Jay Winter

Antoine Prost

A vast amount of literature has emerged on the First World War and its repercussions since the Armistice. Two leading historians therefore present this comparative analysis of the ways in which the history has been written and interpreted. Identifying three generations of historians, literary scholars, film directors and writers who have commented upon the war, they assess social and cultural interpretations as well as diplomatic and military studies, seen primarily through the eyes of French, German and British writers.

Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present

The Great War in History

Following the death of her father, a twelve-year-old girl takes a summer job instead of going to camp with a friend as planned.

The Great War in European Cultural History

Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning

Long before Rwanda and Bosnia and the Holocaust, the first genocide of the twentieth century occurred in Turkish Armenia in 1915. The essays in this collection examine how Americans learned of this catastrophe and tried to help its victims. Knowledge and compassion, however, were not enough to stop the killings, and a terrible precedent was born in 1915. The Armenian genocide has haunted the U.S. and other Western countries throughout the twentieth century.

America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915

Michael Teitelbaum

DIV The world's population has grown by five billion people over the past century, an astounding 300 percent increase. Yet it is actually the decline in family size and population growth that is the issue attracting greatest concern in many countries. This eye-opening book looks at demographic trends in Europe, North America, and Asia—areas that now have low fertility rates—and argues that there is an essential yet often neglected political dimension to a full assessment of these trends. Political decisions that promote or discourage marriage and childbearing, facilitate or discourage contraception and abortion, and stimulate or restrain immigration all have played significant roles in recent trends. /div

Population, Fear, and Uncertainty

The Global Spread of Fertility Decline

Jean-Louis Robert

This 2007 book is a comparative social and economic history of the capitals of Britain, France and Germany in 1914-18.

Paris, London, Berlin 1914-1919

Capital Cities at War: Volume 2, A Cultural History

div This incisive study explores population movements and declining fertility in China, India, Japan, and North America in the 21st century, suggesting that politics, in addition to cultural and economic concerns, must be included as a prime determining factor in these powerful global trends. /DIV

Jay Winter's powerful and substantial new study of the "collective remembrance" of the Great War offers a major reassessment of one of the critical episodes in the cultural history of the twentieth century. Using a wide variety of literary, artistic and architectural evidence, Dr. Winter looks anew at the ways, many of them highly traditional, in which communities endeavored to find collective solace after the carnage of the First World War. The result is a profound and moving book, of seminal importance for the attempt to understand the course of European history during the first half of the twentieth century.

Nigel Penn

Louise Edwards

The Cambridge World History of Violence

Through the life of one extraordinary man, this biography reveals what the term human rights meant to the men and women who endured two world wars, and how this major political and intellectual movement ultimately inspired and enshrined the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. René Cassin was a man of his generation, committed to moving from war to peace through international law, and whose work won him the Nobel Peace Prize in 1968. His life crossed all the major events of the first seventy years of the twentieth century, and illustrates the hopes, aspirations, failures and achievements of an entire generation. It shows how today's human rights regimes emerged from the First World War as a pacifist response to that catastrophe and how, after 1945, human rights became a way to go beyond the dangers of absolute state sovereignty, helping to create today's European project.

From the Great War to the Universal Declaration

René Cassin and Human Rights

Il lutto e la memoria. La grande guerra nella storia culturale europea

Presents a new interpretation of the history of human rights through the biography of a key player in the movement.

Ruth Ginio

Efrat Ben-Ze’ev

Silence lies between forgetting and remembering. This book explores how different societies have constructed silences to enable men and women to survive and make sense of the catastrophic consequences of armed conflict. Using a range of disciplinary approaches, it examines the silences that have followed violence in twentieth-century Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. These essays show that silence is a powerful language of remembrance and commemoration and a cultural practice with its own rules. This broad-ranging book discloses the universality of silence in the ways we think about war through examples ranging from the Spanish Civil War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Armenian Genocide and South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Bringing together scholarship on varied practices in different cultures, this book breaks new ground in the vast literature on memory, and opens up new avenues of reflection and research on the lingering aftermath of war.

A Social History of Silence in the Twentieth Century

Shadows of War

A definitive, transnational account of the military, political and cultural history of the First World War.

The Cambridge History of the First World War. 3 Volume Hardback Set

In late 2007 and early 2008, world-renowned historians gathered in Kansas City for a series of public forums on World War I. Each of the five events focused on a particular topic and featured spirited dialogue between its prominent participants. In spontaneous exchanges, the eminent scholars probed each other’s arguments, learned from each other, and provided insights not just into history but also into the way scholars think about their subject alongside and at times in conflict with their colleagues. Representing a fourth generation of writers on the Great War and a transnational rather than an international approach, prominent historians Niall Ferguson and Paul Kennedy, Holger Afflerbach and Gary Sheffield, John Horne and Len Smith, John Milton Cooper and Margaret MacMillan, and Jay Winter and Robert Wohl brought to the proceedings an exciting clash of ideas. The forums addressed topics about the Great War that have long fascinated both scholars and the educated public: the origins of the war and the question of who was responsible for the escalation of the July Crisis; the nature of generalship and military command, seen here from the perspectives of a German and a British scholar; the private soldiers’ experiences of combat, revealing their strategies of survival and negotiation; the peace-making process and the overwhelming pressures under which statesmen worked; and the long-term cultural consequences of the war—showing that the Great War was “great” not merely because of its magnitude but also because of its revolutionary effects. These topics continue to reverberate, and in addition to shedding new light on the subjects, these forums constitute a glimpse at how historical writing happens. American society did not suffer the consequences of the Great War that virtually all European countries knew—a lack of perspective that the National World War I Museum seeks to correct. This book celebrates that effort, helping readers feel the excitement and the moral seriousness of historical scholarship in this field and drawing more Americans into considering how their own history is part of this story.

