Brill’s Digital Library of World War I
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Subject: History
Brill’s Digital Library of World War I is an online resource that contains over 700 encyclopedia entries plus 250 peer-reviewed articles of transnational and global historical perspectives on significant topics of World War I. This collection includes Brill’s Encyclopedia of the First World War, an unrivalled reference work that showcases the knowledge of experts from 15 countries and offers 26 additional essays on the major belligerents, wartime society and culture, diplomatic and military events, and the historiography of the Great War.
The 250 articles address not only the key issues from political, historical and cultural perspectives, but also engages with aspects of the war which have remained underexplored such as the neutrals, the role of women before, during and after the war, and memory. The chapters have been drawn from a select number of Brill publications that have been published in the last 15 years. Brill’s Digital Library of World War I is a unique digital library that will allow researchers to discover new perspectives and connections with the enhanced navigational tools provided.
Subscriptions: see Brill.
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Brill’s Digital Library of World War I is an online resource that contains over 700 encyclopedia entries plus 250 peer-reviewed articles of transnational and global historical perspectives on significant topics of World War I. This collection includes Brill’s Encyclopedia of the First World War, an unrivalled reference work that showcases the knowledge of experts from 15 countries and offers 26 additional essays on the major belligerents, wartime society and culture, diplomatic and military events, and the historiography of the Great War.
The 250 articles address not only the key issues from political, historical and cultural perspectives, but also engages with aspects of the war which have remained underexplored such as the neutrals, the role of women before, during and after the war, and memory. The chapters have been drawn from a select number of Brill publications that have been published in the last 15 years. Brill’s Digital Library of World War I is a unique digital library that will allow researchers to discover new perspectives and connections with the enhanced navigational tools provided.
Subscriptions: see Brill.
Baker, Newton Diehl
(399 words)
Baker, Newton Diehl (December 3, 1871, Martinsburg West Virginia – December 25, 1937, Cleveland, Ohio), American politician (secretary of war). After earning his law degree Baker worked as a solicitor in Martinsburg and served as the mayor of Cleveland from 1912 to 1916. He is thought to be one of the architects of the progressive movement and played a major part in the nomination of Woodrow Wilson as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party in 1912. Baker was highly regarded by President Wilson, who relied on him as a loyal follower and close advisor. In March…
Balfour Declaration
(486 words)
Balfour Declaration Statement by the British government made in a letter from the Foreign Secretary Arthur J. Balfour to Lord Lionel Rothschild on November 2, 1917, expressing support for the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” The Manchester-based British Palestine Committee had campaigned for the Declaration. The most prominent advocate was Chaim Weizmann, an advisor to the British government, who enjoyed good contacts with Lord Balfour and the (then) Chancello…
Balkan Wars
(957 words)
Balkan Wars Two wars in the Balkans region (1912–1913) that caused the Ottoman Empire to lose most of its European territories. During this period of conflict there were differences between the Great Powers concerning the consequences of the Balkan Wars. Against the backdrop of the Italo-Turkish war (1911–1912), the ethnically diverse and unstable Southeastern European States led by Serbia attempted to secure for themselves a share of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. A direct consequence of the Turkish weakness wa…
Balloons
(471 words)
Balloons The early 19th century saw the first balloons employed for military purposes. The use of free balloons in the Franco-Prussian War attracted much attention. The balloons helped the beleaguered capital maintain communications with the surrounding countryside. After 1871 most European Powers created military airship detachments in particular to operate tethered balloons, as they offered a controllable observation platform at altitude. Interest in balloons declined with the emergence of diri…
