EXPeditions - The living library of knowlegde16 Des 2025

Aaron William Moore - Soldiers' diaries in WWII

One of the reasons why it's useful to look at the diaries and overall life writings of ordinary soldiers is it helps us understand how people like us got involved in supporting modern warfare.

About Aaron William Moore "I am the Handa Chair of Japanese-Chinese Relations at the University of Edinburgh and a modern historian of China and Japan. I also work in modern literature. I am a 2014 Philip Leverhulme Prize Winner. I am a comparative and transnational historian working with documents in Japanese, Chinese and Russian. I predominantly teach modern history of East Asia. My work includes studies of war diaries, the history of childhood and youth and speculative science writing and science fiction."

Key Points • Soldiers’ diaries are valuable not because they reveal inner truths, but because they show the linguistic tools people used to make sense of war and survive it. • These writings help us see how individuals absorb, reinterpret, or resist state and media messaging, revealing the limits and possibilities of personal agency. • Diaries can be dangerous because they can convince the writer to take harmful actions, and later become a painful or inescapable record of the self. • The act of diary writing was shaped by education and institutional practices, and became a way for ordinary people to participate in larger political and cultural processes.

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