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This is a fascinating flap book packed with essential information about the First World War, from the start of the conflict in 1914, to its resolution in 1918.
HISTORY. This is a brilliant new historical addition to the "See Inside" series, looking closely at the vehicles and major events that defined the Second World War as one of the most destructive wars in history. Lifting the flaps reveals the insides of some of the military vehicles used during campaigns including tanks, fighter planes and aircraft carriers, while others look in depth at life during the Blitz and the action on the beaches during the invasion of Normandy. Ages 6+.
With a new Afterword, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Kennedy reveals how the First World War's legacy of Wilsonian idealism is reflected today in President George W. Bush's National Security Strategy.
The colours of catastrophe: Rediscovered autochrome photography of the First World War The devastating events of the First World War were captured in myriad photographs on all sides of the front. Since then, thousands of books of black-and-white photographs of the war have been published as all nations endeavour to comprehend the scale and the carnage of the "greatest catastrophe of the 20th century". Far less familiar are the rare colour images of the First World War, taken at the time by a small group of photographers pioneering recently developed autochrome technology. To mark the centenary of the outbreak of war, this groundbreaking volume brings together all of these remarkable, fully hued pictures of the "war to end war". Assembled from archives in Europe, the United States and Australia, more than 320 colour photos provide unprecedented access to the most important developments of the period - from the mobilization of 1914 to the victory celebrations in Paris, London and New York in 1919. The volume represents the work of each of the major autochrome pioneers of the period, including Paul Castelnau, Fernand Cuville, Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, Léon Gimpel, Hans Hildenbrand, Frank Hurley, Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud and Charles C. Zoller. Since the autochrome process required a relatively long exposure time, almost all of the photos depict carefully composed scenes, behind the rapid front-line action. We see poignant group portraits, soldiers preparing for battle, cities ravaged by military bombardment - daily human existence and the devastating consequences on the front. A century on, this unprecedented publication brings a startling human reality to one of the most momentous upheavals in history.
An intimate narrative history of World War I told through the stories of twenty men and women from around the globe--a powerful, illuminating, heart-rending picture of what the war was really like. In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of twenty individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund’s collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling." Composed in short chapters that move between the home front and the front lines, The Beauty and Sorrow brings to life these twenty particular people and lets them speak for all who were shaped in some way by the War, but whose voices have remained unheard.
The First World War created the modern world. A conflict of unprecedented ferocity, it abruptly ended the relative peace and prosperity of the Victorian era, unleashing such demons of the twentieth century as mechanized warfare and mass death. It also helped to usher in the ideas that have shaped our times--modernism in the arts, new approaches to psychology and medicine, radical thoughts about economics and society--and in so doing shattered the faith in rationalism and liberalism that had prevailed in Europe since the Enlightenment. With The First World War, John Keegan, one of our most eminent military historians, fulfills a lifelong ambition to write the definitive account of the Great War for our generation. Probing the mystery of how a civilization at the height of its achievement could have propelled itself into such a ruinous conflict, Keegan takes us behind the scenes of the negotiations among Europe's crowned heads (all of them related to one another by blood) and ministers, and their doomed efforts to defuse the crisis. He reveals how, by an astonishing failure of diplomacy and communication, a bilateral dispute grew to engulf an entire continent. But the heart of Keegan's superb narrative is, of course, his analysis of the military conflict. With unequalled authority and insight, he recreates the nightmarish engagements whose names have become legend--Verdun, the Somme and Gallipoli among them--and sheds new light on the strategies and tactics employed, particularly the contributions of geography and technology. No less central to Keegan's account is the human aspect. He acquaints us with the thoughts of the intriguing personalities who oversaw the tragically unnecessary catastrophe--from heads of state like Russia's hapless tsar, Nicholas II, to renowned warmakers such as Haig, Hindenburg and Joffre. But Keegan reserves his most affecting personal sympathy for those whose individual efforts history has not recorded--"the anonymous millions, indistinguishably drab, undifferentially deprived of any scrap of the glories that by tradition made the life of the man-at-arms tolerable." By the end of the war, three great empires--the Austro-Hungarian, the Russian and the Ottoman--had collapsed. But as Keegan shows, the devastation ex-tended over the entirety of Europe, and still profoundly informs the politics and culture of the continent today. His brilliant, panoramic account of this vast and terrible conflict is destined to take its place among the classics of world history. With 24 pages of photographs, 2 endpaper maps, and 15 maps in text
