Message to the reader
The year 2014 is rich with memorial dates, but the most notable one is the centennial anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. The events of that war have attracted undivided attention of both governmental authorities and scientific community. The discussion of numerous aspects of the world history connected with those events was one of the main reasons for the editorial board of journal “History Studies” to address the theme of war in wider historical terms. The history of mankind is inseparably connected with wars and armed conflicts. There have numbered only a few hundred peaceful years during the whole period of the world history, not taking into consideration small and local conflicts. In this connection multilateral examination of the origins of wars and their types, the lives of people in the war, the influence of hostilities over the economy, society, public policy and international relations is reasonably among the most significant goals of historical science.
Certainly, it goes without saying that it has been absolutely impossible to examine all the facets of the world history of warfare in current issue. Therefore, the reader will find only the isolated examples of research into problems connected with the wars in the period of modern and contemporary history of European and American countries from the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th century to the consequences of the Second World War.
Meanwhile, the large variety of problems raised in the articles and types of analyzed historical sources are among the characteristic features of the work. The images of war taking shape in the minds of contemporaries, civilizational conflicts between the European colonists and Indian indigenous population, characteristics and regional peculiarity of the civil wars, the problems of fighting efficiency and reformation of the armed forces in individual countries can be found here.
Special attention of the issue was paid to the history of the First World War. That war has been of profound interest to the Russian scholars. The Russian Association of the First World War Historians alone numbers 87 members, namely top professional researchers. There also exists a much broader section of public who is simply interested in that “forgotten” war and delves into information about the battles, regiments, certain individuals and their fates.
In the current issue the reader can familiarize himself with such scientific aspects of the events as Britain’s policy in the Balkans and the beginning of the First World War, the July Crisis 1914 and the issue of the mental readiness of the Great European powers’ population to accept the First World War, the projects of the French conservative intellectuals on the problem of territorial and political transformation of Austro-Hungary (1914-1918).
Furthermore, the issue contains interesting information about the new documents connected with the war from the State Archive of the Russian Federation. The reader has an opportunity to familiarize himself with the presentation of the book “The First World War and the fate of European civilization” and the materials of the international conference “The First World War - the prologue of the XX century” which was organized by the Faculty of History of Lomonosov Moscow State University in collaboration with Institute of General History of Russian Academy of Science, Moscow City Teacher Training University and Russian Association of the First World War. This conference stands out against a large number of conferences and exhibitions timed to the centennial anniversary of the war because of the organizers’ desire to scrutinize war and its significance on a broad universal and historic scale.
(c) 2014 Исторические Исследования
Это произведение доступно по лицензии Creative Commons «Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives» («Атрибуция — Некоммерческое использование — Без производных произведений») 4.0 Всемирная.
 | ISSN: 2410-4671 Свидетельство о регистрации СМИ: Эл № ФС77-55611 от 9 октября 2013 г. |