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The First World War (IWM)
The First World War tells the story of that war from a fresh perspective, fully illustrated with objects, photographs and works of art from IWM's unparalleled collections. It presents events as they happened, through quotations from diaries, letters or reported conversations written or spoken within hours, days or weeks of the events they describe. Through these voices and objects - emotive, immediate, and sometimes surprising - the story of the war is retold from a compelling new angle, allowing us to both understand and reflect upon the landmark conflict that still shapes our lives today.
Building the story around IWM's collections, the book presents events as they happened through quotations from diaries, letters, oral histories, and more; those accounts are amplified by images of countless objects from the war, from items that would have been in a soldier's kit to paintings created by war artists. Emotive, painful, and surprisingly immediate, this account of the experience, and losses, of World War I will introduce a new generation to this landmark conflict.
Though the Imperial War Museum in London is one of the most popular destinations for tourists and residents in all of the city, few people realize that it was founded in the midst of World War I. As realization of the scale, and the costs, of the war grew, the War Cabinet approved a proposal to create a national war museum to collect and display artifacts that would tell the story of the war as experienced by soldier and civilian alike--and, in particular, would testify to the sacrifices the war demanded.
Paul Cornish
Paperback 256 pages