Review of the hardback: 'The book's primary goals are to provide a generous sample of the best new historical scholarship on trauma; to indicate the empirical, analytical, and methodological scope of this work; and to present some of the conceptual and methodological issues inherent in writing about the subject … All these goals are achieved in a readable style which … will appeal to a general readership beyond trauma experts.' German Historical Institute Bulletin

Traumatic Pasts, originally published in 2001, offers a variety of perspectives on mental trauma in war, medicine, culture and society in modern European and American history. Its primary goals are: to provide a generous sampling of the best of the historical scholarship about trauma; to indicate the empirical, analytical and methodological scope of this work; and to present some of the conceptual and methodological issues inherent in writing about the subject. The book operates on the premise that the historical humanities have something crucially important to say about trauma; its essays may be read, in part, as attempts to introduce a deep historical dimension into ongoing debates and controversies. However, it is important to stress that these essays are not simply addressed the concerns; rather, they reflect a shared conviction that trauma opens up fresh perspectives in the study of social and cultural history.

Contributors
Preface
1. Trauma, psychiatry, and history: a conceptual and historiographical introduction Paul Lerner and Mark S. Micale
Part I. Travel and Trauma in the Victorian Era: 2. The railway accident: trains, trauma, and technological crisis in nineteenth-century Britain Ralph Harrington
3. Trains and trauma in the American gilded age Eric Caplan
Part II. Work, Accidents, and Trauma in the Early Welfare State: 4. Events, series, trauma: the probabilistic revolution of the mind in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Wolfgang Schäffner
5. The German welfare state as a discourse of trauma Greg A. Eghigian
Part III. Theorizing Trauma: Psychiatry and Modernity at the Turn of the Century: 6. Jean-Martin Charcot and les névroses traumatiques: from medicine to culture in French trauma theory of the late nineteenth century Mark S. Micale
7. From traumatic neurosis to male hysteria: the decline and fall of Hermann Oppenheim, 1889–1919 Paul Lerner
8. The construction of female sexual trauma in turn-of-the-century American mental medicine Lisa Cardyn
Part IV. Shock, Trauma, and Psychiatry in the First World War: 9. 'Why are they not cured?' British shellshock treatment during the Great War Peter Leese
10. Psychiatrists, soldiers, and officers in Italy during the Great War Bruna Bianchi
11. A Battle of Nerves: hysteria and its treatments in France during World War I Marc Roudebush
13. Invisible wounds: the American legion, shell-shocked veterans, and American society, 1919–1924 Caroline Cox
Index.

Subject Areas: Trauma & shock [MMKB], History of medicine [MBX], Psychology [JM]