ABSTRACT
What do historians speak of when they describe the “home front” during a war? There are several ways in which this question might be approached and they are not always compatible. Many scholars separate accounts of civilian life during wartime from the narratives of military campaigns; they assume that the former did not necessarily impact the latter. From this vantage point, studies of the home front can embrace a wide variety of phenomena that cannot be categorized clearly as the history of combat. Other writers, drawing on recent developments in the fields of military and social history, have dissolved this distinction by stressing the permeability of the military and civilian spheres; they maintain that the two constantly interact and cannot be meaningfully separated. Pushed to its logical conclusion, this approach has given rise to the notion of “transformational” war, conflicts in which the demands of mobilization and battle can be so great that they inexorably reshape pre-war patterns of culture, economic activity, politics, and social structure in ways that produce significant and long-lasting change.
