The Last Great War
British Society and the First World War

A groundbreaking new history of the British home front during the First World War.

Adrian Gregory (Author)

9780521728836, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 16 October 2008

364 pages, 18 b/w illus.
22.7 x 15.3 x 1.8 cm, 0.59 kg

'Adrian Gregory is one of the best historians of the British Home Front that we have. What he's been able to do is to pull together the social history of the First World War - with a very good understanding of the dynamics of the war itself as well - and put it all into a package. This book is, I think, the best single volume book on the British Home Front in the First World War.' Jonathan Boff, Five Books (www.fivebooks.com)

What was it that the British people believed they were fighting for in 1914–18? This compelling history of the British home front during the First World War offers an entirely new account of how British society understood and endured the war. Drawing on official archives, memoirs, diaries and letters, Adrian Gregory sheds new light on the public reaction to the war, examining the role of propaganda and rumour in fostering patriotism and hatred of the enemy. He shows the importance of the ethic of volunteerism and the rhetoric of sacrifice in debates over where the burdens of war should fall as well as the influence of religious ideas on wartime culture. As the war drew to a climax and tensions about the distribution of sacrifices threatened to tear society apart, he shows how victory and the processes of commemoration helped create a fiction of a society united in grief.

Introduction: the war that did not end all wars
1. Going to war
2. Defining the enemy: atrocities and propaganda
3. From spectatorship to participation
volunteering to compulsion
4. Economies of sacrifice
5. Redemption through war: religion and the languages of sacrifice
6. The conditional sacrifices of labour
7. The Last War: 1917-?
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: First World War [HBWN], Military history [HBW], Social & cultural history [HBTB], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW]