The Cambridge History of the First World War: Volume 3, Civil Society

Description

Volume 3 of The Cambridge History of the First World War explores the social and cultural history of the war and considers the role of civil society throughout the conflict; that is to say those institutions and practices outside the state through which the war effort was waged. Drawing on 25 years of historical scholarship, it sheds new light on culturally significant issues such as how families and medical authorities adapted to the challenges of war and the shift that occurred in gender roles and behaviour that would subsequently reshape society. Adopting a transnational approach, this volume surveys the war's treatment of populations at risk, including refugees, minorities and internees, to show the full extent of the disaster of war and, with it, the stubborn survival of irrational kindness and the generosity of spirit that persisted amidst the bitterness at the heart of warfare, with all its contradictions and enduring legacies.

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 'The global perspective on the war, represented in these volumes, adds further layers of complexity to our understanding of this foundational moment in modern history. The conjunction of early twentieth-century patterns of globalization and industrialized great power war was singular, distinguishing it from earlier European conflicts fought across the globe and the Second World War, which followed the collapse of globalization in the 1930s.' William Mulligan, European History Quarterly