The Cambridge history of the First World War

This massive study has been produced under the editorship of Professor Jay Winter of Yale University and the Editorial Committee of the International Research Centre of the Historial de la Grande Guerre, Péronne, Somme. It attempts a new interpretation of the First World War, based on its transnational and global impact. Some 43 contributions by a ‘transnational’ group of scholars provide a detailed and convincing account of the war, going well beyond more orthodox treatments which emphasize the strategy and tactics involved. In the first volume, Global war, Winter and his colleagues examine, for example, the spread of the conflict to distant continents, together with a discussion of the law of war, atrocities and genocide. Volume II covers the changing nature of the state as the war progressed, the role of armed forces, the sinews of war and the search for peace. Volume III analyses the war's impact on civil society in all its various guises during the conflict; hence we are offered scholarly treatment of, for example, private life, gender and cultural life. This bald summary does scant justice to a magisterial work, an essential resource for those —at schools and universities—who teach the history of the First World War and its impact on domestic and global developments. Of particular interest is the fine reproduction of photos and paintings and the annotated and detailed bibliographies attached to each volume. Winter and his colleagues deserve to be congratulated for providing both the scholar and the interested layperson with an exemplary treatment of an event, the significance of which still echoes down the years.     

The Cambridge history of the Second World War

Following on from earlier three‐volume histories of the Cold War and the First World War, Cambridge University Press completes a trilogy with this detailed treatment of the Second World War. Multi‐authored in the Cambridge tradition, the individual chapters cover a wide range of events and topics and the 81 contributors, mainly but not exclusively from the United Kingdom and the United States, include both scholars who have already established a reputation in the subject as well as those who are in the process of doing so. Perhaps the greatest strength of the volumes is the treatment given to what may be loosely referred to as the Pacific War. No one who uses them properly is going to have any doubts about the nature and importance of the struggle between Japan and its opponents between 1937 and 1945, and it is particularly encouraging to note the use of Chinese and Japanese sources by the authors, when so many English‐language books on the subject cite none. The principal weakness of the enterprise is its division into an unnecessarily complicated series of topics, which is not always adhered to by the authors and which often compels the unfortunate reader to skip backwards and forwards, not only within but between volumes. Despite this flaw, however, this remains an important contribution to the history of the Second World War and will need to be consulted by any serious student of the subject for many years to come.     

Digging in the Dark: The Underground War on the Western Front in World War I

Throughout the First World War, with the trenches largely static, the combatants tried to break the deadlock by tunnelling under one another’s trenches. The Tunnelling Companies of the British Royal Engineers were engaged in a bitter struggle against German Pioneers that left both sides with heavy casualties. A project to determine the location of one particular act of heroism in that underground war has resulted in the erection of a monument to the Tunnellers at Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée in northern France.     

Excavation and Study of Skeletal Remains from a World War I Mass Grave

This study presents the excavation and multidisciplinary analysis of seven skeletons recovered in a World War I Mass Grave on the mountains of the Veneto Region, Italy. While it is not a rare phenomenon to these mountainous areas involved in the First Conflict, it is exceptional, on these mountains, to find a mass grave with soldiers in primary burials. Stratigraphic excavation was the mean used for recovery, along with 3D laser scanning documentation. Every skeleton but one was found complete and in anatomical connection. Four soldiers lay in the prone position; two subjects were lying on their side. Identification of the nationality was performed for two of the subjects, who both of whom had personal effects such as a badge for military vaccinations and religious medals. What remained of their uniforms gave clues about their Italian nationality. The entomological analysis conducted on fly puparia discovered close to the bones revealed that the bodies had not been buried immediately. The skeletons were biologically profiled by sex, age, height and ancestry. An accurate study of pathology and stress markers was carried on, as well as on skeletal trauma in order to establish the type of trauma and ammunition involved. The remains belonged altogether to seven Italian male soldiers ages between 18 and 35. Various kinds of stress markers revealed occupational (enthesopathies) and metabolic stress: several signs of cribra cranii and of cribra orbitalia were registered. The study of the injuries revealed a surprising variety of types of lesions, mostly lethal: a few subjects were struck by a shrapnel grenade; one soldier was killed by a grenade explosion. Two of the soldiers were probably executed, instead: this conclusion reached on the basis of gunshot holes (9 mm) in their skulls, and by the position of the injuries. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Fixing History: Narratives of World War I in France

For nearly a century, the French have entertained an unshakable conviction that their bility to recognize themselves—to know and transmit the essence of Frenchness—depended on the teaching of the history of France. In effect, history was a discourse on France, and the teaching of history—" la pédagogie centrale du citoyen "—the means by which children were constituted as heirs and carriers of a common collective memory that made them not only citizens, but family. In this essay, I examine the rhetorical and conceptual effects on history writing that emerge out of this preoccupation with the elaboration of a continuous, coherent national identity.
Focusing on schoolbooks, I begin by looking at the dominant, nearly hegemonic model of French history created by Ernest Lavisse in the 1890s—a model informed by the dream of a unified, unitary French nation, embodied in and articulated through the history of France—and at the disruption of this paradigm in the aftermath of the Great War. I then consider a text written in the 1990s specifically to repudiate the kind of nationalist narratives that prevailed for most of this century—a new supranational history of Europe. I argue that, in their different experiments with fixing history, both Lavisse and the contemporary textbook authors did not so much repair a deficient history as produce a historical fixation, creating mythicized histories that are complete, closed, predictable, and at bottom ahistorical. Finally, I turn to a recent World War I novel, A Very Long Engagement by SébastienJaprisot, in order to suggest ways in which the narrative strategies of a fiction writer may be useful to historians in thinking about a different kind of historical project.