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Traces of the Great War is a remarkable, original collection of 18 thought provoking graphic short stories bridging the past and present. Internationally-acclaimed comic book artists, graphic novelists and writers, all of them explore the continued relevance and resonance of the First World War and its legacy in our lives today, creating emotion and reflexions.
At the end of the First World War, the landscape of the Western Front in Flanders had been transformed into a wasteland. After the war, the population returned, faced with the enormous challenge of rebuilding the region and making it inhabitable again. All traces of the war were wiped out, leaving only what was left in the ground - what is now the archaeological soil archive. Throughout the Westhoek, 30 centimetres beneath the ground and invisible to the naked eye, the archaeological remains of the war lie dormant. This book, the first of its kind, is a compendium of the findings of ten years of First World War archaeology in Belgium. Clearly written, it looks at many spectacular finds resulting from excavations at more than 150 sites in the front-line region, and also delves into the unexpected role of the landscape as the last witness of the war. These material remains from military camps, hospitals and trenches illustrate day-to-day life at the front, while also looking at the personal fates of several of the fallen soldiers - and many horses. The text is supported by a wealth of visual data, including photographs of excavated artefacts, maps, aerial photographs and other archive material.
A chronicle of the American experience during World War I and the unexpected changes that rocked the country in its immediate aftermath—the Red Scare, race riots, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition. The Great War’s bitter outcome left the experience largely overlooked and forgotten in American history. This timely book is a reexamination of America’s first global experience as we commemorate World War I's centennial. The U.S. had steered clear of the European conflagration known as the Great War for more than two years, but President Woodrow Wilson reluctantly led the divided country into the conflict with the goal of making the world “safe for democracy.” The country assumed a global role for the first time and attempted to build the foundations for world peace, only to witness the experience go badly awry and it retreated into isolationism. Though overshadowed by the tens of millions of deaths and catastrophic destruction of World War II, the Great War was the most important war of the twentieth century. It was the first continent-wide conflagration in a century, and it drew much of the world into its fire. By the end of it, four empires and their royal houses had fallen, communism was unleashed, the map of the Middle East was redrawn, and the United States emerged as a global power – only to withdraw from the world’s stage. The Great War is often overlooked, especially compared to World War II, which is considered the “last good war.” The United States was disillusioned with what it achieved in the earlier war and withdrew into itself. Americans have tried to forget about it ever since. The Great War in America presents an opportunity to reexamine the country’s role on the global stage and the tremendous political and social changes that overtook the nation because of the war.
In this riveting and suspenseful New York Times best-selling book, Adam Hochschild brings WWI to life as never before... World War I was supposed to be the “war to end all wars.” Over four long years, nations around the globe were sucked into the tempest, and millions of men died on the battlefields. To this day, the war stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. To End All Wars focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Many of these dissenters were thrown in jail for their opposition to the war, from a future Nobel Prize winner to an editor behind bars who distributed a clandestine newspaper on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. Hochschild forces us to confront the big questions: Why did so many nations get so swept up in the violence? Why couldn’t cooler heads prevail? And can we ever avoid repeating history?
In the popular imagination, World War I stands for the horror of all wars. The unprecedented scale of the war and the mechanized weaponry it introduced to battle brought an abrupt end to the romantic idea that soldiers were somehow knights in shining armor who always vanquished their foes and saved the day. Yet the concept of chivalry still played a crucial role in how soldiers saw themselves in the conflict. Here for the first time, Allen J. Frantzen traces these chivalric ideals from the Great War back to their origins in the Middle Ages and shows how they resulted in highly influential models of behavior for men in combat. Drawing on a wide selection of literature and images from the medieval period, along with photographs, memorials, postcards, war posters, and film from both sides of the front, Frantzen shows how such media shaped a chivalric ideal of male sacrifice based on the Passion of Jesus Christ. He demonstrates, for instance, how the wounded body of Christ became the inspiration for heroic male suffering in battle. For some men, the Crucifixion inspired a culture of revenge, one in which Christ's bleeding wounds were venerated as badges of valor and honor. For others, Christ's sacrifice inspired action more in line with his teachings—a daring stay of hands or reason not to visit death upon one's enemies. Lavishly illustrated and eloquently written, Bloody Good will be must reading for anyone interested in World War I and the influence of Christian ideas on modern life.
