The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 was done mainly, if one is to believe US policy at the time, to liberate the people of Iraq from an oppressive dictator. However, the many protests in London, New ...York, and other cities imply that the policy of "making the world safe for democracy" was not shared by millions of people in many Western countries. Thinking about this controversy inspired the present volume, which takes a closer look at how society responded to the outbreaks and conclusions of the First and Second World Wars. In order to examine this relationship between the conduct of wars and public opinion, leading scholars trace the moods and attitudes of the people of four Western countries (Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy) before, during and after the crucial moments of the two major conflicts of the twentieth century. Focusing less on politics and more on how people experienced the wars, this volume shows how the distinction between enthusiasm for war and concern about its consequences is rarely clear-cut.
Like many men of his generation, poet Robert Graves was indelibly marked by his experience of trench warfare in World War I. The horrific battles in which he fought and his guilt over surviving when ...so many perished left Graves shell-shocked and disoriented, desperately seeking a way to bridge the rupture between his conventional upbringing and the uncertainties of postwar British society. In this study of Graves’s early poetry, Frank Kersnowski explores how his war neurosis opened a door into the unconscious for Graves and led him to reject the essential components of the Western idea of reality—reason and predictability. In particular, Kersnowski traces the emergence in Graves’s early poems of a figure he later called The White Goddess, a being at once terrifying and glorious, who sustains life and inspires poetry. Drawing on interviews with Graves’s family, as well as unpublished correspondence and drafts of poems, Kersnowski argues that Graves actually experienced the White Goddess as a real being and that his life as a poet was driven by the purpose of celebrating and explaining this deity and her matriarchy.
This book provides an annotated translation of memoirs of Ottoman eye-witness actors of the Great War in the Arab lands. It reflects on numerous crises of the Middle East today such as the ambiguous ...Arab-Turkish relations, the Arab-Israeli confrontation, and the struggle for the holy places of Islam.
Although physicians during World War I, and scholars since, have addressed the idea of disorders such as shell shock as inchoate flights into sickness by men unwilling to cope with war's privations, ...they have given little attention to the agency many soldiers actually possessed to express dissent in a system that medicalized it. In Germany, these men were called Kriegszitterer, or "war tremblers, " for their telltale symptom of uncontrollable shaking. Based on archival research that constitutes the largest study of psychiatric patient files from 1914 to 1918, Diagnosing Dissent examines the important space that wartime psychiatry provided soldiers expressing objection to the war. Rebecca Ayako Bennette argues that the treatment of these soldiers was far less dismissive of real ailments and more conducive to individual expression of protest than we have previously thought. In addition, Diagnosing Dissent provides an important reevaluation of German psychiatry during this period. Bennette's argument fundamentally changes how we interpret central issues such as the strength of the German Rechtsstaat and the continuities or discontinuities between the events of World War I and the atrocities committed—often in the name of medicine and sometimes by the same physicians—during World War II.
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.
Selena Daly's work is the first comprehensive study of Futurism during the First World War period. In this book, she examines the cultural, political, and military engagement of the Futurists with ...the war effort, both on the battlefields and on the home front.
This multidisciplinary collection fills a gap in First World War scholarship, revealing the diversity and richness of women's and girls' wartime experiences in Canada and Newfoundland.
Missouri was one of many states that established a defense organization to take over the duties of the National Guard that had been federalized for military service when the United States declared ...war on Germany in 1917. The tasks of this volunteer Home Guard included traditional National Guard responsibilities such as providing introductory military training for draftable men, protecting crucial infrastructure from potential enemy activities, and maintaining law and order during labor activism.The Home Guard also functioned to preserve patriotism and reduce opposition to the war. Service in the Guard was a way to show loyalty to one's country, particularly for German Americans, who were frequently under suspicion as untrustworthy. Many German Americans in Missouri enthusiastically signed up to dispel any whispers of treason, while others found themselves torn between the motherland and their new homeland. Men too old or exempt from the draft for other reasons found meaning in helping with the war effort through the Home Guard while also garnering respect from the community. For similar reasons, women attempted to join the organization as did African Americans, some of whom formed units of a "Negro Home Guard." Informed by the dynamics of race, gender, and ethnicity, DeWitt's consideration of this understudied but important organization examines the fluctuating definition of patriotism and the very real question of who did and who did not have the privilege of citizenship and acceptance in society.
First World War commemoration in Europe has been framed as a moment of national trial and as a collective European tragedy. But the ‘Great War for Civilisation’ was more than just a European ...conflict. It was in fact a global war, a clash of empires that began a process of nationalist agitation against imperial polities and the racisms that underpinned them in Asia, Africa and beyond. Despite the global context of Centenary commemorative activity these events remain framed by national and state imaginaries and ones in which the ideas about nation, race and imperialism that animated and dominated men and women during the Great War sit uncomfortably with modern sensibilities. By drawing on original archival research, translations from French and Mandarin into English and by employing multidisciplinary conceptual frames of analysis, this exciting and innovative volume explores how race and empire, and racism and imperialism, were commemorated during the First World War Centenary.
This collection of articles is the outcome of extensive investigations into archival materials, concerning the involvement of various nations in the Great War. The authors analyse the wartime ...experiences of individuals and local communities, as well as whole nations. They offer a closer, more personal view of the impact of the Great War. The book re-constructs individual war narratives, and studies the long-term consequences of the conflict. The result is a multifaceted portrayal of the war, seen from local and international perspectives.
