the site for other forms of American commemoration: from the sombre and solemn battlefield pilgrimages of veterans, to the political theatre of Presidents, to the production and consumption of commemorative souvenirs. With a specific focus on processes and practices in two distinct regions of Europe – Normandy and East Anglia – Sam Edwards tells a story of postwar Euro-American cultural contact, and of the acts of transatlantic commemoration that this bequeathed.

The Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism, 1918–1924
  • Bruno Cabanes
  • Published online:
    05 June 2014
    Print publication:
    13 March 2014
  • The aftermath of the Great War brought the most troubled peacetime the world had ever seen. Survivors of the war were not only the soldiers who fought, the wounded in mind and body. They were also the stateless, the children who suffered war's consequences, and later the victims of the great Russian famine of 1921 to 1923. Before the phrases 'universal human rights' and 'non-governmental organization' even existed, five remarkable men and women - René Cassin and Albert Thomas from France, Fridtjof Nansen from Norway, Herbert Hoover from the US and Eglantyne Jebb from Britain - understood that a new type of transnational organization was needed to face problems that respected no national boundaries or rivalries. Bruno Cabanes, a pioneer in the study of the aftermath of war, shows, through his vivid and revelatory history of individuals, organizations, and nations in crisis, how and when the right to human dignity first became inalienable.

Behind the Front
  • British Soldiers and French Civilians, 1914–1918
  • Craig Gibson
  • Published online:
    05 April 2014
    Print publication:
    27 March 2014
  • Until now scholars have looked for the source of the indomitable Tommy morale on the Western Front in innate British bloody-mindedness and irony, not to mention material concerns such as leave, food, rum, brothels, regimental pride, and male bonding. However, re-examining previously used sources alongside never-before consulted archives, Craig Gibson shifts the focus away from battle and the trenches to times behind the front, where the British intermingled with a vast population of allied civilians, whom Lord Kitchener had instructed the troops to 'avoid'. Besides providing a comprehensive examination of soldiers' encounters with local French and Belgian inhabitants which were not only unavoidable but also challenging, symbiotic and uplifting in equal measure, Gibson contends that such relationships were crucial to how the war was fought on the Western Front and, ultimately, to British victory in 1918. What emerges is a novel interpretation of the British and Dominion soldier at war.

Violence against Prisoners of War in the First World War
  • Britain, France and Germany, 1914–1920
  • Heather Jones
  • Published online:
    05 January 2014
    Print publication:
    02 June 2011
  • In this groundbreaking study, Heather Jones provides the first in-depth and comparative examination of violence against First World War prisoners. She shows how the war radicalised captivity treatment in Britain, France and Germany, dramatically undermined international law protecting prisoners of war and led to new forms of forced prisoner labour and reprisals, which fuelled wartime propaganda that was often based on accurate prisoner testimony. This book reveals how, during the conflict, increasing numbers of captives were not sent to home front camps but retained in western front working units to labour directly for the British, French and German armies - in the German case, by 1918, prisoners working for the German army endured widespread malnutrition and constant beatings. Dr Jones examines the significance of these new, violent trends and their later legacy, arguing that the Great War marked a key turning-point in the twentieth-century evolution of the prison camp.

World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–1930
  • Frederick R. Dickinson
  • Published online:
    05 October 2013
    Print publication:
    03 October 2013
  • Frederick R. Dickinson illuminates a new, integrative history of interwar Japan that highlights the transformative effects of the Great War far from the Western Front. World War I and the Triumph of a New Japan, 1919–1930 reveals how Japan embarked upon a decade of national reconstruction following the Paris Peace Conference, rivalling the monumental rebuilding efforts in post-Versailles Europe. Taking World War I as his anchor, Dickinson examines the structural foundations of a new Japan, discussing the country's wholehearted participation in new post-war projects of democracy, internationalism, disarmament and peace. Dickinson proposes that Japan's renewed drive for military expansion in the 1930s marked less a failure of Japan's interwar culture than the start of a tumultuous domestic debate over the most desirable shape of Japan's twentieth-century world. This stimulating study will engage students and researchers alike, offering a unique, global perspective of interwar Japan.

The War Inside
  • Psychoanalysis, Total War, and the Making of the Democratic Self in Postwar Britain
  • Michal Shapira
  • Published online:
    05 September 2013
    Print publication:
    12 September 2013
  • The War Inside is a groundbreaking history of the contribution of British psychoanalysis to the making of social democracy, childhood, and the family during World War II and the postwar reconstruction. Psychoanalysts informed understandings not only of individuals, but also of broader political questions. By asserting a link between a real 'war outside' and an emotional 'war inside', psychoanalysts contributed to an increased state responsibility for citizens' mental health. They made understanding children and the mother-child relationship key to the successful creation of a democratic citizenry. Using rich archival sources, the book revises the common view of psychoanalysis as an elite discipline by taking it out of the clinic and into the war nursery, the juvenile court, the state welfare committee, and the children's hospital. It traces the work of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Freud in response to total war and explores its broad postwar effects on British society.

