This book is designed to explore key questions surrounding faith, philosophy, science, culture and social progress by celebrating the life and thought of cultural leaders from Rugby School (estd. 1567).Some of the most distinguished historians, philosophers, social commentators and religious commentators are alumni of Rugby School. In this collection of essays, contributors explore the most important values that guide and challenge us today, by reflecting on the achievements of the...

The first English translation of writings that capture the lives and thoughts of German soldiers fighting in the trenches and on the battlefields of WWI.German Soldiers in the Great War is a vivid selection of firsthand accounts and other wartime documents that shed new light on the experiences of German frontline soldiers during the First World War. It reveals in authentic detail the perceptions and emotions of ordinary soldiers that have been covered up ...

Performing the Past is an investigation of the multiple social and culture practices through which Europeans have negotiated the space between their history and their memory over the past 200 years. In museums, in opera houses, in the streets, in the schools, in theatres, in films, on the internet and beyond, narratives about the past circulate today at a dizzying speed. Producing and selling them is big business; if the past is indeed a foreign country, there are tens of thousand...

Population politics has taken many forms throughout history. Political leaders from both democracies and non-democracies commonly place population issues at the center of their political programs, manufacturing alarm over changing demographic distributions. From fears of existential decline to debates over migration and fertility, demographic issues are often distorted by political ideologies that obscure understanding and fuel divisive narratives. In Toxic Demography, Jennifer D....

This book is a study of statelessness in the period of the Second World War. It breaks new ground by focusing not on Europe, but on the Asian and Pacific theatres of the conflict. This perspective enables us to go beyond Hannah Arendt’s classic account of statelessness in her Origins of Totalitarianism.To her, statelessness was the product of a failed European nation-state system. We find a very different story when we examine the history of statele...

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 wi...

This Element is a user's guide to the cultural history of warfare since 1914. It provides summaries of the basic questions historians have posed in what is now a truly global field of research. It is divided into three parts. The first provides an introduction to the cultural history of the state, focusing on the institutions of violence, both political and military, as well as introducing the key concept of the civilianization of war. The second part addresses civil society at war. It ask...

On 24 July 1923 the last Treaty ending hostilities in the Great War was signed at Lausanne in Switzerland. That Treaty closed a decade of violence. Jay Winter tells the story of what happened on that day. On the shores of Lake Geneva, diplomats, statesmen, and soldiers came from Ankara and Athens, from London, Paris, and Rome, and from other capital cities to affirm that war was over. The Treaty they signed fixed the boundaries of present-day Greece and Turkey, and marked a beginning of a ...

This set of essays introduces readers to new historical research on the creation of the new order in East-Central Europe in the period immediately following 1918.The book offers insights into the political, diplomatic, military, economic and cultural conditions out of which the New Europe was born. Experts from various countries take into account three perspectives. They give equal attention to both the Western and Eastern fronts; they recognise that on 11 November 1918, the War en...

This double special issue investigates the experiences of Soviet Afghan veterans and the ongoing impact of the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-89); and the new and reconstituted narratives of martyrdom that have been emerging in connection with 20th-century history and memory in the post-socialist world. The JOURNAL OF SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET POLITICS AND SOCIETY (JSPPS) is a new bi-annual companion journal to the Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society (SPPS) book series (founded 2004 and edit...

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 horror...

Jay Winter's powerful 1998 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. Dr Winter looks anew at the culture of commemoration and the ways in which communities endeavoured to find collective solace after 1918. Taking issue with the prevailing 'modernist' interpretation of the European reaction to the appalling events of 1914–18, Dr Winter instead argues that what character...