Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare
2 total works
Jay Winter's powerful 1998 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 that reaction was, rather, the attempt to interpret the Great War within traditional frames of reference. Tensions arose inevitably. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a profound and moving book of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century.
This ambitious volume marks a huge step in our understanding of the social history of the Great War. Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert have gathered a group of scholars of London, Paris and Berlin, who collectively have drawn a coherent and original study of cities at war. The contributors explore notions of well-being in wartime cities - relating to the economy and the question of whether the state of the capitals contributed to victory or defeat. Expert contributors in fields stretching from history, demography, anthropology, economics, and sociology to the history of medicine, bring an interdisciplinary approach to the book, as well as representing the best of recent research in their own fields. Capital Cities at War, one of the few truly comparative works on the Great War, will transform studies of the conflict, and is likely to become a paradigm for research on other wars.