Escape from Total War: British, French & German Soldier Newspapers - Dr. Robert Nelson

This lecture was delivered at the National World War I Museum and Memorial's Symposium -- 1916 | Total War -- which was held in Kansas City, Mo. November 4-5, 2016.

For more information about the National WWI Museum and Memorial visit http://theworldwar.org

To memoirs and soldiers’ letters, the new military historian must add soldier newspapers as a rich and useful source for understanding the fears and hopes of the troops of all ranks in the First World War. By analyzing the production and creation of these newspapers for the British, French and German armies, and indicating both the unique national traits of each nation’s journals as well as the universal stories found across the three armies’ newspapers, one can see how soldiers sought to ‘escape’ while on rest behind the lines, and simultaneously better understand why they continued to fight.

Robert Nelson is the Department Head and Associate Professor in History at the University of Windsor, where he specializes in Modern European cultural history, German history, First World War and colonialism. He is the author of the book German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War (Cambridge, 2011) and the editor of Germans, Poland and Colonial Expansion to the East: 1850 Through the Present (Palgrave, 2009). His new area of research, developed this last year while a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the City University of New York, Graduate Center, investigates the development of a German 'colonial gaze' upon Eastern Europe, which began in the 1880s, and radicalized during the First World War.Dr. Nelson’s areas of interest thus include: the social and cultural history of war and occupation, as well as both overseas and 'inner' colonialism.