World War I

As a war raged across the world, young American women flocked to work, painting watches, clocks, and military dials with a special luminous substance made from radium....

Today, 1913 is inevitably viewed through the lens of 1914: as the last year before a war that would shatter the global economic order and tear Europe apart, undermining its global pre-eminence....

It was to be the war to end all wars, and it began at 11:15 on the morning of June 28, 1914, in an outpost of the Austro-Hungarian Empire called Sarajevo. It would officially end nearly five years later. Unofficially, however, it has never ended...

This instant New York Times bestselling “dynamic detective story” (The New York Times) reveals the hidden history Rudolf Diesel, one of the world’s greatest inventors, and his mysterious disappearance on the eve of World War I. September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between...

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From the bestselling author and master of narrative nonfiction comes the enthralling story of the sinking of the Lusitania “Both terrifying and enthralling.”—Entertainment Weekly “Thrilling, dramatic and powerful.”—NPR “Thoroughly engrossing...

The Sleepwalkers is historian Christopher Clark's riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War....

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Drawing on exhaustive research, this intimate account details how World War I reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of our modern world “Thundering, magnificent . . . [A World Undone] is a book of...

Drawing on the latest scholarship as well as eyewitness reports, diary entries, and memoirs, Lloyd moves from the great battles of 1914 to the final collapse of the Central Powers in 1918, showing how a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia spiraled into a massive conflagration.

Were World Wars I and II–which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction–inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Were the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts ever suffered by mankind fated by forces beyond man’s control? Or were they products of calamitous...

The Penguin History of Europe series reaches the 20th century with acclaimed scholar Ian Kershaw's long-anticipated analysis of the pivotal years of World War I and World War II....

The Deluge is a chilling work of great originality that will fundamentally change how we view the legacy of World War I....

In The Fall of the Ottomans, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan brings the First World War and its immediate aftermath in the Middle East to vivid life, uncovering the often ignored story....

From New York Times bestselling author John U. Bacon, a gripping narrative history of the largest manmade detonation prior to Hiroshima: in 1917 a ship laden with the most explosives ever packed on a vessel sailed out of Brooklyn’s harbor for the battlegrounds of World War I; when it stopped...

In this definitive history of the modern Arab world, award-winning historian Eugene Rogan draws extensively on Arab sources and texts to place the Arab experience in its crucial historical context....

In this epic narrative history, the first volume in a groundbreaking trilogy on the Great War, Nick Lloyd captures the horrific fighting on the Western Front beginning with the surprise German invasion of Belgium in August 1914 and taking us to the Armistice of November 1918....

The battle of Verdun lasted ten months. It was a battle in which at least 700,000 men fell, along a front of fifteen miles. Its aim was less to defeat the enemy than bleed him to death and a battleground whose once fertile terrain is even now a haunted wilderness....

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...

An astonishing retelling of 20th-century history from the Ottoman perspective, delivering profound new insights into World War I and the contemporary Middle East....

World War I altered the landscape of the modern world in every conceivable arena. Millions died; empires collapsed; new ideologies and political movements arose; poison gas, warplanes, tanks, submarines, and other technologies appeared. "Total war" emerged as a grim, mature reality....

This classic war memoir, first published in 1920, is based on the author's extensive diaries describing hard combat experienced on the Western Front during World War I.....

The fighting that raged in the East during the First World War was every bit as fierce as that on the Western Front, but the titanic clashes between three towering empires....

Winston Churchill is perhaps the most important political figure of the 20th century....

From a New York Times bestselling historian comes a gripping account of the crisis that threatened to unravel the Weimar Republic....

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review The Economist The Christian Science Monitor Bloomberg Businessweek The Globe and Mail From the bestselling and award-winning author of Paris 1919 comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a fascinating...

Ranging over the entire history of the German Empire, Imperial Germany and War, 1871-1918 presents a picture of unprecedented scope and depth of one of the most widely studied, criticized, and imitated organizations in the modern world....

The Harlem Hellfighters, also known as the 369th Infantry Regiment of the U. S. Army, embody a significant intersection of America’s military history and racial history. Initially raised as the 15th New York (Colored) National Guard and later federalized for World War I, the regiment was "loaned" to the French Army, where it compiled an extraordinary combat record, with a remarkable 191 days on the line and suffering about 1,400 casualties while never yielding its sector (Morrow & Sammons, 2014, pp. 3–6; Harris, 2003, pp. 233–235).

