| Description |
xiii, 357 pages ; 23 cm |
| Contents |
1. 'Clad in Glittering White' -- 2. Virtuous Inferiority -- 3. 'To Die Young' -- 4. Business as Usual -- 5. War by Improvisation: Money, Manpower, Munitions and Food -- 6. Working for the War -- 7. Aliens, Outlaws and Dissenters -- 8. Lions and Donkeys -- 9. Mobilising Minds -- 10. Houses, Homes and Health -- 11. 'Are You Forgetting There's a War On?' -- 12. Denouement: 1918 -- 13. Coming Home -- 14. The Dead, the Living and the Living Dead -- 15. The Social Legacy of the War: Three Steps Forward, Two Back -- 16. Politics and the People: the Triumph of the Hard-Faced Men |
| Summary |
A different world. It was the vacuum cleaner and the internal combustion engine that transformed Britain in the early twentieth century, not the sorrows, sacrifices and opportunities of the Great War |
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Because we assume momentous events must have momentous consequences, we too easily accept the conventional wisdom that the Great War of 1914-18 shook British society to its foundations, leaving nothing of the prewar world intact. We take it for granted that, along with a generation of its finest young men, the nation's old ways of life and thought perished in the mud of Flanders. Recent historiography, however, has shown a new sensitivity to the power of tradition in |
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British society, and its ability to contain and neutralise radical social change. Now, in this impressive study - the first major treatment of the theme - Gerard DeGroot examines every aspect of society in the period (c. 1907-22) to understand what actually happened to the people of Britain during and after the trial by fire. As well as incorporating the latest scholarship, he makes rich, and often very moving, use of primary sources - newspapers, poetry (both high and |
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Low), literature, memoirs and letters - to illuminate the attitudes of society at all its levels, not merely the elite and the articulate. He reveals the extent to which the dominant social force in Britain during the war was not change but continuity. The most urgent wish of most people for the postwar world was, poignantly, that life should return to the way it had been - and to a quite astonishing extent it did, despite the tide of technological change flowing towards |
| Analysis |
Great Britain |
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World War 1 Social life |
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Great Britain |
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World War 1 Social life |
| Bibliography |
Includes bibliographical references (pages 334-343) and index |
| Subject |
World War, 1914-1918 -- Great Britain.
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| SUBJECT |
Great Britain -- History -- George V, 1910-1936.
http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85056827
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Great Britain -- Social life and customs -- 20th century. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85056953
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| LC no. |
95045475 |
| ISBN |
0582061377 (ppr) |
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0582061385 (csd) |
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