Footnote 8ĭuring the-often heated-public controversy sparked by a number of these publications, fascinating national differences in interpreting the outbreak of the war emerged, a result of differing experiences of World War I, which shaped both a country's subsequent history and its national memory of the war. Footnote 7 These and similar documents brought the experience of war to life for general audiences. Footnote 6 Furthermore, several document collections and edited diaries have enabled readers to reach their own conclusions about the origins and the nature of the war. The year 2014 alone saw the publication of several studies that examined either the July Crisis or the longer-term causes of the war.
Footnote 5 Within these many thousands of pages, the question of the war's origins loomed large. Footnote 4 Finally, there were several impressive multi-authored attempts at capturing all of this new research in large edited collections. Footnote 3 Others, in turn, offered new interpretations of the role played by important individuals. Footnote 2 There were accounts that foregrounded the personal experience of soldiers or civilians. Footnote 1 Others, by contrast, focused on only one country's experience. Among them were general, often voluminous, accounts of the war that adopted an international perspective or addressed the conflict's global reach. The many publications reflected political, military, social, economic, and cultural approaches to studying the conduct and experience of World War I, and included new attempts to explain its origins. In countries whose past has continued to be affected disproportionately by the events of 1914–1918, or where the war has featured largely in national memory (such as Germany and Serbia, for example), the nature of the debate showed clearly that World War I is not yet “history.” Commemoration, as well as the way historians wrote about the war and the way their audiences received this new work differed, too, depending on the national context. General and academic interest in the war peaked well before the actual centenary of its outbreak (the date of which differed, of course, depending on which country was commemorating it). Nor could one have expected that the question of the origins of the war, in particular, would once again be paramount and the subject of widespread, heated debate.
#Ww1 participants full
Few could have predicted, however, the full extent of public and media interest in World War I. The market was consequently flooded with publications that attempted to explain why war had broken out in 1914. The looming anniversary naturally prompted publishers to commission titles that were designed to make a splash, cause debate, and spark public interest.
Historians of the Great War found themselves in high demand in 2014.