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  3. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare

In recent years the field of modern history has been enriched by the exploration of two parallel histories. These are the social and cultural history of armed conflict, and the impact of military events on social and cultural history.Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare presents the fruits of this growing area of research, reflecting both the colonization of military history by cultural historians and the reciprocal interest of military historians in social and cultural history, to the benefit of both. The series offers the latest scholarship in European and non-European events from the 1850s to the present day.

  • General Editors: Robert Gerwarth, University College Dublin, Jay Winter, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Advisory Editors: Heather Jones, University College London, Rana Mitter, University of Oxford, Michelle Moyd, Michigan State University, Martin Thomas, University of Exeter

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68 results in Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare

Page 1 of 4

The European Art Market and the First World War
  • Art, Capital, and the Decline of the Collecting Class, 1910–1925
  • Maddalena Alvi
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • The outbreak of the First World War shattered the established European art market. Amidst fighting, looting, confiscations, expropriation fears and political and economic upheaval, an integrated marketplace shaped by upper-class patrons broke down entirely. In its place, Maddalena Alvi argues, can be found the origins of a recognisably modern market of nationalised spheres driven by capitalist investment and speculation, yet open to wider social strata. Delving into auction records, memoirs, newspaper articles, financial and legal documents in six languages, Alvi explores these cultural and socio-economic developments across the British, French, and German markets, as well as trade spheres such as Russia and Scandinavia. 1914 marked the end of the European art market and cemented the connection between art and finance.

Streetscapes of War and Revolution
  • Prague, 1914–1920
  • Claire Morelon
  • Published online:
    30 May 2024
    Print publication:
    06 June 2024
  • Prague entered the First World War as the third city of the Habsburg empire, but emerged in 1918 as the capital of a brand new nation-state, Czechoslovakia. Claire Morelon explores what this transition looked, sounded and felt like at street level. Through deep archival research, she has carefully reconstructed the sensorial texture of the city, from the posters plastered on walls, to the shop windows' displays, the badges worn by passers-by, and the crowds gathering for protest or celebration. The result is both an atmospheric account of life amid war and regime change, and a fresh interpretation of imperial collapse from below, in which the experience of life on the Habsburg home-front is essential to understanding the post-Versailles world order that followed. Prague is the perfect case study for examining the transition from empire to nation-statehood, hinging on revolutionary dreams of fairer distribution and new forms of political participation.

Making Sense of the Great War
  • Crisis, Englishness, and Morale on the Western Front
  • Alex Mayhew
  • Published online:
    11 April 2024
    Print publication:
    18 April 2024
  • The First World War was an unprecedented crisis, with communities and societies enduring the unimaginable hardships of a prolonged conflict on an industrial scale. In Belgium and France, the terrible capacity of modern weaponry destroyed the natural world and exposed previously held truths about military morale and tactics as falsehoods. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers suffered some of the worst conditions that combatants have ever faced. How did they survive? What did it mean to them? How did they perceive these events? Whilst the trenches of the Western Front have come to symbolise the futility and hopelessness of the Great War, Alex Mayhew shows that English infantrymen rarely interpreted their experiences in this way. They sought to survive, navigated the crises that confronted them, and crafted meaningful narratives about their service. Making Sense of the Great War reveals the mechanisms that allowed them to do so.

Feeding the Mind
  • Humanitarianism and the Reconstruction of European Intellectual Life, 1919–1933
  • Tomás Irish
  • Published online:
    07 October 2023
    Print publication:
    05 October 2023
  • Feeding the Mind explores how European intellectual life was rebuilt after the cataclysm of the First World War. Learned communities were left in ruins by the conflict and its consequences; cultural and educational sites were destroyed, writers and artists were killed in battle, and tens of thousands of others were displaced. Against the backdrop of an unprecedented post-war humanitarian crisis which threatened millions with starvation and disease, many organisations chose to focus on assisting intellectuals and their institutions, giving them food, medicine and books in order to stabilise European democracies and build a peaceful international order. Drawing on examples from Austria to Russia and Belgium to Serbia, Feeding the Mind analyses the role of humanitarianism in post-conflict reconstruction and explores why ideas and intellectuals were deemed to be worth protecting at a time of widespread crisis. This issue was pertinent in the century that followed and remains so today.

