The Civilian Historiography of the First World War: The Great War in Contemporary Historical Scholarship / ההיסטוריוגרפיה האזרחית של מלחמת העולם הראשונה — 'המלחמה הגדולה' בכתיבה האקדמית העכשווית

This article surveys and analyzes the academic scholarship on World War I written in the past two decades in Europe and North America. It argues that this scholarship has ceased to examine the Great War as primarily a military event, but treats it instead as a civilian affair in which even soldiers are predominantly 'civilians in uniforms'. It identifies three metahistorical sensitivities woven into the new scholarship: the war was a 'multifocal' affair rather than an event centered on the Western Front; historians should resist the pull of national historiographies to write about the war from the perspective of contemporaneous and future nation states; transnational, global and local studies are crucial in understanding the human complexity of the war. The article analyzes in detail three areas that have been especially productive in the civilian historiography: gender, human rights and trauma.