The Great War Through Picture Postcards

The Great War Through Picture Postcards
Author: Guus de Vries
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Total Pages: 796
Release: 2016-01-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1473856698

During World War I, the picture postcard was the most important means of communication for the soldiers in the field and their loved ones at home, with an estimated 30 billion of them sent between 1914 and 1918. A Postcard from home offered the soldier in the trenches a short escape from their daily hell, while receiving a postcard from the man on the front-line was literally a sign of life. These postcards create a vivid record of life at home and abroad during the Great War, both from the messages they carries and the pictures on the cards themselves. The dipiction of war on the contemporary postcards is extremely diverse: The ways in which the postcards depict the war differs greatly; from simple enthusiasm, patriotism and propaganda to humour, satire and bitter hatred. Other portray the wishes and dreams (nostalgia, homesickness and pin-ups) of the soldiers, the technological developments of the armies, not to mention the daily life and death on the battlefield, including the horrific reality of piles of bodied and mass-graves Altogether, this extraordinarily vivid contemporary record of the Great War offers a unique and details insight on the minds and mentality of the soldiers and their families who lived and died in the war to end all wars.

Postcards from the Trenches

Postcards from the Trenches
Author: Irene Guenther
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2018-11-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1350015768

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.

A Postcard View of Hell: One Doughboy’s Souvenir Album of the First World War

A Postcard View of Hell: One Doughboy’s Souvenir Album of the First World War
Author: Frank Jacob
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2019-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1622735951

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.

The Postcard’s Radical Openness

The Postcard’s Radical Openness
Author: Mariluz Restrepo
Publisher: Ethics International Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2024-04-05
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1804415162

The Postcard’s Radical Openness offers a groundbreaking exploration of what this multifaceted, double-sided open card entails and how it has affected our being in the world. With a holistic approach, it focuses on studying the postcard’s specific way of being and performing, a particular ontology that opens up what is constitutively implicated in such an apparently trivial artifact. The book, organized into four parts, meticulously unveils the postcard’s political, technological, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions, ending with a coda correlating the postcard’s radical openness to G. Klimt’s painting, Nuda Veritas (1899) in reference to the scope of truth. By examining the postcard’s complex worldwide history, its socio-cultural significance, and its global effect, the book reveals hidden stories shedding light on its impact on photography, printing, marketing, trade, and business practices and exposes the aesthetic, communicative, and ethical qualities that lie behind the enormous success of postcards at the turn of the 20th century. This comprehensive study is positioned as a thought-provoking invitation to scholars and students interested in material culture, media studies, and human interactions, as well as to history enthusiasts, art lovers, and postcard collectors. Offering a distinctive contribution, the book not only fills a void in the literature but also encourages readers to question and reflect on the transformative power inherent in the postcard's 'radical openness,' presenting a novel and unparalleled analysis of this seemingly trivial yet culturally significant object.

Snapshots and Short Notes

Snapshots and Short Notes
Author: Kenneth Wilson
Publisher: University of North Texas Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-08-14
Genre: Photography
ISBN: 1574418068

Snapshots and Short Notes examines the photographic postcards exchanged during the first half of the twentieth century as illustrated, first-hand accounts of American life. Almost immediately after the introduction of the generic postcard at the turn of the century, innovations in small, accessible cameras added black and white photographs to the cards. The resulting combination of image and text emerged as a communication device tantamount to social media today. Postcard messages and photographs tell the stories of ordinary lives during a time of far-reaching technological, demographic, and social changes: a family’s new combine harvester that could cut 40 acres a day; a young woman trying to find work in a man’s world; the sight of an airplane in flight. However, postcards also chronicled and shared hardship and tragedy––the glaring reality of homesteading on the High Plains, natural disasters, preparations for war, and the struggles for racial and gender equality. With a meticulous eye for detail, painstaking research, and astute commentary, Wilson surveys more than 160 photographic postcards, reproduced in full color, that provide insights into every aspect of life in a time not far removed from our own.

WILTSHIRE AND THE GREAT WAR

WILTSHIRE AND THE GREAT WAR
Author: T. S. Crawford
Publisher: Crowood
Total Pages: 262
Release: 2012-08-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1847974473

Soon after the start of the Great War, work hastily began on a series of hutted camps in Wiltshire for more than 100,000 men, and during the course of the war it became home to troops from Canada, Australia and New Zealand as well as Britain. With soldiers forming a third of the population the effect on the businesses, farms, and indeed the morals of the county was dramatic. Even after the Armistice peace did not return, with mutinies and rioting in the camps because of frustration at delays in demobilization. Wiltshire and the Great War describes this turbulent, fascinating period in depth. It describes pre-war training, showing how inappropriate it was to future warfare, outlines the pioneering of military aviation in the county and describes the role of railways in moving tens of thousands of troops. There are accounts of shirkers, spies, escaped prisoners of war, prostitutes, the 'landship' that clanked across the county and the wireless station that pinpointed the position of Zeppelins. Also described are advances in military technology, the camp-building scandals that led to an inquiry by a Royal Commission, press censorship, and the blighting of the Stonehenge landscape.