Baltic States
(1,258 words)
Baltic States The countries of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia are collectively known as the Baltic States. In 1914 they were part of the Russian Empire. In power-political terms, the Baltic States were repeatedly exposed to the expansionist pressure put on them by their larger neighbors: Germany, Russia, Poland, and Scandinavia. At the beginning of the First World War, the Latvian delegate to the Duma J. Goldmanis delivered a declaration of loyalty to the Russian government. Even though opposition movements existed, especially movements of the …
Baptism by Snow: The Ottoman Experience of Winter Warfare During the First World War
(12,771 words)
Atlı, Altay - Baptism by Snow: The Ottoman Experience of Winter Warfare During the First World War
ISFWWS-Keywords: The Ottoman Empire and the Middle East | Published memoirs and biographies | Russian Front | Middle East | Experience of combat | Military organisation of combat
Other Fronts, Other Wars? Joachim Bürgschwentner, Matthias Egger and Gunda Barth-Scalmani , (2014)
Publication Editor: Brill, The Netherlands, 2014
e-ISBN: 9789004279513
DOI: 10.1163/9789004279513_005 © 2014 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Atlı, Altay
Barbarians
(892 words)
Barbarians In all warring societies, the topic of the Barbarians played a central role. In this war, it seemed to hinge upon nothing less than the survival, and the critical importance of humankind. Thus, there developed a script that depicted the war as a conflict between one’s own, idealized nation and a demonized enemy. “Civilization” was thereby commonly juxtaposed against “Barbarity.” This dualism was a powerful concept for two reasons. First, the nation-states of the 19th century were defined through a cultural construct that defined one’s own natio…
Barbusse, Henri
(571 words)
Barbusse, Henri (March 17, 1872, Asnières near Paris – August 30, 1935, Moscow), French writer. Barbusse is undoubtedly one of France’s most famous war novelists. He moreover embodied the type of the left-wing intellectual wartime activist. His 1916 war novel
Le Feu (English:
Under Fire, 1917 and 2003) quickly earned him recognition in and outside of France. Henri Barbusse, 1915. Barbusse was a member of the intellectual bourgeoisie. In 1898 he married Helyonne, daughter of the influential poet Catulle Mendès. At that time he was primarily writing poetry…
Barrage Fire
(300 words)
Barrage Fire A “curtain of fire” created by the artillery, that is the intense, concentrated shelling of a section of terrain to prevent attacking infantry from approaching a defensive position, or to isolate an enemy position from its rear area. The barrage was not aimed at identified, visible targets, but instead sought to deny the enemy movement through a specific area by employing a maximum amount of firepower. Fire distribution and adjustment of the firing batteries had to be completed on schedule as part of the artillery prepara…
Barrès, Maurice
(394 words)
Barrès, Maurice (September 22, 1862, Charmes, département Vosges – December 4, 1923, Neuilly-sur-Seine), French writer and politician. Originally from Lorraine, Barrès was one of the most important exponents of prewar French nationalism. Having come to public attention as the author of a trilogy of novels (
Le Culte du moi, 1888–1891), Barrès turned to the politics and the ideology of nationalism in the wake of the political crisis triggered by General Georges Boulanger in the 1880s that shook the French state and society. Barrès believed that…
Battisti, Cesare
(467 words)
Battisti, Cesare (February 4, 1875, Trento – July 12, 1916, Trento), Italian politician and officer. The son of Italian-speaking parents, Battisti grew up in Trento, which belonged to Austria at the time. Between 1893 and 1897 Battisti studied in Graz, Florence, Turin, and Vienna. He became a supporter of irredentism, a movement calling for the separation of all Italian-speaking territories from the Habsburg Empire and their annexation by Italy. Upon earning his degree in geography Battisti began …
Battlefield Tourism
(601 words)
Battlefield Tourism This term covers visits both to former war locations and landscapes and to military cemeteries of the First World War. The majority of “battlefield tourists” during the 1920s and 1930s were relatives of the fallen. Every French citizen, for example, received a free railway pass every year to visit the military cemeteries. The English travel bureau Thomas Cook specialized in accompanying British visitors to the cemeteries and memorials in Belgium and France, which had begun to be constructed soon a…
