In her book The Age of the Gas Mask: How British Civilians Faced the Terrors of Total War, USU History Professor Susan Grayzel traces the fascinating history of one object – the civilian gas mask – through the years 1915–45 and reveals the reach of modern, total war and the limits of the government’s efforts to safeguard civilian life in an extensive empire. Drawing on records from Britain’s Colonial, Foreign, War, and Home Offices and other archives alongside newspapers, journals, personal accounts, and cultural sources, she connects the histories of the First and Second World Wars, combatants and civilians, men and women, metropole and colony, illuminating how new technologies of warfare shaped culture, politics, and society.
Susan Grayzel is Professor of History at Utah State University. Her previous publications include Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France during the First World War (1999), At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (2012), and the co-edited volume Gender and the Great War (2017).