Contested Commemorations
  • Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture
  • Benjamin Ziemann
  • Published online:
    05 February 2013
    Print publication:
    13 December 2012
  • This innovative study of remembrance in Weimar Germany analyses how experiences and memories of the Great War were transformed along political lines after 1918. Examining the symbolism, language and performative power of public commemoration, Benjamin Ziemann reveals how individual recollections fed into the public narrative of the experience of war. Challenging conventional wisdom that nationalist narratives dominated commemoration, this book demonstrates that Social Democrat war veterans participated in the commemoration of the war at all levels: supporting the 'no more war' movement, mourning the fallen at war memorials and demanding a politics of international solidarity. It describes how the moderate Socialist Left related the legitimacy of the Republic to their experiences in the Imperial army and acknowledged the military defeat of 1918 as a moment of liberation. This is the first comprehensive analysis of war remembrances in post-war Germany and a radical reassessment of the democratic potential of the Weimar Republic.

France under Fire
  • German Invasion, Civilian Flight and Family Survival during World War II
  • Nicole Dombrowski Risser
  • Published online:
    05 August 2012
    Print publication:
    12 July 2012
  • 'We request an immediate favour of you, to build a shelter for us women and small children, because we have absolutely no place to take refuge and we are terrified!' This French mother's petition sent to her mayor on the eve of Germany's 1940 invasion of France reveals civilians' security concerns unleashed by the Blitzkrieg fighting tactics of World War II. Unprepared for air warfare's assault on civilian psyches, French planners were among the first in history to respond to civilian security challenges posed by aerial bombardment. France under Fire offers a social, political and military examination of the origins of the French refugee crisis of 1940, a mass displacement of eight million civilians fleeing German combatants. Scattered throughout a divided France, refugees turned to German Occupation officials and Vichy administrators for relief and repatriation. Their solutions raised questions about occupying powers' obligations to civilians and elicited new definitions of refugees' rights.

The Great War in History
  • Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present
  • Jay Winter, Antoine Prost
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    21 July 2005
  • Since the Armistice, a vast literature has been produced on the First World War and its repercussions. In this 2005 book, two leading historians from the United States and France have produced a fully comparative analysis of the ways in which this history has been written and interpreted. The book identifies three generations of historians, literary scholars, film directors and writers who have commented upon the war. Through a thematic structure, it assesses not only diplomatic and military studies but also the social and cultural interpretations of the Great War as seen primarily through the eyes of French, German and British writers. It provides a fascinating case study of the practice of history in the twentieth century and of the enduring importance of the national lens in shaping historical narrative. This interesting study will prove invaluable reading to scholars and students in history, war studies, European history and international relations.

Ghosts of War in Vietnam
  • Heonik Kwon
  • Published online:
    05 June 2012
    Print publication:
    06 March 2008
  • This book is a fascinating study of the Vietnamese experience and memory of the Vietnam War through the lens of popular imaginings about the wandering souls of the war dead. These ghosts of war play an important part in postwar Vietnamese historical narrative and imagination, and Heonik Kwon explores the intimate ritual ties with these unsettled identities which still survive in Vietnam today as well as the actions of those who hope to liberate these hidden but vital historical presences from their uprooted social existence. Taking a unique approach to the cultural history of war, he introduces gripping stories about spirits claiming social justice and about his own efforts to wrestle with the physical and spiritual presence of ghosts. Although these actions are fantastical, this book shows how examining their stories can illuminate critical issues of war and collective memory in Vietnam and the modern world more generally.

Remembering Palestine in 1948
  • Beyond National Narratives
  • Efrat Ben-Ze'ev
  • Published online:
    07 October 2011
    Print publication:
    07 February 2011
  • The war of 1948 in Palestine is a conflict whose history has been written primarily from the national point of view. This book asks what happens when narratives of war arise out of personal stories of those who were involved, stories that are still unfolding. Efrat Ben-Ze'ev examines the memories of those who participated and were affected by the events of 1948, and how these events have been mythologized over time. This is a three-way conversation between Palestinian villagers, Jewish-Israeli veterans, and British policemen who were stationed in Palestine on the eve of the war. Each has his or her story to tell. These small-scale truths shed new light on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, as it was then and as it has become.