The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present

The Historiography of World War I from 1918 to the Present
Author: Christoph Cornelissen
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 516
Release: 2022-11-11
Genre: History
ISBN: 1800737270

From the Treaty of Versailles to the 2018 centenary and beyond, the history of the First World War has been continually written and rewritten, studied and contested, producing a rich historiography shaped by the social and cultural circumstances of its creation. Writing the Great War provides a groundbreaking survey of this vast body of work, assembling contributions on a variety of national and regional historiographies from some of the most prominent scholars in the field. By analyzing perceptions of the war in contexts ranging from Nazi Germany to India’s struggle for independence, this is an illuminating collective study of the complex interplay of memory and history.

Till the Boys Come Home

Till the Boys Come Home
Author: Tonie Holt
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Total Pages: 1298
Release: 2014-11-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 1473841011

This is a new edition of this classic book which includes, in its over 700 postcards, many new, powerful propaganda images from nations on both sides of this epic conflict. Here are cards from the Queen's Collection, cards from America, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Britain, Bulgaria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Egypt, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Rumania, Salonika, Serbia... All are faithfully reproduced from the original, whether in dramatic black and white or in exuberant colour and they are all at least 100 years old. But this is not just a picture book.Here is a rich treasure trove to be dipped into for dilettante pleasure or to be read seriously as a thematic and contemporary history of the war. These cards have been collected over many years and a good number are rare and extremely valuable, both intrinsically and for the fascinating information contained in the informative running text and in the thoughtful captions (an example appears below, just one of the over 700). This is essential reading for anyone who wishes to sense the feelings and emotions of those who lived through, and fought in, the First World War; readers will appreciate the Twitter-like brevity of the captions, the power of the images and enjoy the chase to understand what lies behind them.This handsome and fascinating book uses hundreds of the immensely popular picture postcards of the '14-'18 period to document the course and effects of the Great War, with all its dramatis personae, its humour, suffering, patriotism, sentimentality and fervour.

The Edwardian Picture Postcard as a Communications Revolution

The Edwardian Picture Postcard as a Communications Revolution
Author: Julia Gillen
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2023-07-13
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000903915

This monograph offers a novel investigation of the Edwardian picture postcard as an innovative form of multimodal communication, revealing much about the creativity, concerns and lives of those who used postcards as an almost instantaneous form of communication. In the early twentieth century, the picture postcard was a revolutionary way of combining short messages with an image, making use of technologies in a way impossible in the decades since, until the advent of the digital revolution. This book offers original insights into the historical and social context in which the Edwardian picture postcard emerged and became a craze. It also expands the field of Literacy Studies by illustrating the combined use of posthuman, multimodal, historic and linguistic methodologies to conduct an in-depth analysis of the communicative, sociolinguistic and relational functions of the postcard. Particular attention is paid to how study of the picture postcard can reveal details of the lives and literacy practices of often overlooked sectors of the population, such as working-class women. The Edwardian era in the United Kingdom was one of extreme inequalities and rapid social change, and picture postcards embodied the dynamism of the times. Grounded in an analysis of a unique, open access, digitized collection of 3,000 picture postcards, this monograph will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of Literacy Studies, sociolinguistics, history of communications and UK social history.

Sheffield in the Great War

Sheffield in the Great War
Author: Peter Warr
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2015-05-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 1473860970

This fascinating new book is devoted to an almost unknown period in the history of Sheffield. It sets the city's people and events against a background of key national developments by looking also at the way government regulations were tightened, how the country's morale was maintained, and how industry was encouraged to deliver more output.Sheffield in the Great War is written for the general reader, and a large number of the city's residents, companies and streets are mentioned by name. Many aspects of life and work are described and illustrated with more than one hundred original photographs. Numerous advertisements and excerpts are presented from the city's wartime newspapers, and highlighted Display Boxes in every chapter summarize particularly interesting or quirky themes. For more specialist readers, Notes at the end of the book provide additional detail and links to other publications and websites; general readers can of course ignore those. Two substantial Indexes make it easy to find personally-relevant people, topics and places.The book thus offers to the general reader an easy-to-read narrative with many pictures, and it provides a valuable source of information and reference to those who would like to learn more. Sheffield in the Great War starts with a brief account of the conflict itself, looking at its enormous cost not only in terms of money but also in thousands and thousands of men and horses killed or disabled. Next it presents short reviews of Britain and the city in 1914 to introduce national features which became important in wartime Sheffield. The following chapters describe Sheffield life in the four and a half years of war, with special attention to recruiting and the creation of more than twenty new military hospitals. Huge numbers of people devoted themselves to voluntary work, and the book includes much information that has been lost for the past hundred years.