A cornerstone of early science fiction and a haunting image of world war
Following the development of massive airships, naive Londoner Bert Smallways becomes accidentally involved in a German plot to invade America by air and reduce New York to rubble. But although bombers devastate the city, they cannot overwhelm the country, and their attack leads not to victory but to the beginning of a new and horrific age for humanity. And so dawns the era of Total War, in which brutal aerial bombardments reduce the great cultures of the twentieth century to nothing. As civilization collapses...

Based on his own experience of the Great War, Henri Barbusse's novel is a powerful account of one of the greatest horrors mankind has inflicted on itself.
For the group of ordinary men in the French Sixth Battalion, thrown together from all over France and longing for home, war is simply a matter of survival, lightened only by the arrival of their rations or a glimpse of a pretty girl or a brief reprieve in the hospital. Reminiscent of classics like Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, Under Fire (originally published...

This is a masterful volume on remembrance and war in the twentieth century. Jay Winter locates the fascination with the subject of memory within a long-term trajectory that focuses on the Great War. Images, languages, and practices that appeared during and after the two world wars focused on the need to acknowledge the victims of war and shaped the ways in which future conflicts were imagined and remembered. At the core of the "memory boom" is an array of collective meditations on war and the victims of war, Winter says.
The book begins by tracing the origins of contemporary interest in...

"Winter is an acclaimed cultural historian of World War I and early 20th-century conflicts. Here, with refreshing, new-millennium insight, he reflects on inter-world war attempts-excluding the awful accomplishments born of the ostensibly idealistic goals of the century's roster of monster totalitarians-to build a better, fairer society on a grand scale. . . . Highly recommended."-Library Journal "To anyone with a flame of utopian hope still flickering in his or her soul, this moving, wise, and passionate book can only be a blessing."-Stanley Hoffman, Foreign Affairs Jay Winter is Charles J....

This comprehensive history of postwar Czech retribution examines the prosecution of more than one-hundred thousand suspected war criminals and collaborators by Czech courts and tribunals after the Second World War. Based on archival sources that remained inaccessible during the cold war, the book provides a new perspective on Czechoslovakia's transition from Nazi occupation to Stalinist rule. Frommer asserts that the Czechs made a genuine, if flawed, attempt to confront past war crimes, including their own.

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 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 is the first systematic analysis of German public opinion at the outbreak of the Great War. Jeffrey Verhey's powerful study demonstrates that the myth of war enthusiasm was historically inaccurate. He also examines the development of the myth in newspapers, politics and propaganda, and the propagation and appropriation of this myth after the war. His innovative analysis sheds new light on German experience of the Great War and on the role of political myths in modern German political culture.

Taking a new view of France during and after the German occupation, this book challenges traditional chronology concentrating on the Vichy government. It punctures standard interpretations dividing occupied France into resisters and collaborators and explores the resistance concept of an ideal Frenchwoman by using interview material to contest the standard view. French demographers' post-liberation enthusiasm for Nazi population policy, women in the city, and the widespread fervor for the family are also examined. The significance of race--specifically Jewishness--and gender is emphasized...

This volume is about the commemoration of the Irish Civil War. Working from the perspective of the winners of a war no one wished to fight, it examines how the memory of the victor's dead is treated in public and private spheres. This is achieved through examination of the methods and rituals of commemoration. The book's importance, and its main difference from other books, lies in its close examination of the legacy of civil war bitterness in Ireland, a legacy which has, until now, been largely assumed and misunderstood.