Abstract
Despite the level of interest in the First World War, little writing exits about the early histories of the war published in Britain during the inter-war period. The historians who do discuss this literature propose either a divide between the histories of the 1920s and 1930s, representing a shift to a tragic narrative influenced by fiction about the war, or lump together all of the inter-war histories as sharing similar characteristics. This study expands on the debate by exploring twenty-eight general, non-fiction historical texts about the war aimed at popular consumption published in Britain between 1914 and 1935, and analyzes four elements of their depictions of the war: the origins, casualties, outcome, and any over-arching meaning that they present. It argues that there are three distinct inter-war periods of writing on the war: 1914 to 1920, 1922 to 1927, and 1928 to 1935, with each period characterized by changes in these four elements. The most profound change is between the First Period (1914 to 1920) and the Second Period (1920 to 1927) during which we see a dramatic rise to prominence of impersonal, structural causes for the war, over-arching meanings of the war as a tragedy, and a heightened iv emphasis on the horrors of the war. Over the entire inter-war period, we see the narrowing of authors’ over-arching meanings of the war down to two: the war as a tragedy, or the war as a costly national victory. This study is an addition to the historiography of the First World War, and will contribute to future research on the topic.