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In 1935, a group of senior military and civilian officials came together in Paris to discuss the growing unrest among indigenous veterans in North Africa. Under the stewardship of the Algerian-born...

Towards and into the Second World War, New Zealand society exhibited a habit of relating contemporary circumstances to aspects of the Great War. Indicating diverging interwar assessments of 1914–1918, this recurring commentary broadly divided over whether the last war should be understood as an exemplary model, a warning against war or as a lesson for a new war effort to learn from. This article outlines New Zealand’s major interwar interpretations, investigates their relation to outlooks on the Second World War and offers some preliminary thoughts on how the conceptual shifts of this period have informed more recent comprehensions of 1914–1918.

The African campaigns of First World War should be thought of as more than ‘sideshows.’ Rather, historians should research local, ordinary African experiences of the war in order to better understand African perspectives on the war, and also to generate narratives that can be integrated into more inclusive histories of the global war. This essay suggests several different vantage points which could prove generative for a new historiography of the war in Africa.

Spencer Jones offers a useful presentation of the British Army’s struggles with the theoretical and technical dynamics of modern war as revealed by the Boer War and, to a much lesser extent, the Ru...

Australian readers consumed with great interest the fruits of the war books boom that began in Europe in the late 1920s. But it was not until the early 1930s that returned soldiers in Australia began to consider the war in memoir and fiction. This article examines the nature of Australian writing about the Great War during the 1930s and seeks to explain why the conflict produced little work of enduring interest or literary merit. It argues that literary representations of the war, which gave emphasis to its tragic and traumatic elements, were overwhelmed by those remembering a war that challenged but did not defeat its Australian participants. The article traces the reason for the triumph of what can be called ‘middlebrow’ representations of the Great War to the nationalist boon delivered by the experience of war to a colonial settler society of uncertain status. In prosecuting this argument, the article challenges the transnational emphasis of contemporary scholarship about literary modernism and seeks t...

Claudia Siebrecht’s book is part of the new body of First World War scholarship that focuses on women’s centrality in the processes of making sense of the war and the state’s claims about it. These...

Forced labour was not a phenomenon limited to the Second World War. Already in the First World War, German labour policy in occupied Poland and Lithuania was increasingly marked by coercion. It is little known in scholarship that the militarily administered territory of the Baltic (Ober Ost), especially, had developed into a laboratory for forced labour and total war. This article examines the conditions, forms and consequences of forced labour and recruitment in occupied Poland and Lithuania between 1914 and 1918. It will contribute towards explaining the extent to which the German labour policy of 1914–1918 served as a blueprint for the Nazi forced labour system during the Second World War.

During the First World War the Netherlands remained neutral. The Dutch did not fight, kill, die or in any way suffer to the extent the belligerents did. The chief problems and questions raised by the First World War accordingly had a comparatively limited impact on Dutch society. The question remains, however, to what extent a neutral country like the Netherlands did experience the First World War. That question is addressed in this article by looking at Dutch public debate on the war during the period 1914–1919. Despite political and military neutrality the war and the specific Dutch position and identity in relation to this war and its possible outcomes were passionately discussed in public debate. The ways in which this debate developed demonstrate how the Great War, when defined as a cultural war, heavily influenced nations that were not militarily involved. Moreover, this approach shows us how neutrality was (re-)defined in this period, both by neutral countries themselves and by the belligerent powe...

This article examines the history of the Great War in New York City and the means by which it has been remembered and forgotten through the presence and absence of war memorials. New York City played a unique role in the history of the Great War, contributing to the war effort even before the declaration of war by the United States in 1917. The wartime experiences in the city were accompanied by political and racial tensions as fears of foreign influences undermining the state were ever-present. In a city which had witnessed large-scale immigration over the preceding century, fears of unrest or unpatriotic and un-American behaviour preoccupied both the city and the federal government. Nevertheless, the wartime contribution of the city’s foreign-born residents was substantial as large numbers registered for military service. As a means of reaffirming the principles of patriotism and an ‘American’ identity for the city, after the Armistice the official bodies and veterans groups worked to develop a singular expression or ‘spirit’ for the local war memorials. As the schemes for a central war memorial for the city floundered, the local memorials served as a means for residents to adopt and adapt this hegemonic expression of ‘American’ identity and form specific memories of the war for each community.

Sean McMeekin's ambitious book challenges traditional explanations for the origins of the First World War, seeking to refocus the debate away from Germany and towards Russia. He argues passionately...

This book makes a fine contribution to an ever-growing corpus of literature on gender and war, histories of masculinity and more specifically on the lived experiences of British men in the First Wo...

Over the two past decades, a new approach to the Great War has progressively developed. Shifting their focus of inquiry to the social and the cultural, away from the economic and the political, the historians of the Great War are particularly attached to the study of the legacy of the war on the cultural and social structures of European societies. The study of war's memory has therefore been placed at the heart of historical research in most of the countries that took part in the war. In France, the mnemonic turn of the cultural historiography of the Great War is thus seen in several works which, through the various forms of commemoration such as the war memorials or the cult of the Unknown Soldier, examine the relationship between memory and identity as well as between remembrance and mourning at both the public and individual levels. This article about Armistice Day in France explores the difficulties of the transmission of memory in the aftermath of war. It questions the persistence and the abandonmen...

This article discusses the widening of the First World War from a European war to a global war and what that meant for the participants. Today's politicians, who talk (albeit tautologically) of an ‘increasingly globalized world’, forget how already ‘globalized’ the world seemed in 1914, especially if you happened to live in London. The fact that the First World War was a global war was itself the product of a global order, shaped by the European great powers and held together by an embryonic economic system. The title ‘the world war’ was a statement about its importance, not a statement about its geographical scale. And yet the French and British official histories, unlike the German, did not use ‘world war’ in their titles, any more than they had used the phrase during the war itself. They preferred the title ‘the Great War’, and in English the war only became widely known as the First World War after 1945, in other words after there had been a Second World War. The article explores the implications of t...

David R. Woodward, Emeritus Professor of History at Marshall, has written a comprehensive and superb study of the American Army, from its slow and difficult transition as a constabulary force used ...

There are very few historical works written in English that foreground the relevance of neutrality and the First World War as well as those offered by Scandinavian scholars. The work of Nils Orvik ...

The origins of the First World War, by William Mulligan, Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010, viii + 256 pp. + maps, illustrations, US$70.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-521-88633-8;...

On the battlefield of memory: The First World War and American remembrance, 1919–1941, by Steven Trout, Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2010, Xxxiii + 304 pp., $44.95 (hardback), ISBN 978-...

Captivity, forced labour and forced migration in Europe during the First World War, edited by Matthew Stibbe, London and New York, Routledge, 2009, viii + 224 pp., US$125.00 (hardback), ISBN 978041...

Untold war: new perspectives in First World War Studies, edited by Heather Jones, Jennifer O'Brien and Christoph Schmidt-Supprian, Lieden and Boston, Brill, 2008, xx + 449 pp. + illustrations, €138...

Jessica Meyer's edited volume offers a portrait of the First World War and its evolution in popular culture, through a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives. The book is divided into four parts...