Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War [Paperback]

The unprecedented scope and intensity of the First World War has prompted an enormous body of retrospective scholarship. However, efforts to provide a coherent synthesis about the war's impact and significance have remained circumscribed, tending to focus either on the operational outlines of military strategy and tactics or on the cultural legacy of the conflict as transmitted bythe war's most articulate observers. This volume departs from traditional accounts on several scores: by exploring issues barely touched upon in previous works, by deviating from the widespread tendency to treat the experiences of front and homefront isolation, and by employing a thematic treatment that, by considering the construction of authority and identity between 1914 and 1918, illuminates the fundamental question of how individuals, whether in uniform or not, endured the war's intrusion into so many aspects of their public and private lives.

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1.A Latecomer in War: The Case of Italy
G. Procacci

Chapter 2.The Political Police, War, and Society in Russia, 1914-1917
F. Zuckerman

Chapter 3.All Quiet on the Homefront: Popular Entertainments, Censorship and Civilian Morale in Germany, 1914-1918
G. Stark

Chapter 4.Restoring Moral Order on the Home Front: Compulsory Savings Plans for Young Workers in Germany, 1916-1919
E. Rosenhaft

Chapter 5.French Catholics, Rumeurs infames and the Union Sacr?e, 1914-1918
J. F. McMillan

Chapter 6.Nationalism in Wartime: Critiquing the Conventional Wisdom
L. L. Farrar

Chapter 7.Love and Death: War and Gender in Britain, 1914-1918
S. Kingsley Kent

Chapter 8.Italian Widows of the First World War
F. Lagorio

Chapter 9.For the Fatherland and Jewish People: Jewish Women in Austria during World War I
M. Rozenblit