This book traces the development of the German Army League from its inception through the earliest days of the Weimar Republic. Founded in January 1912, the League promoted the intensification of German militarism and the cultivation of German nationalism. As the last and second largest of the patriotic societies to emerge after 1890, the League led the campaign for army expansion in 1912 and 1913, and against the growing influence of socialism and pacifism within Germany. Attempting to harness popular and nationalist sentiment against the government's foreign and domestic policies by preying...

Offering a comprehensive account of the war as more than a purely military phenomenon, World War I: A History in Documents, Second Edition, also addresses its profound social, cultural, and economic implications. Authors Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee and Frans Coetzee use editorials, memoirs, newspaper articles, poems, and letters to re-create the many facets of the war. Technological developments such as the machine gun and barbed wire brought the world trench warfare, which is vividly depicted here in a firsthand account of then-soldier Benito Mussolini. An Atlantic Monthly essay by the...

Empires, Soldiers, and Citizens 2/e offers a vivid range of eyewitness perspectives - from female munitions workers to Indian troops in France - which explore the social, cultural, and military dimensions of World War I. This second edition includes added material to reflect the very latest historical thinking.

• Combines documents and themes that have proven successful in the first edition with new sources and topics that are currently at the forefront of historical debate and research
• Now features 59 new documents which illustrate the imperial dimensions of...

For years, those who attempted to understand the devastation of World War I looked to the collections of diplomatic documents, the stirring speeches, and the partisan memoirs of the leading participants. However, those accounts offered little by way of the intimate history, or the individual experiences of those involved in the Great War. In Commitment and Sacrifice, Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee and Frans Coetzee provide just such an "intimate look" by bringing together previously unpublished diaries of five participants in the First World War and restoring to publication the diary of a...

This book presents six recently discovered diaries, almost all of which are previously unpublished. It provides an intimate look at how ordinary soldiers and civilians from five countries experienced and reflected upon the physical and psychological strains of the First World War.