Ninety Years On

The Legacy of the Great War

Voici l’ouvrage de référence sur la Première Guerre mondiale. Sous la direction de Jay Winter, professeur à l’université de Yale, avec le Centre international de recherche de l’Historial de la Grande Guerre et coordonné par Annette Becker, il réunit les plus grands spécialistes internationaux du confl it. Il paraît simultanément chez Fayard et dans la très prestigieuse collection « Cambridge History », au Royaume-Uni. Véritable oeuvre transnationale, et manifeste d’une génération d’historiens, ce livre englobe tous les espaces et les temps de la guerre qui, si elle est née en Europe, devient très vite mondiale par le jeu des Empires coloniaux des grandes puissances. Après le volume 1, Combats, qui déclinait les campagnes sur tous les fronts militaires et s’arrêtait sur les atrocités particulières dont le génocide dans l’Empire ottoman, et le volume 2, États, qui entrait dans la logique de la guerre totale telle que menée par tous ceux qui participent à l’effort de guerre et le fi nancent, dans les usines, les villes et les campagnes, le volume 3, Sociétés, montre que la guerre a bouleversé les sociétés encore largement traditionnelles. Les femmes, les enfants, les minorités, les réfugiés, sont pris dans le mouvement d’un confl it qui innove sur tous les terrains : nouvelles blessures, physiques et mentales, nouveaux rapports sociaux, nouvelles formes d’expression culturelle de la guerre et du deuil. À l’heure du centenaire, ce livre, appelé à faire date, porte la plume d’une mémoire encore à vif, en deuil de près de 10 millions de combattants et de centaines de milliers de civils. Il soulève le voile des illusions perdues pour retrouver la guerre, telle qu’elle fut. Jay Winter est professeur d’histoire à l’université de Yale aux États-Unis, auteur de nombreux ouvrages, notamment, avec Antoine Prost, de Penser la Grande Guerre (Seuil, 2004) et, plus récemment, d’une biographie de René Cassin (Fayard, 2011). Annette Becker, coordinatrice de l’ouvrage, est professeur d’histoire à l’université de Paris Ouest-Nanterre La Défense et membre senior de l’Institut universitaire de France. Spécialiste des deux guerres mondiales, elle est notamment l’auteur de Apollinaire, une biographie de guerre (Tallandier, 2009) et des Cicatrices rouges, 1914-1918, France et Belgique occupées (Fayard, 2010).

Sociétés

La Première Guerre mondiale -

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of the First World War offers a history of the war from a predominantly political angle and concerns itself with the story of the state. It explores the multifaceted history of state power and highlights the ways in which different political systems responded to, and were deformed by, the near-unbearable pressures of war. Every state involved faced issues of military-civilian relations, parliamentary reviews of military policy, and the growth of war economies; and yet their particular form and significance varied in every national case. Written by a global team of historical experts, this volume sets new standards in the political history of the waging of war in an authoritative new narrative which addresses problems of logistics, morale, innovation in tactics and weapons systems, the use and abuse of science; all of which were ubiquitous during the conflict.

The Cambridge History of the First World War: Volume 2, The State

What we know of war is always mediated knowledge and feeling. We need lenses to filter out some of its blinding, terrifying light. These lenses are not fixed; they change over time, and Jay Winter's panoramic history of war and memory offers an unprecedented study of transformations in our imaginings of war, from 1914 to the present. He reveals the ways in which different creative arts have framed our meditations on war, from painting and sculpture to photography, film and poetry, and ultimately to silence, as a language of memory in its own right. He shows how these highly mediated images of war, in turn, circulate through language to constitute our 'cultural memory' of war. This is a major contribution to our understanding of the diverse ways in which men and women have wrestled with the intractable task of conveying what twentieth-century wars meant to them and mean to us.

Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present

War beyond Words

Since the Armistice, a vast literature has been produced on the First World War and its repercussions. In this 2005 book, two leading historians from the United States and France have produced a fully comparative analysis of the ways in which this history has been written and interpreted. The book identifies three generations of historians, literary scholars, film directors and writers who have commented upon the war. Through a thematic structure, it assesses not only diplomatic and military studies but also the social and cultural interpretations of the Great War as seen primarily through the eyes of French, German and British writers. It provides a fascinating case study of the practice of history in the twentieth century and of the enduring importance of the national lens in shaping historical narrative. This interesting study will prove invaluable reading to scholars and students in history, war studies, European history and international relations.

Richard Wall

A unique examination of the effects of the First World War on family life.

Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914-1918

The Upheaval of War

In the wake of the monstrous projects of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and others in the twentieth century, the idea of utopia has been discredited. Yet, historian Jay Winter suggests, alongside the “major utopians” who murdered millions in their attempts to transform the world were disparate groups of people trying in their own separate ways to imagine a radically better world. This original book focuses on some of the twentieth-century’s “minor utopias” whose stories, overshadowed by the horrors of the Holocaust and the Gulag, suggest that the future need not be as catastrophic as the past. The book is organized around six key moments when utopian ideas and projects flourished in Europe: 1900 (the Paris World's Fair), 1919 (the Paris Peace Conference), 1937 (the Paris exhibition celebrating science and light), 1948 (the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), 1968 (moral indictments and student revolt), and 1992 (the emergence of visions of global citizenship). Winter considers the dreamers and the nature of their dreams as well as their connections to one another and to the history of utopian thought. By restoring minor utopias to their rightful place in the recent past, Winter fills an important gap in the history of social thought and action in the twentieth century.

Jay Winter

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