The Cambridge History of the First World War: Volume 1, Global War

Description

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 that occurred both regionally and across the world. It explores how imperial powers devoted vast reserves of manpower and material to their war efforts and how, by doing so, they changed the political landscape of the world order. It also charts the moral, political and legal implications of the changing character of war and, in particular, the collapse of the distinction between civilian and military targets.

Jay Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University, Connecticut. He came to Yale from the University of Cambridge, where he took his doctorate and where he taught history from 1979 to 2001 and was a Fellow of Pembroke College. He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995); Remembering War (2006) and Dreams of Peace and Freedom (2006). In 1997, he received an Emmy award for the best documentary series of the year as co-producer and co-writer of 'The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century', an eight-hour series broadcast on PBS and the BBC, and shown subsequently in 28 countries. He is one of the founders of the Historial de la grande guerre, the international museum of the Great War, in Peronne, Somme, France. His biography of Rene Cassin, written with Antoine Prost and published in French in 2011, was published in an English edition by Cambridge University Press in 2013.

'... both scholarly and deftly drafted, a joy to read. It provides broad as well as deep analysis of just about every conceivable facet of this global catastrophe. It deserves close reading and contemplation.' Len Shurtleff, World War One Historical Association