La Prima Guerra Mondiale fu chiamata «la guerra per porre fine a tutte le guerre»... ma non lo fece. In questo resoconto conciso della prima guerra mondiale, esaminiamo le ragioni che la scatenarono, le reazioni che suscitò e, infine, la morte di coloro che fecero il più grande sacrificio. Spesso sentiamo parlare del grande sacrificio compiuto nelle guerre successive, tuttavia, la storia della Prima Guerra Mondiale offre una profonda comprensione del contesto che portò alla Seconda Guerra Mondiale.

A century later, the Western Front still speaks—through sodden earth, shattered timber, and the letters of ordinary men who endured the unendurable. Mud, Blood, and Silence is a visceral, human-scale portrait of trench life in the First World War, told not through grand strategy or shifting front lines, but through the cramped inches where millions lived, fought, and waited. It is the story of mud that swallowed boots and hope, blood that seeped into the chalky soil of France and Belgium, and the terrible, watchful silence between bombardments when every heartbeat felt like a countdown.

In 1914, the year the war breaks out, football is on the rise. Attendances are steadily increasing, and the players are beginning to become household names. Underlining how football has surpassed cricket as the national sport, George V becomes the first monarch to attend the FA Cup Final in May. In this masterful work of history, Christopher Evans explores how footballers were put under immense pressure to sign up once the war began, resulting in the formation of the Football Battalion in England. He tells the story of World War I through the eyes of seven leading footballers of the day.

In the quiet Cambridgeshire countryside, between the villages of Coton and Madingley, lies a place where history and memory meet. The Cambridge American Cemetery, with its sweeping lawns, shining headstones, and solemn Wall of the Missing, is the only permanent American World War II cemetery in the United Kingdom. Nearly 4,000 servicemen and women rest here, and over 5,100 more are inscribed on the wall, their remains lost at sea or over enemy territory.

A genius who changed literature forever. A man whose hatred nearly destroyed him. A legacy the world still can’t escape. In The Man Who Wouldn’t Die, bestselling biographer Evan Blackmoor delivers the definitive, fearless portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Céline—one of the most explosive, contradictory, and haunting figures of the 20th century. From his brutal World War I injury to the creation of Journey to the End of the Night, from literary stardom to political infamy, from exile to rediscovery, this is the gripping story of a writer whose influence refuses to stay buried. Brilliant ...

Sport has always been part of our wars – from the famous cricket match played at Gallipoli as a decoy for the evacuation of Australian troops, to the hero of Tobruk, Changi and the Burma– Thailand railway, Colonel Sir Ernest Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop AC, who so respected his hard-won Wallabies jersey that he insisted on being buried in it, and to legendary Test cricketer Keith Miller, fighter pilot in World War II, who famously said, ‘Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your arse, playing cricket is not'.

La vie de l'auvergnat Gervais-Raoul Lufbéry est une véritable odyssée. Connu pour être l’As des As de la légendaire escadrille des volontaires américains « Lafayette », pendant la Grande Guerre de 14-18, il fit avant le tour du monde en ce début du XXème siècle, sans moyens. Un exploit déjà remarquable pour l'époque. Né à Chamalières, dans le Puy-de-Dôme en Auvergne, le 14 mars 1885, il quitta son Auvergne natale à l’âge de 15 ans, en quête de la grande aventure. Après avoir travaillé dans une fabrique de chocolats à Blois, il s’engagea comme marin, traversa la...

This is a brief account of an ordinary soldier's experiences at Ypres during the early part of World War I. Reginald Davis was a young boy who worked at the publishers Hodder & Stoughton, but like many others of his generation left his workplace to join the army and fight at Ypres and the Somme. It was John Ernest Hodder Williams who, after Davis returned to the offices of Hodder & Stoughton as one of the war-wounded — minus fingers and with other injuries — decided to put Davis' experiences between two covers.

Ralph was a self-made man who took the good examples set by his parents and grandparents, started with very little, cut his losses when necessary, endured the Great Depression without folding and turned a half section of Iowa farm land into a prosperous operation. In so doing he passed on his work ethic and sound judgement to his family and provided a good life for himself and his family. Serving his country when asked to do so may have saved him from getting mired in the Montana homesteading disaster.