The Transnational History of the Great War

The article begins with a periodization of historical writing about the Great War. In the first decades after the end of the conflict, historiography in all its forms followed traditional patterns of historical narrative and was dominated by people who had direct or indirect experience of the events. The 1960’s saw a major historiographical shift with the introduction of social history in WWI studies. Some years later, at a time dominated by the international peace movement, a new generation of scholars turned decisively the focus on the human dimension, distancing themselves from traditional war narratives. In the very last decades, the transnational approach, thoroughly analyzed in the text, has become more and more widespread in WWI studies, as the only way to address the universal dimensions of that war and to understand some of its aspects that far exceed the national level of analysis.