Historiographical Plug: Read 'The Great War and Modern Memory'

While trying to procrastinate this past weekend, I found myself rereading one of the books that had the biggest impact on me as an undergrad, Paul Fussell's classic study on the effect of the First World War on literature and culture, The Great War and Modern Memory. Fussell's desire to combine a discussion of war with an analysis literature, culture, and society (while obvious to me now) completely blew my mind when I was a sophomore in college. It also made me realize how painfully nerdy I was even compared to my already-nerdy friends. "Do you realize that the word 'breakthrough' first came into wide usage during World War I?," I would ask, "as in 'medical breakthrough' or 'scientific breakthrough,' because everyone was so obsessed with breaking through on the Western Front." This enthusiasm was typically met with appalled silence before someone would shift the discussion back to sports. Nevertheless, Fussell's study was one of the books that helped me realize that I wanted to go to grad school.


What has interested me more as a grad student is how The Great War and Modern Memory is as much a cultural document of the 1970's as it is a study of the First World War. Published in 1975, Paul Fussell has subsequently admitted that his book is "really about the Vietnam War as much as it is about the First World War." Fussell therefore did what historical scholars are, in theory, not supposed to do. He allowed his concern for the events of his own time to shape and inform his analysis of the past. The result in this case is nevertheless one of the most groundbreaking studies on the First World War, which has influenced almost all the scholarship that has followed. While I would agree with Jay Winter and many others that Fussell's study contains some interpretive (and a few factual) errors, it is still the book that I would offer to anyone who wanted to know why I became interested in trench newspapers (the subject of my MA Thesis) in the first place.

I am interested in what some of my friends in the UW grad program, most of whom study early-modern stuff, would offer as the book that really blew them away when they were undergrads. If any of you should come across this blog, please post your book of choice in the comments. I should probably learn to enjoy the early-modern period more anyway.