Oxford In The Great War

After such conflicts as World War II, Vietnam, and now the Persian Gulf, the First World War seems a distant, almost ancient event. It conjures up images of trenches, horse-drawn wagons, and old-fashioned wide-brimmed helmets--a conflict closer to the Civil War than to our own time. It hardly seems an American war at all, considering we fought for scarcely over a year in a primarily European struggle. But, as Ronald Schaffer recounts in this fascinating new book, the Great War wrought a dramatic revolution in America, wrenching a diverse, unregulated, nineteenth-century society into the modern age. Ranging from the Oval Office to corporate boardroom, from the farmyard to the battlefield, America in the Great War details a nation reshaped by the demands of total war. Schaffer shows how the Wilson Administration used persuasion, manipulation, direct control, and the cooperation of private industries and organizations to mobilize a freewheeling, individualist country. The result was a war-welfare state, imposing the federal government on almost every aspect of American life. He describes how it spread propaganda, enforced censorship, and stifled dissent. Political radicals, religious pacifists, German-Americans, even average people who voiced honest doubts about the war suffered arrest and imprisonment. The government extended its control over most of the nation's economic life through a series of new agencies--largely filled with managers from private business, who used their new positions to eliminate competition and secure other personal and corporate gains. Schaffer also details the efforts of scholars, scientists, workers, women, African- Americans, and of social, medical, and moral reformers, to use the war to advance their own agendas even as they contributed to the drive for victory. And not the least important is his account of how soldiers reacted to the reality of war--both at the front lines and at the rear--revealing what brought the doughboys to the battlefield, and how they went through not only horror and disillusionment but felt a fervent patriotism as well. Some of the upheavals Schaffer describes were fleeting--as seen in the thousands of women who had to leave their wartime jobs when the boys came home--but others meant permanent change and set precedents for such future programs as the New Deal. By showing how American life would never be the same again after the Armistice, America in the Great War lays a new foundation for understanding both the First World War and twentieth-century America.

Love and Death in the Great War merges the stories of several American families with analysis of wartime popular culture. It argues that family, in lived experience and as symbolic motivator, gave the war meaning, recovering the conflict's personal dimensions. But that narrative had undergone transformative challenges by war's end.

Originally published: 1998. New edition published in hardcover in 2014.

A new edition of Paul Fussell's literate, literary, and illuminating account of the Great War, now a classic text of literary and cultural criticism.

A new text for courses in 20th century European history, this book is organised chronologically around major themes that emphasise not only political & diplomatic history, but also heavily integrate social & cultural history.

The last great war of antiquity was fought on an unprecedented scale along the full length of the Persian-Roman frontier. James Howard-Johnston pieces together the fragmentary evidence of this period to form, for the first time, a coherent story of the dramatic events, key players, and vast lands over which the conflict spread.

There is no single volume that shines a light on Asia's collective involvement in the First World War, and the impact that war had on its societies. Moreover, no volume in any language explores the experiences Asian countries shared as they became embroiled, with divergent results, in the war and its repercussions. Asia and the Great War moves beyond the national or even international level by presenting a 'shared' history from non-national and transnational perspectives. Asian involvements make the Great War not only a true 'world' war but also a 'great' war. The war generated forces that would transform Asia both internally and externally. Asian involvement in the First World War is a unique chapter in both Asian and world history, with Asian participation transforming the meaning and implications of the broader conflict. Asia and the Great War also takes steps to recover memories of the war and re-evaluate the war in its Asian contexts. Asia's part in the war and the part the war played in the collective development of Asia represent the first steps of the long journey to full national independence and international recognition. This volume aims to bring the Great War more fully into Asian history and the people of Asia into the international history of the war, in the hope that the shared history could lay the groundwork for a shared future.

Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on publication in 1970. Today, Fussell's landmark study remains as original and gripping as ever: a literate, literary, and unapologetic account of the Great War, the war that changed a generation, ushered in the modern era, and revolutionized how we see the world. This brilliant work illuminates the trauma and tragedy of modern warfare in fresh, revelatory ways. Exploring the work of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, Fussell supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for those writers who--with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning--most effectively memorialized World War I as an historical experience. Dispensing with literary theory and elevated rhetoric, Fussell grounds literary texts in the mud and trenches of World War I and shows how these poems, diaries, novels, and letters reflected the massive changes--in every area, including language itself--brought about by the cataclysm of the Great War. For generations of readers, this work has represented and embodied a model of accessible scholarship, huge ambition, hard-minded research, and haunting detail. Restored and updated, this new edition includes an introduction by historian Jay Winter that takes into account the legacy and literary career of Paul Fussell, who died in May 2012.