History Commons^™

Review Of Pandora's Box: A History Of The First World War, Ian A. Isherwood

Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications

Perhaps the gravest difficulty with any single volume book on the Great War is taming the war's complexities while still maintaining a degree of nuance and insight that goes beyond the temptation for simplification. Indeed, the war's scale itself makes this task even more unmanageable. How can an author possibly offer a nuanced treatment that takes into consideration a war fought on three continents, not to mention, the political and social realities on the war's many home fronts and the changing dynamics of differing and complex societies under strain? To be comprehensive is an impossible task especially given the wealth …

From The Shire To The Somme: Comparing Military Themes In The Hobbit And Up To Mamtez, Alexander M. Remington

Student Publications

The Hobbit, by J.R.R Tolkien, tells the story of the titular Bilbo Baggins who goes on an adventure to help a band of dwarves retake their home from a dragon. Throughout the adventure, Bilbo and the dwarves endure many hardships similar to those of a British soldier fighting on the western front in the First World War. These hardships are especially comparable to Llewelyn Wyn Griffith's World War One experience described in his book Up to Mametz. Military themes of enforced adventure, constant and escalating danger, comradeship, and the devastation of war can also be found in both the Hobbit …

Ms – 244: Papers Of George S. Patton Jr., Jujuan K. Johnson

All Finding Aids

This collection is contained in two series, the first being George S. Patton Jr.’s letters to his Aunt “Nannie” and his mother from both VMI and West Point (1903-1908). The second being George S. Patton Jr.’s book “My Father as I remembered him.”, which contains a biography of his father, George S. Patton, and a brief biography of other family members, including himself up to 1927.

In Patton’s book “My Father as I remembered him,” he gives brief descriptions and stories about his family, starting with the first “Patton” and ending with himself in 1927. The first “Patton” was Robert …

Review Of Baptism Of Fire: The Birth Of The Modern British Fantastic In World War I, Ian A. Isherwood

Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications

The Great War had a lasting influence on literature and literary culture in Britain. Spanning the ‘brows’ of literary taste were authors writing in response to the cataclysmic violence experienced by the war generation, at both the war front and the home front. The war's shadow permeated all aspects of cultural expression; its experience found authors who, with varying degrees of success, wrote on its lasting influence to a readership that, as the decades wore on, grew increasingly afraid of another world war. One of the responses undoubtedly influenced by the war was the genre of fantasy. As one of …

Review Of The War That Used Up Words: American Writers And The First World War, By Hazel Hutchison, Ian A. Isherwood

Interdisciplinary Studies Faculty Publications

There is a vast array of scholarship on the literature of the First World War, much of it concerning British authors. When American war literature is considered, it is usually the so-called “Lost Generation” writers of the 1920s and 1930s. If the war had a significant effect upon American literature, it is argued, then it served as a trope for some of the great writers of the 1920s—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner—who wrote of living in its generational shadow in the following decades of so-called peace.

Hazel Hutchison’s book is a corrective to the many assumptions about …