The Peoples’ War?

The Second World War in Sociopolitical Perspective

Alexander Wilson, Richard Hammond, Jonathan Fennell, Alexander Wilson, Richard Hammond, Jonathan Fennell

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780228014706
• eBook ISBN: 9780228015901
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

Some 60 million people died during the Second World War; millions more were displaced in Europe, Africa, and Asia. The war resulted in the creation of new states, the acceleration of imperial decline, and a shift in the distribution of global power. Despite its unprecedented impact, a comprehensive account of the complex international experiences of this war remains elusive.

The Peoples' War? offers fresh approaches to the challenge of writing a new history of the Second World War. Exploring aspects of the war that have been marginalized in military and political studies, the volume foregrounds less familiar narratives, subjects, and places. Chapters recover the wartime experiences of individuals – including women, children, members of minority ethnic groups, and colonial subjects – whose stories do not fit easily into conventional national war narratives. The contributors show how terms used to delineate the conflict such as home front and battle front, occupier and occupied, captor and prisoner, and friend and foe became increasingly blurred as the war wore on. Above all, the volume encourages reflection on whether this conflict really was a "Peoples' War."

Challenging the homogenizing narratives of the war as a nationally unifying experience, The Peoples' War? seeks to enrich our understanding of the Second World War as a global event.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• INTRODUCTION In Search of a New History of the Second World War
• THEME ONE Problematizing “People’s Wars”
• 1 World War, Worldwide Mobilization
• THEME TWO Mobilization and Remobilization for “People’s Wars”
• 2 Fascist Warfare on the Home Front
• 3 Building an Enemy
• 4 Growing Up in Kaifeng
• 5 “What the Soldier Thinks”
• THEME THREE “People’s Wars” as Drivers of Change
• 6 Health Care and Disease in Italy’s War, 1940–1945
• 7 The Second World War and theNew Deal for American Science
• 8 Edward Murrow and the “Little People” of the Blitz
• THEME FOUR Wars among the People
• 9 German Anti-partisan Warfare
• 10 Italian Occupation Policies and Counterinsurgency Campaigns in France and in the Balkans, 1940–1943
• 11 Divided Loyalties
• 12 Spawning Fratricide
• 13 Gender and Community during War
• THEME FIVE The History and Memory of “People’s Wars”
• 14 Framing Myths of the Second World War through Ministry of Information Propaganda Posters
• 15 Beyond a “People’s War”
• Contributors
• Index