Contesting home defence is a new history of the Home Guard, a novel national defence force of the Second World War composed of civilians who served as part-time soldiers: it questions accounts of the force and the war, which have seen them as symbols of national unity.
It scrutinises the Home Guard's reputation and explores whether this 'people's army' was a site of social cohesion or of dissension by assessing the competing claims made for it at the time. It then examines the way it was represented during the war and has been since, notably in Dad's Army, and discusses the memories of...

Contesting home defence is a new history of the Home Guard, a novel national defence force of the Second World War composed of civilians who served as part-time soldiers: it questions accounts of the force and the war, which have seen them as symbols of national unity.
It scrutinises the Home Guard's reputation and explores whether this 'people's army' was a site of social cohesion or of dissension by assessing the competing claims made for it at the time. It then examines the way it was represented during the war and has been since, notably in Dad's Army, and discusses the memories of...

Healing the Nation is a study of caregiving during the Great War, exploring life behind the lines for ordinary British soldiers who served on the Western Front. Using a variety of literary, artistic, and architectural evidence, this study draws connections between the war machine and the wartime culture of caregiving: the product of medical knowledge and procedure, social relationships and health institutions that informed experiences of rest, recovery and rehabilitation in sites administered by military and voluntary-aid authorities.
Rest huts, hospitals, and rehabilitation centres...

Despite the scholarship and political activism devoted to keeping the memory of the Paris Commune alive, there still remains much ignorance both in France and elsewhere, about the traumatic civil war of 1871; some 20,000 to 35,000 people were killed on the streets of Paris in just the final week of the conflict.
Colette Wilson identifies a critical blind-spot in French studies and employs new critical approaches to neglected texts, marginalised aspects of the illustrated press, early photography and a selection of novels by Emile Zola. This book will be of interest to students and...

Behind enemy lines is an examination of gender relations in wartime using the Special Operations Executive as a case study. Drawing on personal testimonies, in particular oral history and autobiography, as well as official records and film, it explores the extraordinary experiences of male and female agents who were recruited and trained by a British organisation and infiltrated into Nazi-Occupied France to encourage sabotage and subversion during the Second World War.
With its original interpretation of a wealth of primary sources, it examines how these ordinary, law-abiding civilians...

This book examines how Armenia and Armenians were portrayed in Britain at a decisive moment in modern history.
It illustrates how British observers represented the 'in-between' position of Armenians and considers the early development of atrocity narratives which related acts of violence and oppression by the Ottomans. It goes on to examine responses to the massacres of the Armenians during the First World War, showing how established images of Armenians were transformed in the wake of this crisis. Laycock then turns to the post-war period when attempts were made to define and establish...

John Galsworthy - recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize for literature - was one of the best-selling authors of the twentieth century. His literary reputation overshadows what he achieved during the Great War, which was his humanitarian support for and his compositions about soldiers disabled in the conflict.
*John Galsworthy and disabled soldiers of the Great War* represents the most comprehensive study published to date about this literature of the 'war to end all wars.' It makes available for the first time in a single edition the most significant of his compositions about disabled...

Behind enemy lines is an examination of gender relations in wartime using the Special Operations Executive as a case study. Drawing on personal testimonies, in particular oral history and autobiography, as well as official records and film, it explores the extraordinary experiences of male and female agents who were recruited and trained by a British organisation and infiltrated into Nazi-Occupied France to encourage sabotage and subversion during the Second World War.
With its original interpretation of a wealth of primary sources, it examines how these ordinary, law-abiding civilians...

Through a series of thematic chapters, Julie Anderson explores the nature of injured and disabled bodies before, during and after the Second World War.
Beginning at the end of the First World War and finishing with the publication of the Piercy Committee's report in 1956, the book examines medical practice, State support, societal attitudes and cultural meanings surrounding disabled war veterans and civilians. The book focuses on the embodied nature of the rehabilitative process, its gendered nature and the concentration on bodily fitness during the war. Through a series of case studies,...

Who were the military nurses of the Great War, and what did they really do? In this lucid and cogently-argued book, Christine Hallett explores the nature of the practices developed by nurses and their volunteer-assistants during the First World War. She argues that nurses found meaning in their complex and stressful work by identifying it as a process of 'containing trauma'. Beginning with a discussion of the current literature on both the literature on the social and cultural position of nurses at the outbreak of the war, and on their importance to the war effort, the book explores a range...