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Аннотация: Do books write themselves?"I ask my students every time we begin a discussion of a new monograph.The purpose of this question, now repeated over thirty years of teaching, is to have students explore the personal and professional baggage authors bring to their writing, but the truth of the matter is that every piece of scholarship is a collective, collaborative enterprise.The single author of a monograph is at best a principal investigator who may take both responsibility and credit for the work and certain decisions associated with it, but would never have been in a position to do so without the assistance of many others, including those who have paved the historiographical highway.The idea for this book was conceived some ten years ago as a much-needed update to the only existing social history of Warsaw during the First World War, Krzysztof Dunin-Wąsowicz's Warszawa w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej (1974), which contained valuable data but otherwise lacked any kind of comparative perspective, ignored issues of gender and ethnicity, and was based solely on Polish sources.The original plan was for this study's publication to coincide with the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War.Unfortunately, books do not write themselves, and a series of unplanned yet eventful circumstances led to one postponement after another.When I began my research, literature on the social history of the "Eastern Front" of the First World War was still in its infancy, less than a decade old, though emerging in cutting-edge fashion through the work of Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius on the German-occupied "Ober Ost" (2000), Peter Gatrell on refugees and the socio-economic history of the war in imperial Russia (1999Russia ( , 2005)), and Eric Lohr on the Russian Empire's "enemy aliens" (2003).The same could be said for a new focus on the social and cultural history of the war in major urban centers, particularly for Berlin by Belinda Davis (2000), Vienna by Maureen Healy ( 2004), Freiburg by Roger Chickering (2008), perhaps inspired-as I was-by the Capital Cities at War volumes on London, Paris, and Berlin edited by Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert (1997, 2007).Since then, Christoph Mick's book on the experience of war in Lwów (2010), Joshua Sanborn's Imperial Apocalypse (2014) on the wartime "decolonization" of the Russian Empire, Jesse Kauffman's Elusive Alliance (2015) on the German occupation regime headquartered in Warsaw, and Katarzyna Sierakowska's book on Poland's Great War in personal documents (2015) have appeared, each with direct bearing on my own, despite differing perspectives and frameworks of analysis.They have
Год издания: 2018
Авторы: Robert Blobaum
Источник: Cornell University Press eBooks
Открытый доступ: bronze
Страницы: vii–xiv