Battle of the Frontiers
(647 words)
Battle of the Frontiers Collective term for a series of engagements that were fought in Belgium and France in the course of the German invasion between August 20 and 24, 1914. The German operational plan had envisioned a strong right wing enveloping the bulk of the French, British, and Belgian forces in northern France. Following the successful
coup de main against Liège this right wing consisting of the First, Second, and Third Armies advanced through Belgium toward the French border. The Fourth and Fifth Armies moved through Luxembourg and the Ardenne…
Bauer, Max
(582 words)
Bauer, Max (January 31, 1869, Quedlinburg – May 6, 1929, Shanghai), Prussian officer. Bauer joined the Prussian Foot Artillery Regiment No. 2 in 1888. In 1908, as a captain, Bauer became an artillery expert with the Deployment Section of the General Staff, where he worked with Erich Ludendorff. In 1918 he was prooted to colonel. He remained a close member of Ludendorff ’s staff throughout the war and was considered to be an exceptionally gifted officer with a touch of genius. During the war he was…
Bäumer, Gertrud
(749 words)
Bäumer, Gertrud (September 12, 1873, Hohenlimburg – March 25, 1954, Bethel, now part of Bielefeld), German literary author and women’s rights campaigner. Bäumer was a leading representative of the moderate wing within the bourgeois women’s movement, a distinguished liberal politician and commentator as well as an author of historical novels. From 1910 to 1919 she chaired the Federation of German Women’s Organizations (Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine, BDF), the umbrella organization of the bourgeois women’s movement. The trained teacher, who held a doctorate in German lit…
Bavarian Soviet Republic
(891 words)
Bavarian Soviet Republic A soviet republic is a state in which all executive, legislate, and jurisdictional power is in the hands of elected spokesmen for workers and soldiers, excluding parliament. For a short time in early 1919 there existed in Germany Soviet republics in Cuxhaven, Mannheim, Braunschweig, Bremen, and Munich. Of these, the ones which lasted longest were those in Bremen (25 days) and Munich (24 days). In the first months after the revolution, Bremen was a stronghold of the Spartakus movement. Together with t…
Beatty, David
(572 words)
Beatty, David (January 17, 1871, Howbeck, Cheshire – March 11, 1936, London; from 1919 Earl Beatty, Viscount Borodale of Borodale, Baron Beatty of the North Sea), British Admiral of the Fleet. Beatty joined the Royal Navy in 1884 and participated in various colonial operations, thus for instance in the Sudan (1896–1898) and in China (1900). After commanding several ships between 1902 and 1910, Beatty was promoted to rear admiral in 1910 – the youngest in 100 years. Having been appointed naval secretary to the First Lord of th…
Beckmann, Max
(348 words)
Beckmann, Max (February 12, 1884, Leipzig – December 27, 1950, New York NY), German painter and graphic artist. When Beckmann went to the Eastern Front as a medical volunteer in 1914 he was already a well-known painter. The war, which he experienced at the Western Front in 1915, at first appeared to him as a magnificent natural spectacle, a “wonder” that he hoped would expand and enrich his artistic work: “My art is being fed here.” However, Beckmann’s reaction to the war changed: he became increa…
Belgium
(3,743 words)
Belgium The status of Belgium during the First World War was a special one. Not only as a small, neutral country that had been drawn into the war against its will, but also as an occupied country that only knew the difference between frontline and occupied territories, Belgium did not experience the war in the same way as the other warring nations. The memory of the war that developed after 1918 was accordingly a different one. An additional psychological burden resulted from the fact that Belgiu…
Below, Otto von
(480 words)
Below, Otto von (January 18, 1857, Danzig, modern Gdańsk – March 9, 1944, Besenhausen near Göttingen), German general. After attending secondary school, Below joined the Prussian army as a cadet in 1871. From 1884 to 1887 he attended the Prussian Military Academy and was subsequently appointed to the General Staff. He was given command of a battalion in 1897, a regiment in 1905, and a brigade in 1909. In 1912 he was promoted to lieutenant-general, with command of the 2nd Division at Insterburg (Chernyakhovsk) in East Prussia. At the start of the war Below commanded the Ist Reserve…