Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain (Material Culture and Modern Conflict)

"How do children cope when their world is transformed by war? This book draws on memory narratives to construct an historical anthropology of childhood in Second World Britain, focusing on objects and spaces such as gas masks, air raid shelters and bombed-out buildings. In their struggles to cope with the fears and upheavals of wartime, with families divided and familiar landscapes lost or transformed, children reimagined and reshaped these material traces of conflict into toys, treasures and playgrounds. This study of the material worlds of wartime childhood offers a unique viewpoint into an extraordinary period in history with powerful resonances across global conflicts into the present day"-- Provided by publisher Modern warfare is a unique cultural phenomenon. While many conflicts in history have produced dramatic shifts in human behaviour, the industrialized nature of modern war possesses a material and psychological intensity that embodies the extremes of our behaviours, from the total economic mobilization of a nation state to the unbearable pain of individual loss. Fundamentally, war is the transformation of matter through the agency of destruction, and the character of modern technological warfare is such that it simultaneously creates and destroys more than any previous kind of conflict.