Annual Booklist 2025 : Professor Jessica Meyer
Jessica Meyer is Professor of British Social and Cultural History at the University of Leeds. Her research interests lie at the intersection of the histories of gender, particularly masculinity, medicine and warfare. She is the author of Men of War: Masculinity and the First World War in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan) and An Equal Burden: The Men of the Royal Army Medical Corps in the First World War (Oxford University Press, available open access). She has also published extensively on the histories of war disability, popular fiction and military medical service. A keynote speaker at our recent research conference, Jessica was made a Fellow of the Society in 2025 in recognition of her contribution to the fields in which she works.
Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (London: Macmillan Education, 1986)
A precursor to Winter’s seminal Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, this book brings the quantitative methods of the demographic historian to bear on the make-up of the British armed forces in the First World War. In doing so, it provides insight into questions of class, health and mortality. It is the final chapter, which brings social history into conversation with cultural history through a discussion of the war poets that has been most influential for my own work, shaping my approach to writing histories of the First World War since I first read this book as a Master’s student.
Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)
A professor of English literature, Furneaux’s previous major work was a study of masculinities in the work of Dickens. In this beautifully written cultural history of British servicemen in the Crimean War, Furneaux draws on in-depth research into the archives of the National Army Museum. It is not only informative and eminently readable, but inspiring in its synthesis of approaches to the history of the British armed forces.
Alexander Watson, Enduring the Great War: Combat, Morale and Collapse in the German and British Armies, 1914-1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)
There are many excellent studies of morale in the British Army in the First World War. This is one of the finest and most comprehensive. Watson considers motivation, leadership and psychological trauma, factors all too often dealt with in isolation, alongside each other. The comparative aspect of the study, which allows Watson to address the question of why Germany lost the war, is an important reminder that the best histories of the British Army in the First World War are transnational.
Chris Kempshall, British, French and American Relations on the Western Front, 1914-1919 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018)
Like Watson’s work, Kempshall’s book demonstrates the importance of locating the history of the British Army in the First World War in a transnational context, this time that of its allies rather than enemies. As a social history, it centres on the voices of the men in the line, rather than the politicians or generals, to show how the wartime alliance worked (or failed to work) on the ground. What sets this book apart as a social history, however, is the author’s ear for a good quotation and ability to tell a story with all the irony and black humour of his sources.
Rachel Duffett, The Stomach for Fighting: Food and the Soldiers of the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012)
An army may fight on its stomach, but that fact is all too often overlooked by historians. This cultural history of wartime food provision fills this gap, providing me with an important conceptual link in the trajectory of my own research from men writing home about food parcels to the importance of nourishment in the provision of wartime medical care.
This may be a bit of special pleading, given that my current book project has the working sub-title ‘An intimate history of demobilization after the First World War’, but as far as I can tell no one has yet written military history of the demobilization process. There have been a few (though not many) political histories, most recently Adam Siepp’s comparative history of Manchester and Munich, but a history of how the British military handled the process of demobilization after the First World War would be a great contribution to the field.