This volume challenges the traditional view that the First World War represents a pivotal turning point in the long history of monarchy, suggesting the picture is significantly more complex. Using a comparative approach, it explores the diverse roles played by monarchs during the Great War, and how these met the expectations of the monarchic institution in different states at a time of such crisis. Its contributors not only explore less familiar narratives, including the experiences of monarchs in Belgium and Italy, as well as the Austro-Hungarian, Japanese and Ottoman Empires, but also cast fresh light on more familiar accounts. In doing so, this book moves away from the conventional view that monarchy showed itself irrelevant in the Great War, by drawing on new approaches to diplomatic and international history - ones informed by cultural contextualization for instance - while grounding the research behind each chapter in a wide range of contemporary sources The chapters provide an innovative revisiting of the actual role of monarchy at this crucial period in European (indeed, global) history, and are framed by a substantial introductory chapter where the key factors explaining the survival or collapse of dynasties, and of the individuals occupying these thrones, are considered in a wide-ranging set of reflections that highlight the extent of common experiences as well as the differences.
Before the First World War, the British Admiralty conceived a plan to win rapid victory in the event of war with Germany-economic warfare on an unprecedented scale.This secret strategy called for the state to exploit Britain's effective monopolies in banking, communications, and shipping-the essential infrastructure underpinning global trade-to create a controlled implosion of the world economic system. In this revisionist account, Nicholas Lambert shows in lively detail how naval planners persuaded the British political leadership that systematic disruption of the global economy could bring about German military paralysis. After the outbreak of hostilities, the government shied away from full implementation upon realizing the extent of likely collateral damage-political, social, economic, and diplomatic-to both Britain and neutral countries. Woodrow Wilson in particular bristled at British restrictions on trade. A new, less disruptive approach to economic coercion was hastily improvised. The result was the blockade, ostensibly intended to starve Germany. It proved largely ineffective because of the massive political influence of economic interests on national ambitions and the continued interdependencies of all countries upon the smooth functioning of the global trading system. Lambert's interpretation entirely overturns the conventional understanding of British strategy in the early part of the First World War and underscores the importance in any analysis of strategic policy of understanding Clausewitz's "political conditions of war."
This book is an innovative comparative history of how German and British soldiers endured the horror of the First World War. Unlike existing literature, which emphasises the strength of societies or military institutions, this study argues that at the heart of armies' robustness lay natural human resilience. Drawing widely on contemporary letters and diaries of British and German soldiers, psychiatric reports and official documentation, and interpreting these sources with modern psychological research, this unique account provides fresh insights into the soldiers' fears, motivations and coping mechanisms. It explains why the British outlasted their opponents by examining and comparing the motives for fighting, the effectiveness with which armies and societies supported men and the combatants' morale throughout the conflict on both sides. Finally it challenges the consensus on the war's end, arguing that not a 'covert strike' but rather an 'ordered surrender' led by junior officers brought about Germany's defeat in 1918.
The English Civil War has become a frequent point of reference in contemporary British political debate. A bitter and bloody series of conflicts, it shook the very foundations of seventeenth-century Britain. This book is the first attempt to portray the visual legacy of this period, as passed down, revisited, and periodically reworked over two and a half centuries of subsequent English history. Highly regarded art historian Stephen Bann deftly interprets the mass of visual evidence accessible today, from ornate tombs and statues to surviving sites of vandalism and iconoclasm, public signage, and historical paintings of human subjects, events, and places. Through these important scenes and sometimes barely perceptible traces, Bann shows how the British view of the War has been influenced and transformed by visual imagery.
World War I was the first large-scale industrialized military conflict, and it led to the concept of total war. The essays in this volume analyze the experience of the war in light of this concept's implications, in particular the erosion of distinctions between the military and civilian spheres.