The Treaty of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles

Author: Michael S. Neiberg

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2017-07-03

Total Pages: 137

ISBN-13: 0190659203

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Signed on June 28, 1919 between Germany and the principal Allied powers, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I. Problematic from the very beginning, even its contemporaries saw the treaty as a mediocre compromise, creating a precarious order in Europe and abroad and destined to fall short of ensuring lasting peace. At the time, observers read the treaty through competing lenses: a desire for peace after five years of disastrous war, demands for vengeance against Germany, the uncertain future of colonialism, and, most alarmingly, the emerging threat of Bolshevism. A century after its signing, we can look back at how those developments evolved through the twentieth century, evaluating the treaty and its consequences with unprecedented depth of perspective. The author of several award-winning books, Michael S. Neiberg provides a lucid and authoritative account of the Treaty of Versailles, explaining the enormous challenges facing those who tried to put the world back together after the global destruction of the World War I. Rather than assessing winners and losers, this compelling book analyzes the many subtle factors that influenced the treaty and the dominant, at times ambiguous role of the “Big Four” leaders?Woodrow Wilson of the United States, David Lloyd George of Great Britain, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando of Italy, and Georges Clémenceau of France. The Treaty of Versailles was not solely responsible for the catastrophic war that crippled Europe and the world just two decades later, but it played a critical role. As Neiberg reminds us, to understand decolonization, World War II, the Cold War, and even the complex world we inhabit today, there is no better place to begin than with World War I and the treaty that tried, and perhaps failed, to end it.

The Fourteen Points Speech
The Fourteen Points Speech

Author: Woodrow Wilson

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2017-06-17

Total Pages: 32

ISBN-13: 9781548159412

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This Squid Ink Classic includes the full text of the work plus MLA style citations for scholarly secondary sources, peer-reviewed journal articles and critical essays for when your teacher requires extra resources in MLA format for your research paper.

France and Her Eastern Allies, 1919-1925
France and Her Eastern Allies, 1919-1925

Author: Piotr Stefan Wandycz

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1962-01-01

Total Pages: 470

ISBN-13: 0816658862

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

France and her Eastern Allies, 1919–1925 was first published in 1962. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. Relations between France, Czechoslovakia, and Poland occupied an important position in European diplomacy in the years between World War I and World War II. Beginning with the breakdown of the old political, social, and economic order on the Continent during the first World War, these relations went through many changes. This book deals with the crucial period from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 to the signing of the Locarno Pact in 1925. During this time France attempted to establish an eastern barrier of buffer states with Poland and Czechoslovakia at the core, with the aim of keeping Germany and Bolshevik Russia apart. This, France hoped, would guarantee European peace and security. Although an effective eastern barrier was never realized, the attempt to create one was a worthy and important undertaking. Professor Wandycz considers in detail the various aspects of the complex relationship between France and the two western Slav states — geographic, economic, social, and political. In addition, he provides a clear and interesting picture of some of the personalities involved. Through the use of hitherto unpublished source material, he throws new light on many events of general European diplomatic history as well as on Polish, French, and Czechoslovak foreign policy in particular.

Paris 1919
Paris 1919

Author: Margaret MacMillan

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 626

ISBN-13: 0307432963

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created—Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel—whose troubles haunt us still. Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize • Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize • Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Between January and July 1919, after “the war to end all wars,” men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War. Praise for Paris 1919 “It’s easy to get into a war, but ending it is a more arduous matter. It was never more so than in 1919, at the Paris Conference. . . . This is an enthralling book: detailed, fair, unfailingly lively. Professor MacMillan has that essential quality of the historian, a narrative gift.” —Allan Massie, The Daily Telegraph (London)

The Treaty of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles

Author: Manfred F. Boemeke

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 1998-09-13

Total Pages: 696

ISBN-13: 9780521621328

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This text scrutinizes the motives, actions, and constraints that informed decision making by the various politicians who bore the principal responsibility for drafting the Treaty of Versailles.