Neutrality and Collaboration in South China
  • Macau during the Second World War
  • Helena F. S. Lopes
  • Published online:
    01 June 2023
    Print publication:
    15 June 2023
  • The South China enclave of Macau was the first and last European colonial settlement in East Asia and a territory at the crossroads of different empires. In this highly original study, Helena F. S. Lopes analyses the layers of collaboration that developed from neutrality in Macau during the Second World War. Exploring the intersections of local, regional and global dynamics, she unpacks the connections between a plurality of actors with competing and collaborative interests, including Chinese Nationalists, Communists and collaborators with Japan, Portuguese colonial authorities and British and Japanese representatives. Lopes argues that neutrality eased the movement of refugees of different nationalities who sought shelter in Macau during the war and that it helped to guarantee the maintenance of two remnants of European colonialism – Macau and Hong Kong. Drawing on extensive research from multilingual archival material from Asia, Europe, Australasia and America, this book brings to light the multiple global connections framing the experiences of neutrality and collaboration in the Portuguese-administered enclave of Macau.

When Men Fell from the Sky
  • Civilians and Downed Airmen in Second World War Europe
  • Claire Andrieu
  • Published online:
    21 March 2023
    Print publication:
    13 April 2023
  • Between 1940 and 1945, more than 100,000 airmen were shot down over Europe, a few thousand of whom survived and avoided being arrested. When Men Fell from the Sky is a comparative history of the treatment of these airmen by civilians in France, Germany and Britain. By studying the situation on the ground, Claire Andrieu shows how these encounters reshaped societies at a local level. She reveals how the fall of France in 1940 may have concealed an insurrection nipped in the bud, that the 'People's War' in Britain was not merely a myth, and that in Germany, the 'racial community of the people' had in fact become a social reality with Allied airmen increasingly subjected to lynching from 1943 onwards. By considering why the treatment of these airmen contrasted so strongly in these countries, Andrieu sheds new light on how civilians reacted when confronted with the war 'at home'.

Bodies of Work
  • The First World War and the Transnational Making of Rehabilitation
  • Julie M. Powell
  • Published online:
    20 October 2022
    Print publication:
    27 October 2022
  • Bodies of Work examines the transnational development of large-scale national systems, international organizations, technologies, and cultural material aimed at rehabilitating Allied ex-servicemen, disabled in the First World War. When nations mobilised in August 1914, it was thought that casualties would be minimal and the war would be quickly over. Little consideration was given to what ought to be done for those men whose bodies would forever bear the marks of war's destruction. Julie M. Powell charts how rehabilitation emerged as the best means to deal with millions of disabled ex-servicemen. She considers the ways in which rehabilitation was shaped by both durable and discrete influences, including social reformism, paternalist philanthropy, the movement for workers' rights, patriotism, class tensions, cultural ideas about manliness and disability, nationalism, and internationalism. Powell sheds light on the ways in which rehabilitation systems became sites for the contestation and maintenance of boundaries of belonging.

