Jay Winter's powerful study of the 'collective remembrance' of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Dr Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. Taking issue with the prevailing 'modernist' interpretation of the European reaction to the appalling events of 1914–18, Dr Winter instead argues that what characterised ...

In late 2007 and early 2008, world-renowned historians gathered in Kansas City for a series of public forums on World War I. Each of the five events focused on a particular topic and featured spirited dialogue between its prominent participants.In spontaneous exchanges, the eminent scholars probed each other’s arguments, learned from each other, and provided insights not just into history but also into the way scholars think about their subject alongside and at times in conflict wi...

What we know of war is always mediated knowledge and feeling. We need lenses to filter out some of its blinding, terrifying light. These lenses are not fixed; they change over time, and Jay Winter's panoramic history of war and memory offers an unprecedented study of transformations in our imaginings of war, from 1914 to the present. He reveals the ways in which different creative arts have framed our meditations on war, from painting and sculpture to photography, film and poetry, and ulti...

Population politics has taken many forms throughout history. Political leaders from both democracies and non-democracies commonly place population issues at the center of their political programs, manufacturing alarm over changing demographic distributions. From fears of existential decline to debates over migration and fertility, demographic issues are often distorted by political ideologies that obscure understanding and fuel divisive narratives. In Toxic Demography, Jennifer D....

This first volume of The Cambridge History of the First World War provides a comprehensive account of the war's military history. An international team of leading historians charts how a war made possible by globalization and imperial expansion unfolded into catastrophe, growing year by year in scale and destructive power far beyond that which anyone had anticipated in 1914. Adopting a global perspective, the volume analyses the spatial impact of the war and the subsequent ripple effects t...

Originally appearing at the same time as the pacifist novel All Quiet on the Western Front, this powerful collection provides a glimpse into the hearts and minds of an enemy that had been thoroughly demonized by the Allied press. Composed by German students who had left their university studies in order to participate in World War I, these letters reveal the struggles and hardships that all soldiers face.The stark brutality and surrealism of war are revealed as young men f...

In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the major utopians” who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century’s minor utopias” whose stories, overshadowed by the horror...

The first English translation of writings that capture the lives and thoughts of German soldiers fighting in the trenches and on the battlefields of WWI.German Soldiers in the Great War is a vivid selection of firsthand accounts and other wartime documents that shed new light on the experiences of German frontline soldiers during the First World War. It reveals in authentic detail the perceptions and emotions of ordinary soldiers that have been covered up ...

On 24 July 1923 the last Treaty ending hostilities in the Great War was signed at Lausanne in Switzerland. That Treaty closed a decade of violence. Jay Winter tells the story of what happened on that day. On the shores of Lake Geneva, diplomats, statesmen, and soldiers came from Ankara and Athens, from London, Paris, and Rome, and from other capital cities to affirm that war was over. The Treaty they signed fixed the boundaries of present-day Greece and Turkey, and marked a beginning of a ...

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 milita...

Following the development of massive airships, naïve Londoner Bert Smallways becomes accidentally involved in a German plot to invade America by air and reduce New York to rubble. But although bombers devastate the city, they cannot overwhelm the country, and their attack leads not to victory but to the beginning of a new and horrific age for humanity. And so dawns the era of Total War, in which brutal aerial bombardments reduce the great cultures of the twentieth century to nothing. As ci...

Silence lies between forgetting and remembering. This book explores how different societies have constructed silences to enable men and women to survive and make sense of the catastrophic consequences of armed conflict. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, it examines the silences that have followed violence in twentieth-century Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These essays show that silence is a powerful language of remembrance and commemoration and a cultural practice with its o...