Synopses & Reviews
World War I heralded a new global era of warfare, consolidating and expanding changes that had been building throughout the previous century, while also instituting new notions of war. The 1914-18 conflict witnessed the first aerial bombing of civilian populations, the first widespread concentration camps for the internment of enemy alien civilians, and an unprecedented use of civilian labor and resources for the war effort. Humanitarian relief programs for civilians became a common feature of modern society, while food became as significant as weaponry in the fight to win.
Tammy M. Proctor argues that it was World War I—the first modern, global war—that witnessed the invention of both the modern “civilian” and the “home front,” where a totalizing war strategy pitted industrial nations and their citizenries against each other. Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918, explores the different ways civilians work and function in a war situation, and broadens our understanding of the civilian to encompass munitions workers, nurses, laundresses, refugees, aid workers, and children who lived and worked in occupied zones, on home and battle fronts, and in the spaces in between. Comprehensive and global in scope, spanning the Eastern, Western, Italian, East African, and Mediterranean fronts, Proctor examines in lucid and evocative detail the role of experts in the war, the use of forced labor, and the experiences of children in the combatant countries.
As in many wars, civilians on both sides of WWI were affected, and vast displacements of the populations shaped the contemporary world in countless ways, redrawing boundaries and creating or reviving lines of ethnic conflict. Exploring primary source materials and secondary studies of combatant and neutral nations, while synthesizing French, German, Dutch, and English language sources, Proctor transcends the artificial boundaries of national histories and the exclusive focus on soldiers. Instead she tells the fascinating and long-buried story of the civilian in the Great War, allowing voices from the period to speak for themselves.
Review
“A powerful and important book that turns our attention to the often understudied experiences of civilians at war. Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918, makes a major contribution not only to the history of World War I but to the history of civilians involved in war before and since.”
-Michael S. Neiberg,author of Fighting the Great War: A Global History
Review
"Carefully researched and well-organized,
Civilians in a World at War is an excellent overview of the effects of World War I on civilians. Combining specific stories and life experiences with a detailed discussion of the changes, the author provides insight inot one of the most important developments in the 20th century - what she terms the invention of the modern civilian."
“A powerful and important book that turns our attention to the often understudied experiences of civilians at war. Civilians in a World at War, 1914-1918, makes a major contribution not only to the history of World War I but to the history of civilians involved in war before and since.”
“Proctor offers a comprehensive analysis of the impact of World War I on the ways men and women not in uniform functioned in an environment that pitted not only armies but citizens against each other. This is easily the best work of its kind to emerge from the new generation of scholars who are expanding the horizons of Great War studies.”
Review
"This atlas covers a variety of social issues in a clear and concise format by presenting for each topic a map, explanatory text, and, in some cases, additional charts as illustrations. . . . Highly recommended." -Choice,
Review
"In this excellent, astute work, historian Proctor explains that the creation of citizen-armies by widespread international conscription and recruiting campaigns during WWI ensured that noncombatants also were mired in warfare, taking over the responsibilities of men who had been called up, sustaining at long distance the morale of their loved ones in uniform, dealing with food rationing and epidemics, or providing medical care, entertainment or sex to troops who were far from their homes."
-E.J. Jenkins,Choice Magazine
Review
“Proctor offers a comprehensive analysis of the impact of World War I on the ways men and women not in uniform functioned in an environment that pitted not only armies but citizens against each other. This is easily the best work of its kind to emerge from the new generation of scholars who are expanding the horizons of Great War studies.”
-Dennis Showalter,Colorado College
Synopsis
Alice C. Andrews and James W. Fonseca, whose Atlas of American Higher Education was hailed for its unique approach to statistical information and whose research for this new Atlas has been prominently featured in the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe, here provide a geographic window onto the most pressing social issues of our time.
Too often, information about America--its culture and politics, affluence and poverty, health and medical care, crime and education--is presented in the form of dry statistics that do not convey critical trends and patterns. In this unprecedented volume, two respected geographers present dozens of maps that depict, at a glance, the topography of America's social well-being. Among the many topics covered are: cultural diversity and immigration; income, poverty and unemployment; lifestyle risks including drug abuse, smoking and auto fatalities; access to medical care; medical costs; status of women, children, and senior citizens; marriage and divorce; teen pregnancy and non-marital births; school dropouts; abortion; death rates from AIDS, cancer, suicide and infant mortality; violent crime and homelessness. The Atlas of American Society maps out a comprehensive picture of an America rarely seen in such breadth.
Synopsis
We often think of war as creating two different kinds of people: soldiers and civilians. But hasnt history taught us that this distinction is painfully nebulous? The contributors to this volume, writing from different disciplinary vantages, address a number of important issues connected to the ways in which the social distinctions and divisions surrounding warespecially those that determine participationplay out across different historical and geographical settings. Contextualizing the dichotomy of civilian and combatant against these larger complexities, this book offers a new understanding of the problematic middle ground that civilians occupy during wartime.
About the Author
Tammy M. Proctor is professor of history at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. She is the author of On My Honour: Guides and Scouts in Interwar Britain, Scouting for Girls: A Century of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, and Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (NYU Press).
Table of Contents
Preface
War and Social Theory: A Critique of the Fusion Theory in Social Theory - Lars Bo Kaspersen
Genesis of the Civilian in the Western World, 1500-2000 - Gunner Lind
Military and Civilian in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Denmark - Jeppe Büchert Netterstrøm
War Observed at a Distance: Media Coverage and Attitudes to War in Denmark, 1939-1940 - Palle Roslyng-Jensen
Wartime Violence against Civilians: Philosophical Reflections on War Rape - Robin May Schott
Demobilizing Civilians - Steffen Jensen and Finn Stepputat
Notes on Contributors
Index