Between Community and Collaboration
  • 'Jewish Councils' in Western Europe under Nazi Occupation
  • Laurien Vastenhout
  • Published online:
    15 September 2022
    Print publication:
    22 September 2022
  • The first comprehensive, comparative study of the 'Jewish Councils' in the Netherlands, Belgium and France during Nazi rule. In the postwar period, there was extensive focus on these organisations' controversial role as facilitators of the Holocaust. They were seen as instruments of Nazi oppression, aiding the process of isolating and deporting the Jews they were ostensibly representing. As a result, they have chiefly been remembered as forms of collaboration. Using a wide range of sources including personal testimonies, diaries, administrative documents and trial records, Laurien Vastenhout demonstrates that the nature of the Nazi regime, and its outlook on these bodies, was far more complex. She sets the conduct of the Councils' leaders in their prewar and wartime social and situational contexts and provides a thorough understanding of their personal contacts with the Germans and clandestine organisations. Between Community and Collaboration reveals what German intentions with these organisations were during the course of the occupation, and allows for a deeper understanding of the different ways in which the Holocaust unfolded in each of these countries.

The Humanitarians
  • Child War Refugees and Australian Humanitarianism in a Transnational World, 1919–1975
  • Joy Damousi
  • Published online:
    28 July 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022
  • Spanning six decades from the formation of the Save the Children Fund in 1919 to humanitarian interventions during the Vietnam War, The Humanitarians maps the national and international humanitarian efforts undertaken by Australians on behalf of child refugees. In this longitudinal study, Joy Damousi explores the shifting forms of humanitarian activity related to war refugee children over the twentieth century, from child sponsorship, the establishment of orphanages, fundraising, to aid and development schemes and campaigns for inter-country adoption. Framed by conceptualisations of the history of emotions, and the limits and possibilities afforded by empathy and compassion, she considers the vital role of women and includes studies of unknown, but significant, women humanitarian workers and their often-traumatic experience of international humanitarian work. Through an examination of the intersection between racial politics and war refugees, Damousi advances our understanding of humanitarianism over the twentieth century as a deeply racialised and multi-layered practice.

The Age of the Gas Mask
  • How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War
  • Susan R. Grayzel
  • Published online:
    21 July 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022
  • The First World War introduced the widespread use of lethal chemical weapons. In its aftermath, the British government, like that of many states, had to prepare civilians to confront such weapons in a future war. Over the course of the interwar period, it developed individual anti-gas protection as a cornerstone of civil defence. Susan R. Grayzel traces the fascinating history of one object – the civilian gas mask – through the years 1915–1945 and, in so doing, reveals the reach of modern, total war and the limits of the state trying to safeguard civilian life in an extensive empire. Drawing on records from Britain's Colonial, Foreign, War and Home Offices and other archives alongside newspapers, journals, personal accounts and cultural sources, she connects the histories of the First and Second World Wars, combatants and civilians, men and women, metropole and colony, illuminating how new technologies of warfare shaped culture, politics, and society.

The Architecture of Confinement
  • Incarceration Camps of the Pacific War
  • Anoma Pieris, Lynne Horiuchi
  • Published online:
    17 February 2022
    Print publication:
    24 February 2022
  • In this global and comparative study of Pacific War incarceration environments we explore the arc of the Pacific Basin as an archipelagic network of militarized penal sites. Grounded in spatial, physical and material analyses focused on experiences of civilian internees, minority citizens, and enemy prisoners of war, the book offers an architectural and urban understanding of the unfolding history and aftermath of World War II in the Pacific. Examples are drawn from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan, and North America. The Architecture of Confinement highlights the contrasting physical facilities, urban formations and material character of various camps and the ways in which these uncover different interpretations of wartime sovereignty. The exclusion and material deprivation of selective populations within these camp environments extends the practices by which land, labor and capital are expropriated in settler-colonial societies; practices critical to identity formation and endemic to their legacies of liberal democracy.

