People's Victory

Lucy Noakes is the Rab Butler Professor of Modern History at the University of Essex, a Trustee of the Mass Observation Archive and the current President of the Royal Historical Society. She is a historian of twentieth-century Britain and an expert on the social and cultural history of the Second World War. Her publications include three single authored books - War and the British: National Identity and the Second World War, Women and the British Army 1907-1948 and Dying for the Nation: Death, Grief and Bereavement in Second World War Britain - and three edited collections.

• Map: Geographical Distribution of Wartime Mass Observation Diarists Prologue: 'An Anthropology of Our Own People' Chapter One: The Second World War in British Myth and Memory - 'I Had a Pretty Quiet War Really' Chapter Two: Mass Observation and the Second World War - 'They Speak for Themselves' Chapter Three: Mass Observers at War - 'War Begins at Home' Chapter Four: 1-6 May 1945 - 'A Week of Confusion and Fluctuating Emotions' Prologue - 7 May 1945: The Funeral of Germany Chapter Five: Daytime, Monday 7 May - 'The Most Unsettling Day of All' Chapter Six: Evening, Monday 7 May - 'I Still Rejoiced with All My Heart' Prologue - 8 May 1945: An End and a Beginning Chapter Seven: Daytime, Tuesday 8 May - 'So, This Is V Day' Chapter Eight: Evening, Tuesday 8 May - 'This Is Your Victory' Afterword: 'It Is All Very Difficult to Imagine We Have Peace'

An intimate, and profoundly moving, encounter with ordinary lives in a moment of extraordinary change. Drawing on the unparalleled riches of the UK's Mass Observation Archive, it shows us that wartime people were complex, surprising and thoughtful - in fact people quite like us. The book is authoritative, enlightening, and narratively gripping.