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Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, eds., Capital Cities at War: London, Paris, Berlin, 1914–1919. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. xvii + 622 pp. $90.00 cloth.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2001

Robert J. Bezucha
Affiliation:
Amherst College

Abstract

Part of a new series called Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, this is the first of what eventually is going to be a two-volume collection of essays on the experience of three European capital cities during the Great War. The work under review privileges the material conditions of the lives of the inhabitants “of London, Paris, and Berlin between 1914 and the early 1920s in order to study the new social relations and hierachies which they constructed, and the representations they themselves gave to their wartime reality” (527). Volume two will focus on an appreciation of the wartime reactions and perceptions of families, social groups, and social movements (527). Volume one of Capital Cities at War is an impressive book in several ways: in overall length and the density of its prose; in the heft of the primary research that supports almost every essay; in the theoretical jolt it means to deliver to comparative history; and in the extent of scholarly turf it commands at the junction of a “chronological history, that of the Great War, and a thematic history, that of urban history” (527). When the project is completed, editors Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert will have published more than a thousand pages on the subject.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Copyright
© 1999 The International Labor and Working-Class History Society

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