World War One: A History in 100 Stories

Description

There has been no shortage of heroic stories over the course of the Anzac Centenary- stories of courage and sacrifice, fortitude and endurance, mateship and resolve. But a hundred years on, there is a need for other stories as well - the stories too often marginalised in favour of nation-building narratives. World War One- a history in 100 stories remembers not just the men and women who lost their lives during the battles of WWI, but those who returned home as well- the gassed, the crippled, the insane - all those irreparably damaged by war. Drawn from a unique collection of sources, including repatriation files, these heartbreaking and deeply personal stories reveal a broken and suffering generation - gentle men driven to violence, mothers sent insane with grief, the hopelessness of rehabilitation and the quiet, pervasive sadness of loss. They also retrieve a fragile kind of courage from the pain and devastation of a conflict that changed the world. This is an unflinching and remarkable social history. It is an act of remembering in the face of forgetting. Telling the truth about war requires its own kind of courage.

Bruce Scates is currently Professor of History and Australian Studies, and Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. Scates is an award-winning teacher, novelist and historian. His publications include Return to Gallipoli, A New Australia, the Cambridge History of the Shrine of Remembrance and the recently republished Women and the Great War (co authored with Raelene Frances). The last of these won the coveted NSW Premier's History Award. Bruce is committed to communicating history to the widest possible audience; he played a leading role in the production of the recent ABC mini series 'The War that Changed Us'. He was also featured in an ABC Compass program exploring pilgrimages to the cemeteries of the Great War. His work is distinctive because of his accessible prose and engaging narrative as well as academic rigour.