The Allied Air War and Urban Memory
  • The Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany
  • Jörg Arnold
  • Published online:
    05 July 2011
    Print publication:
    21 July 2011
  • The cultural legacy of the air war on Germany is explored in this comparative study of two bombed cities from different sides of the subsequently divided nation. Contrary to what is often assumed, Allied bombing left a lasting imprint on German society, spawning vibrant memory cultures that can be traced from the 1940s to the present. While the death of half a million civilians and the destruction of much of Germany's urban landscape provided 'usable' rallying points in the great political confrontations of the day, the cataclysms were above all remembered on a local level, in the very spaces that had been hit by the bombs and transformed beyond recognition. The author investigates how lived experience in the shadow of Nazism and war was translated into cultural memory by local communities in Kassel and Magdeburg struggling to find ways of coming to terms with catastrophic events unprecedented in living memory.

The Legacy of the French Revolutionary Wars
  • The Nation-in-Arms in French Republican Memory
  • Alan Forrest
  • Published online:
    04 August 2010
    Print publication:
    28 May 2009
  • A major contribution to the study of collective identity and memory in France, this book examines a French republican myth: the belief that the nation can be adequately defended only by its own citizens, in the manner of the French revolutionaries of 1793. Alan Forrest examines the image of the citizen army reflected in political speeches, school textbooks, art and literature across the nineteenth century. He reveals that the image appealed to notions of equality and social justice, and with time it expanded to incorporate Napoleon's victorious legions, the partisans who repelled the German invader in 1814 and the people of Paris who rose in arms to defend the Republic in 1870. More recently it has risked being marginalized by military technology and by the realities of colonial warfare, but its influence can still be seen in the propaganda of the Great War and of the French Resistance under Vichy.

The Labour of Loss
  • Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia
  • Joy Damousi
  • Published online:
    06 July 2010
    Print publication:
    28 June 1999
  • The Labour of Loss, first published in 1999, explores how mothers, fathers, widows, relatives and friends dealt with their experiences of grief and loss during and after the First and Second World Wars. Based on an examination of private loss through letters and diaries, it makes a significant contribution to understanding how people came to terms with the deaths of friends and family. The book considers the ways in which the bereaved dealt with grief psychologically, and analyses the social and cultural context within which they mourned their dead. Damousi shows that grief remained with people as they attempted to re-build an internal and external world without those to whom they had been so fundamentally attached. Unlike other studies in this area, The Labour of Loss considers how mourning affected men and women in different ways, and analyses the gendered dimensions of grief.

Capital Cities at War
  • Paris, London, Berlin 1914–1919
  • Jay Winter, Jean-Louis Robert
  • Published online:
    15 December 2009
    Print publication:
    28 February 1997
  • This ambitious volume marks a huge step in our understanding of the social history of the Great War. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert have gathered a group of scholars of London, Paris and Berlin, who collectively have drawn a coherent and original study of cities at war. The contributors explore notions of well-being in wartime cities - relating to the economy and the question of whether the state of the capitals contributed to victory or defeat. Expert contributors in fields stretching from history, demography, anthropology, economics, and sociology to the history of medicine, bring an interdisciplinary approach to the book, as well as representing the best of recent research in their own fields. Capital Cities at War, one of the few truly comparative works on the Great War, will transform studies of the conflict, and is likely to become a paradigm for research on other wars.

State, Society and Mobilization in Europe during the First World War
  • Edited by John Horne
  • Published online:
    04 December 2009
    Print publication:
    03 July 1997
  • This volume examines political and cultural mobilisation in the face of industrialised mass death during the First World War. Comparing Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Austria-Hungary, it generates arguments on mobilisation and 'total war' which have wider relevance. It explores 'national ideals' which cast the war as a crusade, the inclusive 'self-mobilisation' of sectional identities and private organisations behind national efforts, and the exclusion of suspect groups (the 'enemy within') from the mobilisation process. It also highlights the importance, and difficulty, of assessing the limits of mobilisation as well as the differing capacities of the state to sustain it, factors related to prior degrees of national integration and political legitimacy. Mobilisation in this sense was an important factor which determined the outcome and legacy of the war.

The Legacy of Nazi Occupation
  • Patriotic Memory and National Recovery in Western Europe, 1945–1965
  • Pieter Lagrou
  • Published online:
    02 December 2009
    Print publication:
    13 February 1999
  • This volume, in Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series, examines how France, Belgium and the Netherlands emerged from the military collapse and humiliating Nazi occupation they suffered during the Second World War. Rather than traditional armed conflict, the human consequences of Nazi policies were resistance, genocide and labour migration to Germany. Pieter Lagrou offers a genuinely comparative approach to these issues, based on extensive archival research; he underlines the divergence between ambiguous experiences of occupation and the univocal post-war patriotic narratives which followed. His book reveals striking differences in political cultures as well as close convergence in the creation of a common Western European discourse, and uncovers disturbing aspects of the aftermath of the war, including post-war antisemitism and the marginalisation of resistance veterans. Brilliantly researched and fluently written, this book will be of central interest to all scholars and students of twentieth-century European history.

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