Writing the history of the First World War

1. Writing the history of the First World War http://johncmullen.blogspot.com

4. THE HISTORY of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it. … Concerning the Age which has just passed, our fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumulated so vast a quantity of information that the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it, and the perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it. It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden, revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hither-to undivined. (Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians, 1918)

5. What sources? What corpus? What questions? What methods? What assumptions? What objectives?

6. First field: Military and diplomatic history

9. 2011 1919

11. Later military history

12. Military history from below

13. Military history from below: diaries

14. Just outside the wood, we came to a well-constructed trench. In it there’s a British soldier to every yard, killed on the parapet in trying to hop off. Twenty yards in front, a row of dead British soldiers in perfect line as if on parade, NCOs in position, and a half-dozen paces ahead, their platoon officer, a rusty revolver in one outstretched hand, his whistle still clasped in the other, mowed down by machine guns… we see two men, a Fritz and a Tommy, dead within a yard of each other; the Fritz has a British bayonet through his throat whilst the Tommy lies doubled over a Fritz bayonet whose point protrudes from his back. E. P. F. Lynch, Somme Mud, London, Bantam, 2008, p. 89

15. Military history from below: Particular groups Within the military

16. Military history from below: particular experiences within the military

18. Oral history

19. Second field : social history

21. What is social history ? A new form of antiquarianism? Celebrating experience at the expense of analysis? The sort of history Socialists write? Rescuing the past from the enormous 'condescension of posterity'? Mobilising popular enthusiasm? What is social history? Seven historians answer... History Today Volume 35 Issue 3 March 1985

22. History of « the home front »

23. 2014

24. Local history

25. Social history: Women

26. Social history organizations 1930

28. Social aspects of the Great War

29. Third field : cultural history

35. Cultural history • A wideview of « culture » • Distancingfrompreviousapproaches to Culture (« History of Art » of « History of Ideas », for example • Concentrating on whatismeasurable and its influence • Generally a « historyfrombelow », • Strong points • Concentration on livedexperience • widening of the historicalobject • Criticismsit has been subjected to • Can ignore important institutions like the state • Can suggest a uniformity of culture whichdoes not exist in a nation.

36. Questions about cultural history • Is cultural history only concerned with « what people have in their head » : their representations of the world? • Where does people’s culture come from? What is the influence of social class in the emergence of culture or cultures? • What do social and cultural historians have in common ? – an interest in history from below.

37. Quelle priorité pour les historiens ?

38. «There’s no question that our generation in the 1950s and 1960s, while they didn’t completely neglect culture, did not actually give it sufficient weight in our analyses. I think this must be so. » «…The main trouble about the cultural turn is that an awful lot of it tends to move away not merely from the social element in history, but also from the real history. For instance, the enormous range of studies of memory in the 1970s and 1980s which are quite new, which didn’t happen in our day. Well, memory is about today, memory isn’t about what happened, it’s about what people later on think happened.» Eric Hobsbawm, June 2008

39. « L’histoire culturelle, méfiante a priori envers les interprétations unifiées, qui mettent en scène un homme simplifié et rationnel, est l’infatigable avocat d’un être humain traversé – et, parfois, animé – par des contradictions internes… » Pascal Ory, L’Histoire culturelle, Paris, PUF, 2004, p 27,

40. Some new tendencies

44. [1] Le total ne fait pas 100% car j’ai arrondi au dixième près.