The years 1936-1945 in Spain saw catastrophic civil war followed by fierce repression and economic misery. Families were torn apart and social relations were disrupted by death, exile and defeat. This study attempts to show how the Civil War was understood and absorbed, particularly by those who could claim themselves as "the victors," during and in the immediate aftermath of the conflict, taking as its main focus the repression and violence of the period, and the role of Catholic and Fascist ideology.

This book offers a comparative analysis of how postwar society dealt with the disruptive legacy of Nazi occupation in France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. It examines the postwar trajectories of resistance fighters, labor conscripts employed in Nazi Germany and victims of Nazi persecution and genocide. Their experiences were often incompatible with the patriotic narratives, aimed at restoring national pride and with the international context, requiring reconciliation with West Germany. In the conflict between memories of the war and the contingencies of the postwar political agenda lies a...

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius presents a study of a hidden legacy of World War I: the experience of German soldiers on the Eastern front and the long-term effects of this encounter. Using hitherto neglected sources from both occupiers and occupied, official documents, propaganda, memoirs, and novels, he reveals how German views of the East changed during total war, and how these views affected the return of German armies under the Nazis. This persuasive and compelling study fills a yawning gap in the literature of the Great War.

The Labour of Loss explores how mothers, fathers, widows, relatives and friends dealt with their experiences of grief and loss during and after the First and Second World Wars. Based on an examination of private loss through letters and diaries, this study makes a significant contribution to understanding how people came to terms with the deaths of friends and family. Unlike other studies in this area, The Labour of Loss considers how mourning affected men and women in different ways, and analyzes the gendered dimensions of grief.

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.

While French schoolteachers of the late nineteenth century have been widely celebrated for converting 'peasants into Frenchmen', their interwar counterparts have enjoyed little such acclaim. Both contemporary critics and subsequent scholars have condemned French pacifist schoolteachers of the interwar decades for cultivating antipatriotism and facilitating the defeat of 1940. In this book, Mona L. Siegel challenges such equations of teachers' pacifism with national betrayal. Drawn to pacifist ideals in the aftermath of World War I, schoolteachers sought to 'morally disarm' the nation by...

Europe in 1618 was riven between Protestants and Catholics, Bourbon and Hapsburg--as well as empires, kingdoms, and countless principalities. After angry Protestants tossed three representatives of the Holy Roman Empire out the window of the royal castle in Prague, world war spread from Bohemia with relentless abandon, drawing powers from Spain to Sweden into a nightmarish world of famine, disease, and seemingly unstoppable destruction.