World War I

September 29, 1913: the steamship Dresden is halfway between Belgium and England. On board is one of the most famous men in the world, Rudolf Diesel, whose new internal combustion engine is on the verge of revolutionizing global industry forever....

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning classic, historian Barbara Tuchman brings to life the people and events that led up to World War I....

On May 1, 1915, with WWI entering its tenth month, a luxury ocean liner as richly appointed as an English country house sailed out of New York, bound for Liverpool, carrying a record number of children and infants....

Between 1917 and 1921 a devastating struggle took place in Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist empire. The doomed White alliance of moderate socialists and reactionary monarchists stood little chance against Trotsky’s Red Army and the single-minded Communist dictatorship under Lenin....

A thrilling and revelatory narrative of one of the most epic and consequential periods in 20th century history - the Arab Revolt and the secret “great game” to control the Middle East....

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 20th century as mechanized warfare and mass death....

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 First World War comes to harrowing life through the intertwined lives of the soldier-poets in Michael Korda's epic Muse of Fire.

On a summer day in 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. While the world slumbered, monumental forces were shaken....

From legendary historian Adam Hochschild, a groundbreaking reassessment of the overlooked but startlingly resonant period between World War I and the Roaring Twenties, when the foundations of American democracy were threated by war, pandemic, and violence fueled by battles over race.

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

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....

A propulsive human drama, The Last Ships from Hamburg chronicles the mass exodus of Jews from Eastern Europe to America in the early years of the twentieth century, and the men who made it possible....

From freezing infantrymen huddled in trenches to intricate political maneuvering in European capitals, noted historian John Toland tells of the unforgettable final year of the First World War....

In the years before the First World War, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V of Britain, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia....

From the best-selling and award-winning author of Paris 1919 comes a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction, a fascinating portrait of Europe from 1900 up to the outbreak of World War I....

African Kaiser is the almost-forgotten true account of Wiemar Germany's military escapades on the dark continent. A story of 1,000-mile marches through the harshest landscapes....

The night broke open in a storm of explosions and fire. The sound of shells whizzing overhead, screeching through the night like wounded pheasants, was terrifying....

A bracing, indispensable account of America's epoch-defining involvement in the Great War, rich with fresh insights into the key issues, events, and personalities of the period....

T.E. Lawrence was a seminal figure in the shaping and reshaping of the politics of Arabia in the early 20th century....

Michael Palin recreates the extraordinary life and tragic death of a First World War soldier—his great-uncle Harry....

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is historian Christopher Clark's riveting account of the explosive beginnings of World War I. Drawing on new scholarship, Clark offers a fresh look at World War I....

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

On the 100th anniversary of the devastating pandemic of 1918, Jeremy Brown, a veteran ER doctor, explores the troubling, terrifying, and complex history of the flu virus, from the origins of the Great Flu that killed millions, to vexing questions....

Sir Barnes Wallis CBE became a household name after the hit 1954 film The Dam Busters in which Michael Redgrave portrayed a shy, slightly abstracted genius at odds with bureaucracy. Yet this was a simplified picture of a complicated, mercurial man....

1915: A U-boat swiftly slips away as a torpedoed freighter sinks into the cold Atlantic, muffling the anguished cries of its burning crew. As war escalates around the world, Germany has shocked mankind by firing on civilian as well as military targets, including the doomed American cargo ship. Amid the international chaos, duty calls Bill Shafer from his humble home in Liverpool, and business draws Everett Stringham from his comfortable life in the United States. Their paths cross aboard the pride of the British fleet, the luxury cruise liner R.M.S. Lusitania, where Everett’s small copy ...

With Muse of Fire, Michael Korda, the bestselling author of Alone and Hero, takes a novel approach to World War I by telling its history through the lives of the soldier-poets whose verses memorialize the war's unimaginable horrors. He begins with Rupert Brooke and the halcyon days before violence engulfed his generation—destroying the self-contented world of Edwardian England—and ends with the tragic death of Wilfred Owen, killed only days before the armistice brought an end to a war that took over 25,000,000 lives.

On the evening of June 27, 1918, the Llandovery Castle—an unarmed, clearly marked hospital ship used by the Canadian military—was torpedoed off the Irish Coast by U-Boat 86, a German submarine. Sinking hospital ships violated international law. To conceal his actions, the U-86 commander had the submarine deck guns fire on survivors. One lifeboat escaped with witnesses to the atrocity. Global outrage over the attack ensued.

Delve into the captivating biography of one of America's most revered heroes. "Sergeant Alvin C. York: From the Hills of Tennessee to the Battlefields of World War I" offers an intimate portrayal of York's remarkable journey from the rugged hills of rural Tennessee to the trenches of World War I. Born into humble beginnings in Pall Mall, Tennessee, York's upbringing instilled in him the values of hard work, integrity, and self-reliance. However, when duty called during World War I, York faced a moral dilemma that would shape the course of his life. Despite his initial reluctance, York's ...

Sent to France with the Royal Flying Corps at just 17, and later a member of the famous 56 Squadron, Cecil Lewis was an illustrious and passionate fighter pilot of the First World War, described by Bernard Shaw in 1935 as 'a thinker, a master of words, and a bit of a poet'. In this vivid and spirited account the author evocatively sets his love of the skies and flying against his bitter experience of the horrors of war. We then follow his progress from France and the battlefields of the Somme to his pioneering defence of London against deadly nighttime raids.

The First World War saw the birth of an extraordinary fighting machine that has held an enduring fascination for over a century: the tank. In TANK MEN, ex-soldier and military historian Robert Kershaw brings to life the grime, the grease and the fury of a tank battle through the voices of ordinary men and women who lived and fought in those fearsome machines. Drawing on vivid personal testimony from the crucial battles of the First and Second World Wars, this is military history at its very best.

Discover the key battles, tactics, technologies and turning points of the First World War—the epic conflict that was supposed to be "the war to end all wars". With authoritative, exciting text, The World War I Book explores the historical background to the war, its causes, all of key events across the major theatres of conflict, and its aftermath.

War has always led to prisoners. In ancient times, many were turned into slaves by the victorious armies, while in medieval Europe, they were often returned to their families in return for a ransom, leading to fortune or poverty depending upon which side one was on. By the Napoleonic era, as armies grew in size and professionalism, many were kept in camps for the duration of the fighting, their captors not wanting to restore their enemies' manpower while the fate of nations hung in the balance.

With authoritative, exciting text, The World War I Book explores the historical background to the war, its causes, all of key events across the major theatres of conflict, and its aftermath. Using the original approach of the series, entries profile more than 90 of the key events during and surrounding the conflict - from tensions between Europe's major powers to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the German invasion of Belgium, the endless slaughter in the trenches, the American entry into the war, the Russian Revolution, the Armistice, and the creation of the League of Nations.

This is not a history of the First World War. It is the story of the women of the resistance in Belgium and Occupied northern France during that conflict. Stroud uses six main characters as a lens to describe the work of an extraordinarily brave group of women. In 1914, before the Germans invaded, they were ordinary people – some were poor, some were rich, some were low born and others from the top echelons of society – they were drawn together by war and they show what the individual can do when faced with apparently overwhelming odds.