NNNThe essays in this collection ask whether the Great War was a “total” war. Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 2000. Great War, Total War: Combat and Mobilization on the Western Front, 1914–1918. Detailed, knowledgeable, and very well referenced, with an excellent bibliography, maps, and chronology, it contains much on the Western Front.Ĭhickering, Roger, and Stig Förster, eds. NNNBeckett provides an excellent survey of the Great War. A more popular book accompanied the series, Strachan 2003, which is aimed at a more general audience.īeckett, Ian F.
#Battle of verdun summary series
For a more popular approach, Hew Strachan’s television series The First World War, produced in 2003 by the UK television station Channel 4, is an excellent starting point, based on his authoritative account of the war. More recently, Sondhaus 2011 is an exhaustive and informative account of the war, with documents and bibliographical information, which will be a useful starting point for those trying to familiarize themselves with the events of 1914–1918. The Western Front is well covered in this impressive volume. The work provides expert overviews of all relevant areas of research in major introductory essays on the main combatants, on society at war, the course of the war and major battles, the end of the war, and its historiography, as well as offering encyclopedic entries on events, people, and concepts.
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2003 is a German-language encyclopedia of the war that is a useful starting point for anyone interested in overviews of the multitude of approaches historians have adopted in studying World War I. 1999 (cited under Germany and the Central Powers) and Chickering and Förster 2000 focus on the experience of war and the question of the war’s unique nature by asking whether it was the first “total war,” and by examining the nature of “total war” in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Neiberg 2005 provides essays on a number of topics, including the Western Front, and Neiberg 2008 is especially helpful for its close focus on the Western Front. Stevenson 2004 is impressive in its ability to review the entire war and accurately portray so many key events. Beckett 2007 attempts to deal with the sheer weight of material by abandoning a chronological narrative for a thematic approach that allows the author to analyze key areas of the war such as the effects of economics, science and technology, and training, among many other important topics. Strachan 2001 is the only volume completed so far of the author’s planned three-volume study, which is set to become the most comprehensive account of the war. General histories of World War I abound despite the inherent difficulty in synthesizing truly monumental amounts of data into relatively concise accounts. No doubt the centenary of the war’s outbreak will add further publications to an already seemingly inexhaustible list as historians continue to debate the nature of the war on the Western Front. In addition, the interest in the experience of war and in its cultural history has led to new ways of studying the Western Front, focusing, for example, on civilian experiences of the war. Tactical evolution, the development of operations-level planning, generalship, military effectiveness, and the integration of new technology (among other topics) are the central themes around which the debates continue. Many major battles still need serious scholarly attention, and the efforts of the French and German armies remain poorly understood, compared to the more thoroughly studied British. While scholarship has long denounced the popular images of “mud and blood” and challenged the once prevalent idea that British troops had been “lions led by donkeys” with concepts such as the (admittedly Anglocentric) “learning curve,” historians continue to study the Western Front, and its popular appeal remains unchanged. For many it is epitomized by images of the Somme. Popular mythology equates the Western Front with the futility and pity of war, and with pointless suffering. The war of movement that resulted from the implementation of Germany’s so-called Schlieffen Plan quickly became bogged down, and by the end of 1914 troops had been digging themselves into the ground and would stay there, with relatively little adjustment to the front line, until the end of the war. The Western Front is synonymous with trench warfare and the static war that replaced the relatively brief period of a war of movement in August and September 1914. The war that raged along the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 is among the most studied and controversial events in European history.