Each book lifts its head above battles and biographies to take a broader, more theoretical look at New Zealand society and the war.
Calls to Arms is the best study of our home front story since Paul Baker's indispensable 1988 book King and Country Call.
Loveridge spreads his net wider.
Six chapters examine our sense of being British, anti-alienism, the ''proto-Anzac ethos'', attitudes to shirkers, the mobilisation of womanpower and managing public responses to the costs, human and financial, of war.
Loveridge admits he ''spends altogether too much time in the past'', and challenges the Blackadder Goes Forth TV series with its mythology of blundering British ''chateau generals''.
Launched by writers such as Alan Clark with his line about British troops being ''lions led by donkeys'', the myth of general staff incompetence continues to echo even in 2014 speeches and briefing notes.
New Zealanders (like Australians) have added another nationalist dimension to that mythology by sometimes seeing our participation as a failure of maturity.
Loveridge talks a lot about cultural mobilisation.
By this he means anything from heroic imaginings, sporting euphemisms, gender stereotypes to adversarial imagery.
While top-down state directives did help shape New Zealanders' thinking, war messages he is careful to drill down into everyday attitudes.
As he says, we must dismiss the idea that ''officialdom or a hazily defined 'elite' can be considered the silver bullet that shaped wartime culture and drove popular commitment''.
Indeed, by exploring pre-war culture in depth, Loveridge shows a continuum between major features of the pre-war cultural landscape and the way in which commitment to the struggle was articulated.
Anti-German representations, for example, drew on pre-war anti-alien philosophies and expressions.
World War 1 brought its sharp disruptions, but we mostly grafted new actions and expression on existing preoccupations and priorities.
Those continued after 1918, keeping wartime measures such as passports, six o'clock closing and some anti-sedition and censorship powers.
Based on a PhD thesis, Calls to Arms is largely free of academic jargon and offers an alternative view of the war we will be commemorating for another four years.
• Gavin McLean is a Wellington historian.
