A comparative study of European cultural and social history during the First World War.

The First World War is usually believed to have had a catastrophic effect on British art, killing artists and movements, and creating a mood of belligerent philistinism around the nation. In this book, however, James Fox paints a very different picture of artistic life in wartime Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, he examines the cultural activities of largely forgotten individuals and institutions, as well as the press and the government, in order to shed new light on art's unusual role in a nation at war. He argues that the conflict's artistic consequences, though initially disruptive, were ultimately and enduringly productive. He reveals how the war effort helped forge a much closer relationship between the British public and their art - a relationship that informed the country's cultural agenda well into the 1920s.

This is a truly encyclopedic survey of artists' responses - both 'official' and personal - to 'the horrors of war'. "Art and War" reveals the sheer diversity of artists' portrayals of this most devastating aspect of the human condition - from the 'heroic' paintings of Benjamin West and John Singer Sargent to brutal and iconic works by artists from Goya to Picasso, and the equally oppositional work of Leon Golub, Nancy Spero and others who reacted with fury to the Vietnam War. Laura Brandon pays particular attention to work produced in response to World War I and World War II, as well as to more recent art and memorial work by artists as diverse as Barbara Kruger, Alfredo Jarr and Maya Lin. She looks finally to the reactions of contemporary artists such as Langlands and Bell to the US invasion in 2001 of Afghanistan and the 'War on Terror'.

The lives of women changed immeasurably during the twentieth century, not just because of technological and economic advances, but as a result of a multiplicity of small and large, local, national and international political campaigns by women. The activities of the Edwardian suffrage campaigns are the most well-known example of this, but in less well-known, political struggles women fought with equal tenacity, sacrifice, and inventiveness, to demand, for example, equal pay, analgesics for women and childbirth, an end to virginity testing at airports or wages for housework. This book focuses on 15 such campaigns and the thousands of women who sought to influence decision making, exercise and challenge power in the twentieth century. These political activities were sometimes small-scale and short-lived or seemingly unsuccessful but together they helped to bring about immeasurable changes in women’s lives during the twentieth century. With limited financial resources and hefty domestic responsibilities, women have often chosen to pick their political battles very carefully. Some fought for workers’ rights or the right to education, some prioritised stopping male violence on the streets, in the home or between nations, others like Radcliffe Hall campaigned so women could define their own sexuality. Women organised self-help childcare, rape crisis centres and peace camps. They set up birth control clinics and women’s refuges. Ordinary women took on exploitive landlords, immigration officers, international companies, local councils, the media and successive governments. A few of the hundreds of thousands of these political women, like Maggie Wintringham and Nancy Astor, were MPs; others became local councillors. However, women’s access to traditional areas of political power was limited, even when Britain had its first woman prime minister in 1979, she was one of only 19 women MPs in parliament. Consequently, women sought other spheres of activity through which to fight for change, using all the resources and imagination at their disposal to challenge injustice and abuse. They employed deeds and words, petitions and protests, legal and illegal devices, peaceful and violent strategies to further their political aims. Their motivations and contributions were varied, many made sacrifices to be involved in political battles, but this book seeks to celebrate some of these unsung heroines who tried to make a difference.

The topics covered are wide-ranging and eclectic, and include, among others, studies of the Battle of Amiens, the Halifax explosion, Charlie Chaplin and wartime propaganda in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, Newfoundland's contribution to the war effort, the leadership capabilities of Brigadier General Griesbach, and the wartime poetry of John McRae. Contributors include Major John Armstrong (ret.), author many articles on military history and an administrative specialist in the Canadian Forces for thirty-two years, including stints as an instructor in history at the Royal Military College; Laura Brandon, curator of war art at the Canadian War Museum and co-author of Canvas of War: Painting and the Canadian Experience, 1914-1918; Patrick Brennan, associate professor of history at the University of Calgary; Tim Cook, archivist at the National Archives of Canada; Owen Cooke, independent researcher and former chief archivist at the Directorate of History, Canadian Department of National Defence; Andrew Horrall, archivist in charge of military records at the National Archives of Canada; John Hurst, retired administrator from the University of Guelph and head of the Ontario Branch of the WFA ; Jeff Keshen, associate professor of history at the University of Ottawa; David Parsons, Lt. Colonel with the Canadian Forces in Korea and chair of the Newfoundland Branch of the WFA; Roger Sarty, director of Historical Research and Exhibit Development at the Canadian War Museum; Christopher J. Terry, director, Canada Science and Technology Museums and chair of the Aviation Museum Group of the International Association of Transportation Museums; and Sidney F. Wise, professor emeritus in history and former dean of Graduate Studies and Research at Carleton University.

First systematic study of German soldier newspapers as a representation of daily life on the front during the Great War.