World War One
A History in 100 Stories
1st Edition
Published on 21. October 2015
384 pages
978-1-76014-188-2 (ISBN)
Description
There has been no shortage of heroic stories over the course of the Anzac Centenary: stories of courage and sacrifice, fortitude and endurance, mateship and resolve. But a hundred years on, there is a need for other stories as well - the stories too often marginalised in favour of nation-building narratives.
World War One: a history in 100 stories remembers not just the men and women who lost their lives during the battles of WWI, but those who returned home as well: the gassed, the crippled, the insane - all those irreparably damaged by war.
Drawn from a unique collection of sources, including repatriation files, these heartbreaking and deeply personal stories reveal a broken and suffering generation - gentle men driven to violence, mothers sent insane with grief, the hopelessness of rehabilitation and the quiet, pervasive sadness of loss. They also retrieve a fragile kind of courage from the pain and devastation of a conflict that changed the world.
This is an unflinching and remarkable social history. It is an act of remembering in the face of forgetting. Telling the truth about war requires its own kind of courage.
World War One: a history in 100 stories remembers not just the men and women who lost their lives during the battles of WWI, but those who returned home as well: the gassed, the crippled, the insane - all those irreparably damaged by war.
Drawn from a unique collection of sources, including repatriation files, these heartbreaking and deeply personal stories reveal a broken and suffering generation - gentle men driven to violence, mothers sent insane with grief, the hopelessness of rehabilitation and the quiet, pervasive sadness of loss. They also retrieve a fragile kind of courage from the pain and devastation of a conflict that changed the world.
This is an unflinching and remarkable social history. It is an act of remembering in the face of forgetting. Telling the truth about war requires its own kind of courage.
More details
Other editions
Additional editions
Book
10/2015
Viking Australia
€51.50
Article exhausted; check different version
Persons
Laura James (Author)
Laura James is a PhD candidate with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. Laura's research is focused on war and remembrance in regional Australia, looking at how the experience of warfare and conflict has impacted regional communities and how remembrance and commemoration of war has changed and developed over time. Laura is also a contributing editor to the forthcoming publication Battlefield Events: Landscape, Commemoration and Heritage.
Bruce Scates (Author)
Bruce Scates is currently Professor of History and Australian Studies, and Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. Scates is an award-winning teacher, novelist and historian. His publications include Return to Gallipoli, A New Australia, the Cambridge History of the Shrine of Remembrance and the recently republished Women and the Great War (co authored with Raelene Frances). The last of these won the coveted NSW Premier's History Award.
Bruce is committed to communicating history to the widest possible audience; he played a leading role in the production of the recent ABC mini series 'The War that Changed Us'. He was also featured in an ABC Compass program exploring pilgrimages to the cemeteries of the Great War. His work is distinctive because of his accessible prose and engaging narrative as well as academic rigour.
Rebecca Wheatley (Author)
Rebecca Wheatley is a PhD candidate at the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. Rebecca's research explores the teaching of Anzac and Australia's war history as a pedagogical, political and historical issue over the last century and in contemporary Australia. Rebecca is a contributing author to The Cambridge History of the First World War and Anzac Journeys: Returning to the Battlefields of World War Two. In 2015, Rebecca accompanied the Victorian Premier's Spirit of Anzac Prize group across Gallipoli and the Western Front as the Tour Historian.
Laura James is a PhD candidate with the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. Laura's research is focused on war and remembrance in regional Australia, looking at how the experience of warfare and conflict has impacted regional communities and how remembrance and commemoration of war has changed and developed over time. Laura is also a contributing editor to the forthcoming publication Battlefield Events: Landscape, Commemoration and Heritage.
Bruce Scates (Author)
Bruce Scates is currently Professor of History and Australian Studies, and Director of the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. Scates is an award-winning teacher, novelist and historian. His publications include Return to Gallipoli, A New Australia, the Cambridge History of the Shrine of Remembrance and the recently republished Women and the Great War (co authored with Raelene Frances). The last of these won the coveted NSW Premier's History Award.
Bruce is committed to communicating history to the widest possible audience; he played a leading role in the production of the recent ABC mini series 'The War that Changed Us'. He was also featured in an ABC Compass program exploring pilgrimages to the cemeteries of the Great War. His work is distinctive because of his accessible prose and engaging narrative as well as academic rigour.
Rebecca Wheatley (Author)
Rebecca Wheatley is a PhD candidate at the National Centre for Australian Studies at Monash University. Rebecca's research explores the teaching of Anzac and Australia's war history as a pedagogical, political and historical issue over the last century and in contemporary Australia. Rebecca is a contributing author to The Cambridge History of the First World War and Anzac Journeys: Returning to the Battlefields of World War Two. In 2015, Rebecca accompanied the Victorian Premier's Spirit of Anzac Prize group across Gallipoli and the Western Front as the Tour Historian.
