A Century of Historical Writing
Jay Winter
Many historians have written about war experience, but different generations have configured that experience in different ways. In a nutshell, histories of the interwar years initially focused on the experience of elites, both in military and political circles. Hundreds of books were written by retired leaders set to justify their role in the war. Given the small size of the historical profession, it is hardly surprising that celebrities and other officials occupied the centre of the stage. At the same time, this first generation of writing was the moment for the publication of a vast array of memoirs, some of which were fictionalized and some of which were presented as straight reportage. Here the notion of experience as internalized, the personal property of the men who fought, predominated.
The second generation of historical writing about soldiers’ experience emerged in the 1960s, at a time when social history was expanding rapidly, as were universities as a whole in Europe and North America. Social history focused on ordinary people, rather than on elites, and social historians structured their history in terms of collective loyalties, roughly organized around social class, region, family, or nation.
In 1964 the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of war precipitated a commemorative avalanche, and television networks on both sides of the Atlantic broadcast blockbuster accounts of the 1914-18 war. The same commemorative boom emerged in 1967, but this time focused on either Russia, which got out of the war, or the United States, which got into it 50 years before.