Despite the voluminous historical literature on the First World War, a volume devoted to the theme of communication has yet to appear. From the communication of war aims and objectives to the communication of war call-up and war experience and knowledge, this volume fills the gap in the market, including the work of both established and newly emerging scholars working on the First World War across the globe. The volume includes chapters that focus on the experience of belligerent and also neutral powers, thus providing a genuinely representative dimension to the subject.

In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. In this absorbing history, Winkler sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the United States as the predominant power of the century.

The entry of the Dominions and the colonies into WWI produced a mixture of languages and cultures and communication thus became an international concept. The publication 'Decoding the front' draws the attention to the wide range of possibilities that the word 'communication' covers. Around the turn of the century, modern means of communication were not well-developed but the First World War and technological progress soon changed this. Photography and film, letters, postcards and many ways of communication at the front are discussed such as radio, telephone and telegraph. But also animals such as homing pigeons, horses and dogs were still indispensable in the vast communication network; communication in the First World War was often a strange contradiction between primitive and modern technologies.

Including a wide range of scholarship, this monograph focuses on the theme of communication during the First World War, analysing aspects such as the communication of war aims, objectives and war call-up, the experiences of war while also focusing on the knowledge produced around war.

This book reveals the impact of communications on the military operations of the British Expeditionary Force during the First World War.

During the First World War, mass media achieved an enormous and continuously growing importance in all belligerent countries. Newspaper, illustrated magazines, comics, pamphlets, and instant books, fi ctional works, photography, and the new-born “theater of imagery”, the cinema, were crucial in order to create a heroic vision of the events, to mobilize and maintain the consensus on the war. But their role was pivotal also in creating the image of the war’s end and fi nally, together with a widespread, new literary genre, the war memoirs, to shape the collective memory of the confl ict for the next generations. Even before November 1918, the media raised high expectations for a multifaceted peace: a new global order, the beginning of a peaceful era, the occasion for a regenerating apocalypse. Likewise, in the following decades, particularly war literature and cinema were pivotal to reverse the icon of the Great War as an epic crusade and a glorious chapter of the national history and to create the hegemonic image of a senseless carnage. The Mediatization of War and Peace focalizes on the central role played by mass media in the tortuous transition to the post-war period as well as on the profound disenchantment generated by their prophesies.

This book examines language change and documentation during the First World War. With contributions from international academics, the chapters cover all aspects of communicating in a transnational war including languages at the front; interpretation, translation and parallels between languages; communication with the home front; propaganda and language manipulation; and recording language during the war. This book will appeal to a wide readership, including linguists and historians and is complemented by the sister volume Languages and the First World War: Representation and Memory which examines issues around the representation and memory of the war such as portrayals in letters and diaries, documentation of language change, and the language of remembering the war.