The Broken Years
  • Russia's Disabled War Veterans, 1904–1921
  • Alexandre Sumpf
  • Published online:
    10 February 2022
    Print publication:
    17 February 2022
  • The Broken Years tells the forgotten story of Russia's disabled ex-servicemen through three wars and three revolutions: the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Civil War and the First World War. Using extensive archival material from national, regional and town archives, Alexandre Sumpf explores the treatment of these veterans by the state, their battle for legal status and their right to both collective and individual health care. He shows how the question of disabled veterans became bound up in broader political and social debates in the early 20th century and fostered healthcare and social welfare policy. The experience of these 1.14 million war veterans reconfigured notions of heroism, sacrifice and patriotism while the period of 1915-1919 was marked by extensive political activism by disabled veterans. Dr Sumpf illustrates how the Bolsheviks condemned disabled veterans as the symbol of the “imperialist war” and brutally negated their rights as part of the broader devaluation of the war experience in early Soviet Russia.

Survivors
  • Warsaw under Nazi Occupation
  • Jadwiga Biskupska
  • Published online:
    27 January 2022
    Print publication:
    17 February 2022
  • Survivors tells the harrowing story of life in Warsaw under Nazi occupation. As the epicenter of Polish resistance, Warsaw was subjected to violent persecution, the ghettoization of the city's Jewish community, the suppression of multiple uprisings, and an avalanche of restrictions that killed hundreds of thousands and destroyed countless lives. In this study into the unique brutality of wartime Warsaw, Jadwiga Biskupska traces how Nazi Germany set out to dismantle the Polish nation and state for long-term occupation by targeting its intelligentsia. She explores how myriad resistance projects emerged within the intelligentsia who were bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. In contrast to other studies on the Holocaust and Second World War, this book focuses on Polish behavior and explains who was in a position to contest the occupation or collaborate with it, while answering lingering questions and addressing controversies about the Nazi empire and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

Return to Vietnam
  • An Oral History of American and Australian Veterans' Journeys
  • Mia Martin Hobbs
  • Published online:
    01 October 2021
    Print publication:
    14 October 2021
  • Between 1981 and 2016, thousands of American and Australian Vietnam War veterans returned to Việt Nam. This comparative, transnational oral history offers the first historical study of these return journeys. It shows how veterans returned in search of resolution, or peace, manifesting in shifting nostalgic visions of 'Vietnam.' Different national war narratives shaped their returns: Australians followed the 'Anzac' pilgrimage tradition, whereas for Americans the return was an anti-war act. Veterans met former enemies, visited battlefields, mourned friends, found new relationships, and addressed enduring legacies of war. Many found their memories of war eased by witnessing Việt Nam at peace. Yet this peacetime reality also challenged veterans' wartime connection to Vietnamese spaces. The place they were nostalgic for was Vietnam, a space in war memory, not Việt Nam, the country. Veterans drew from wartime narratives to negotiate this displacement, performing nostalgic practices to reclaim their sense of belonging.

For King and Country
  • The British Monarchy and the First World War
  • Heather Jones
  • Published online:
    09 September 2021
    Print publication:
    23 September 2021
  • This is a ground-breaking history of the British monarchy in the First World War and of the social and cultural functions of monarchism in the British war effort. Heather Jones examines how the conflict changed British cultural attitudes to the monarchy, arguing that the conflict ultimately helped to consolidate the crown's sacralised status. She looks at how the monarchy engaged with war recruitment, bereavement, gender norms, as well as at its political and military powers and its relationship with Ireland and the empire. She considers the role that monarchism played in military culture and examines royal visits to the front, as well as the monarchy's role in home front morale and in interwar war commemoration. Her findings suggest that the rise of republicanism in wartime Britain has been overestimated and that war commemoration was central to the monarchy's revered interwar status up to the abdication crisis.

