The idea of total war - which has come back into use during the Covid-19 pandemic - is usually associated with the Second World War. In fact, it had already ...

Would Brexit have ever happened if we weren't an island? The idea of European unity is very appealing if, for centuries, your country has been invaded and re...

Fritz Haber, the German chemist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918, was quite a contradiction. By helping develop industrial fertilisers, he could claim...

We tend to define the First World War as 1914-18, but for most of central/eastern Europe and the Middle East 1918 had no meaning. As huge empires imploded, w...

Why, over 100 years later, do we still believe that the outbreak of the First World War was greeted with universal enthusiasm in the combatant nations? In F...

An Understanding History Podcast If you want to read about this unusual WW1 series and the ideas behind it, you can go to the online magazine Military Histor...

Understanding The First World War Memory and remembrance have played a key part in the way we interpret the First World War. But memory tends to be selectiv...

Understanding The First World War Until recently, most general histories of the First World War either were narrative accounts or told from a national perspe...

Understanding The First World War We think of the First World War as a well defined time span 1914-18, almost as if it took place in some historical vaccuum ...

Understanding The First World War In the popular British narrative, 1918 is the ‘forgotten year’ of the First World War. Instead, all the focus has tended to...

Understanding the First World War 1.5 million Indians volunteered to fight for the Allied cause during the First World War. And yet the Indian contribution -...

Understanding The First World War Shell shock was unknown before the First World War, but rapidly grew to prominence during the conflict. In 1916 it reached ...

Understanding The First World War Despite the fact that in the years before 1914 international conferences had agreed a set of rules to govern the conduct of...

Understanding The First World War: Historians of WW1 now view the conflict through trans-national and global perspectives, not simply the old national narrat...

Understanding the real First World War Despite the global nature of the First World War, the popular British narrative of the conflict has tended to focus al...

The Real First World War: Forget the popular British narrative that's prevailed for so long - 10 leading historians tell us what this conflict was really ab...