Description
Uncovers how a material object - the civilian gas mask - can reveal the power and limits of the modern state facing total war.
About the Author
Susan R. Grayzel is Professor of History at Utah State University. Her previous publications include Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (1999), At Home and under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (2012), and the co-edited volume Gender and the Great War (2017).
Reviews
'Grayzel's book is a compelling account of the social life of gas masks. She tells the history of war through one object - the gas mask - highlighting the tsunami of emotions it incites, the intensity of people's imagination, and their terror in the face of bodily violence. It is a book guaranteed to destroy any complacency about the inhumanity of war.' Joanna Bourke, author of Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play Invade our Lives
'This book encourages us to think about the idea of total war in the 20th century in new and surprising ways, through the lens of material culture, and the 'weaponisation of the air'. Grayzel illuminates novel ways of thinking about the relationship between individual citizens and states, and the way that war permeated all aspects of life, for both men and women. Britain, and its empire, appear as fresh sites for understanding total war. I expect this will be a landmark book for the social and cultural history of the First and Second World Wars.' Yasmin Khan, author of The Raj at War: a People's History of India's Second World War
'One of the most horrifying strategies of twentieth-century warfare involved poisoning the air. Grayzel's meticulous study of popular and political responses to this awful prospect opens out the meanings and the legacies of efforts to protect the civilian body and offers new ways of understanding modern war.' Penny Summerfield, author of Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War
'Grayzel's impressive archival collection reveals the value of tracing one technological object as it moved from the battlefield onto civilian bodies and eventually into the minds of an entire generation.' Peter Thompson, Technology and Culture
Book Information
ISBN 9781108491273
Author Susan R. Grayzel
Format Hardback
Page Count 288
Imprint Cambridge University Press
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Weight(grams) 550g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 159mm * 20mm