Traumatic Pasts 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 new 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 present-day debates and controversies. However, it is important to stress that these essays are not simply addressed to current concerns; rather, they reflect a shared conviction that trauma opens up new perspectives in the study of social and cultural history.

Table of Contents:
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.