Postcards from the Front 1914–1919 captures the essence of this medium in a unique and fascinating way, bringing to life the pathos, the trauma and the mud and the blood of Flanders and France as the embattled Tommies wrote home to their loved ones.

Visitors to the battlefields of France and Belgium expressed pain and anguish, pride and nostalgia, and wonder and surprise at what they saw. Postcards from the Western Front chronicles the many ways in which these sites were perceived and commemorated by British people, both during the First World War and in the twenty years following the Armistice. Mark Connelly’s definitive and engaging study of the former Western Front examines how different and distinctive sub-communities – regional, ethnic and religious, civilian and armed forces – influenced the depth and strength of the visiting public’s relationship with the battlefields, all the while comparing and contrasting this relationship with the viewpoint of the French and Belgian inhabitants of the devastated regions. Connelly draws from a vast archive a number of interlocking themes, including the lingering presence of the battlefields in the British domestic imagination, the often fraught experience of visiting the battlefields, memorials and cemeteries functioning as part of a historical testimony to wartime realities, and the interactions between visitors and the people living in these former fighting zones. Focusing on French and Belgian sites, Connelly nevertheless provides insight into other major battlefields fought over by troops from the British Empire. Extensively illustrated with black and white photographs, Postcards from the Western Front offers a groundbreaking perspective on landscapes that rarely left anyone – whether tourist, inhabitant, veteran, or pilgrim – unmoved.

German art student Otto Schubert was 22 years old when he was drafted into the Great War. As the conflict unfolded, he painted a series of postcards that he sent to his sweetheart, Irma. During the battles of Ypres and Verdun, Schubert filled dozens of military-issued 4” x 6” cards with vivid images depicting the daily realities and tragedies of war. Beautifully illustrated with full-color reproductions of his exquisite postcards, as well as his wartime sketches, woodcuts, and two lithograph portfolios, Postcards from the Trenches is Schubert's war diary, love journal, and life story. His powerful artworks illuminate and document in a visual language the truths of war. Postcards from the Trenches offers the first full account of Otto Schubert, soldier-artist of the Great War, rising art star in the 1920s, prolific graphic artist and book illustrator, one of the “degenerate” artists defamed by the Nazis, and a man shattered by the Second World War and the Cold War. Created in the midst of enormous devastation, Schubert's haunting visual missives are as powerful and relevant today as they were a century ago. His postcards are both a young man's token of love and longing and a soldier's testimony of the Great War.

For many the postcard may seem trivial, little more than a mundane souvenir or a way to keep in touch with friends and relatives while on vacation. But if we look carefully, postcards offer valuable insights into the time periods in which they were created and the mentalities of those who bought or sent them. Frank Marhefka, while serving in the U.S. Army Motor Transportation Corps during the First World War, amassed a collection of more than 150 postcards and photographs while in France, and bound them into a souvenir album. Marhefka's collection provides a diverse and vivid look into a period of history that - in many soldiers' accounts - is not usually visualized with all its cruelties. Emphasizing the pictorial turn of the Great War, this album offers personal insight into a conflict that caused so much death and destruction. The book begins with an introduction providing a history of postcards and their extensive use by soldiers during the Great War. Then, after a biography of Marhefka, his postcard collection is presented in its entirety. Accompanying the images are brief texts that place them into historical context, as well as suggestions for further reading.As a visual artifact of the First World War and the perspective of one U.S. soldier, this book is aimed at students, scholars, postcard collectors, and general readers alike who have an interest in military history and popular culture.

Bruccoli Great War Collection at the University of South Carolina: An Illustrated Catalogue provides a reference tool for the study of one of the great watershed moments in history on both sides of the Atlantic serving historians, researchers, and collectors.

Steve Smith tells the story of the five Battalions of the Norfolk Regiment who served on the Western Front using previously unseen photographs, diaries, accounts, and letters. He has also had full access to the Norfolk Regiment Museum archives. It is the men who served in the Norfolks who will tell this story. This book will interest readers nationally & locally as it not only studies the Regiment’s participation in well-known battles such as Ypres and the Somme, but also takes a fresh look at the lesser-known battles fought, battles such as Elouges in 1914 and Kaiserschlacht in 1918. Steve has considered the German perspective too, looking at the men who faced them at places such as Falfemont Farm in 1916. Using new evidence from the Regiment’s participation in the Christmas Truce, he separates the truth from myth surrounding the stories of football played at this time, a controversy that still rages. Steve has walked the ground over which they fought and fresh maps complement this research so the book serves as a history book for those at home and a guidebook for those who wish to get out and explore, down to trench level, the ground covered in its pages.

This book provides a thorough examination of the relations between the men in the British, French and American armies on the Western Front of the First World War. The Allied victory in 1918 was built on the backs of British, French, and American soldiers who joined together to fight for a common cause. Using the diaries, records, and letters of these men, Chris Kempshall shows how these soldiers interacted with each other during four years of war. The British army that arrived in France in 1914 became isolated from their French allies and unable to coordinate with them. By 1916, Britain’s professional soldiers were replaced by civilians who learned to love their French ally, who reached out to them in friendship. At the end of the war the introduction of American soldiers caused hope and conflict before perceived British failures brought the alliance to the brink of collapse. Final cooperation between these three nations saw them victorious.

American women's suffrage activists were fascinated with suffrage themed postcards. They collected them, exchanged them, wrote about them, used them as fundraisers and organized "postcard day" campaigns. The cards they produced were imaginative and ideological, advancing arguments for the enfranchisement of women and responding to antisuffrage broadsides. Commercial publishers were also interested in suffrage cards, recognizing their profit potential. Their products, though, were reactive rather than proactive, conveying stereotypes they assumed reflected public attitudes--often negative--towards the movement. Cataloging approximately 700 examples, this study examines the "visual rhetoric" of suffrage postcards in the context of the movement itself and as part of the general history of postcards.

Challenges the tired orthodoxy that the Church of England had a bad First World War.

The soldier-horse relationship was nurtured by The British Army because it made the soldier and his horse into an effective fighting unit. Soldiers and their Horses explores a complex relationship forged between horses and humans in extreme conditions. As both a social history of Britain in the early twentieth century and a history of the British Army, Soldiers and their Horses reconciles the hard pragmatism of war with the imaginative and emotional. By carefully overlapping the civilian and the military, by juxtaposing "sense" and "sentimentality," and by considering institutional policy alongside individual experience, the soldier and his horse are re-instated as co-participators in The Great War. Soldiers and their Horses provides a valuable contribution to current thinking about the role of horses in history.