The First World War had a colossal impact: The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires dissolved; revolutions toppled the Russian and German dynasties; American democracy was tested; the Western European landscape was ravaged. The immediate cost of the four years was staggering--nearly ninemillion dead and millions more physically or psychologically scarred--but the war's long-term consequences were even deeper.Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee and Frans Coetzee use the editorials, memoirs, newspaper articles, poems, and letters of the day to re-create the many facets of the war. Technological developments such as the machine gun and barbed wire brought the world trench warfare, vividly depicted here in a firsthandaccount of then-soldier Benito Mussolini. But fighting at the front lines was only the most graphic part of this violent time; civilians suffered too. A British parliamentary report recommending that businessman Sir Edgar Speyer be stripped of his citizenship because he had been born in Germanydemonstrates government interference in people's lives. An Atlantic Monthly essay by the African-American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois draws attention to the conflict's origins in imperialist greed in Africa. A poor French girl's thank-you note to a charitable American demonstrates the plight ofEurope's children. And a photo essay of poster art reveals the passion and propaganda aroused on every side.Such chaos provided a breeding ground for political extremists, such as the Bolsheviks and later the Nazis, and unleashed decades of conflict that encompassed colonial wars for independence, World War II, and the Cold War. The revolutionary changes that resulted and their geographical scope show howwhat was known to many as the Great War marked the real beginning of the twentieth century.This new edition includes an updated introduction with a note on sources and interpretation, twelve new documents, twenty-seven new sidebars, three new images, and updated further reading and websites. The new documents add material on colonialism in Africa and on purely military aspects of thewar--for example, an excerpt on the coming of war in Germany from Stefan Zweig's autobiography; a description of the Brusilov offensive; the diary of a German deserter, an account of the Christmas truce; soldiers' poetry, a diary from the Gallipoli campaign; Jan Smuts's report on fighting in eastAfrica; and a report from the battle of Jutland. There are also several new literary sources, including a poem by Anna Akhmatova. The new images are two satirical German postcards and a broadside of the Proclamation of a Provisional Government of the Irish Republic.
The First World War in the Middle East is an accessibly written military and social history of the clash of world empires in the Dardanelles, Egypt and Palestine, Mesopotamia, Persia and the Caucasus. Coates Ulrichsen demonstrates how wartime exigencies shaped the parameters of the modern Middle East, and describes and assesses the major campaigns against the Ottoman Empire and Germany involving British and imperial troops from the French and Russian Empires, as well as their Arab and Armenian allies. Also documented are the enormous logistical demands placed on host societies by the Great Powers' conduct of industrialised warfare in hostile terrain. The resulting deepening of imperial penetration, and the extension of state controls across a heterogeneous sprawl of territories, generated a powerful backlash both during and immediately after the war, which played a pivotal role in shaping national identities as the Ottoman Empire was dismembered. This is a multidimensional account of the many seemingly discrete yet interlinked campaigns that resulted in one to one and a half million casualties. It details not just their military outcome but relates them to intelligence-gathering, industrial organisation, authoritarianism and the political economy of empires at war.
James Joll's study is not simply another narrative, retracing the powder trail that was finally ignited at Sarajevo. It is an ambitious and wide-ranging analysis of the historical forces at work in the Europe of 1914, and the very different ways in which historians have subsequently attempted to understand them. The importance of the theme, the breadth and sympathy of James Joll's scholarship, and the clarity of his exposition, have all contributed to the spectacular success of the book since its first appearance in 1984. Revised by Gordon Martel, this new 3rd edition accommodates recent research and an expanded further reading section.
