Great War: Western Front and Home Front (Second edition.)

The war that resulted from the Archduke's assassination in 1914 reflected the immediate past of Europe, but it also set up the immediate future of both Europe and the rest of the world.

In The Great War, Hunt Tooley depicts this struggle as an almost organic entity, created by terrain and technology, but shaped as well by the countless human decisions forming a web between the mass violence of war and the societies of the belligerent powers fighting there.

Tooley argues that the home fronts informed the battleground just as the battleground shaped the home fronts.

But he also sees in this vast network of relations the tension between the state and the individual in the modern world.

By working between the two, and by comparing experiences across national lines and battle lines, he creates a new narrative that supersedes the well-known military and political narrative of the war.

Drawing on primary sources and incorporating the most recent research, Tooley rethinks the patterns of society, culture and politics in the early twentieth-century.