The Soviet Myth of World War II
  • Patriotic Memory and the Russian Question in the USSR
  • Jonathan Brunstedt
  • Published online:
    24 June 2021
    Print publication:
    15 July 2021
  • This pioneering monograph – a Foreign Affairs Best Book of the Year – asks how a socialist society, ostensibly committed to Marxist ideals of internationalism and global class struggle, reconciled itself to notions of patriotism, homeland, Russian ethnocentrism, and the glorification of war. Through the lens of the myth and remembrance of victory in World War II, arguably the central defining event of the Soviet epoch, the book shows that while state historical narratives reinforced a sense of Russian primacy and Russian dominated ethnic hierarchy, the story of the war enabled an alternative, supra-ethnic source of belonging, which subsumed Russian and non-Russian loyalties alike to the Soviet whole. The tension and competition between Russocentric and 'internationalist' conceptions of victory, which burst into the open during the late 1980s, reflected a wider struggle over the nature of patriotic identity in a multiethnic society that continues to reverberate in the post-Soviet space. The book sheds new light on long standing questions linked to the politics of remembrance and provides a crucial historical context for the patriotic revival of the war's memory in Russia today.

Revolution and Political Violence in Central Europe
  • The Deluge of 1919
  • Eliza Ablovatski
  • Published online:
    18 June 2021
    Print publication:
    01 July 2021
  • In the wake of the First World War and Russian Revolutions, Central Europeans in 1919 faced a world of possibilities, threats, and extreme contrasts. Dramatic events since the end of the world war seemed poised to transform the world, but the form of that transformation was unclear and violently contested in the streets and societies of Munich and Budapest in 1919. The political perceptions of contemporaries, framed by gender stereotypes and antisemitism, reveal the sense of living history, of 'fighting the world revolution', which was shared by residents of the two cities. In 1919, both revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries were focused on shaping the emerging new order according to their own worldview. By examining the narratives of these Central European revolutions in their transnational context, Eliza Ablovatski helps answer the question of why so many Germans and Hungarians chose to use their new political power for violence and repression.

Forgotten Wars
  • Central and Eastern Europe, 1912–1916
  • Włodzimierz Borodziej, Maciej Górny
  • Published online:
    15 March 2021
    Print publication:
    01 April 2021
  • Włodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny set out to salvage the historical memory of the experience of war in the lands between Riga and Skopje, beginning with the two Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 and ending with the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916. The First World War in the East and South-East of Europe was fought by people from a multitude of different nationalities, most of them dressed in the uniforms of three imperial armies: Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian. In this first volume of Forgotten Wars, the authors chart the origins and outbreak of the First World War, the early battles, and the war's impact on ordinary soldiers and civilians through to the end of the Romanian campaign in December 1916, by which point the Central Powers controlled all of the Balkans except for the Peloponnese. Combining military and social history, the authors make extensive use of eyewitness accounts to describe the traumatic experience that established a region stretching between the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Seas.

After the Deportation
  • Memory Battles in Postwar France
  • Philip Nord
  • Published online:
    16 November 2020
    Print publication:
    03 December 2020
  • A total of 160,000 people, a mix of résistants and Jews, were deported from France to camps in Central and Eastern Europe during the Second World War. In this compelling new study, Philip Nord addresses how the Deportation, as it came to be known, was remembered after the war and how Deportation memory from the very outset, became politicized against the backdrop of changing domestic and international contexts. He shows how the Deportation generated competing narratives – Jewish, Catholic, Communist, and Gaullist – and analyzes the stories told by and about deportees after the war and how these stories were given form in literature, art, film, monuments, and ceremonials.

The Great War in History
  • Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present
  • 2nd edition
  • Jay Winter, Antoine Prost
  • Published online:
    16 November 2020
    Print publication:
    03 December 2020
  • This revised and updated edition of The Great War in History provides the first survey of historical interpretations of the Great War from 1914 to 2020. It demonstrates how the history of the Great War has now gone global, and how the internet revolution has affected the way we understand the conflict. Jay Winter and Antoine Prost assess not only diplomatic and military studies but also the social and cultural interpretations of the war across academic and popular history, family history, and public history, including at museums, on the stage, on screen, in art, and at sites of memory. They provide a fascinating case study of the practice of history and the first survey of the ways in which the Centenary deepened and deflected both public and professional interpretations of the war. This will be essential reading for scholars and students in history, war studies, European history and international relations.

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