The Sleepwalkers
The Sleepwalkers

Author: Christopher Clark

Publisher: Harper Collins

Published: 2013-03-19

Total Pages: 680

ISBN-13: 0062199226

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“A monumental new volume. . . . Revelatory, even revolutionary. . . . Clark has done a masterful job explaining the inexplicable.” — Boston Globe One of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year • Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (History) 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, focusing not on the battles and atrocities of the war itself, but on the complex events and relationships that led a group of well-meaning leaders into brutal conflict. Clark traces the paths to war in a minute-by-minute, action-packed narrative that cuts between the key decision centers in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Belgrade, and examines the decades of history that informed the events of 1914 and details the mutual misunderstandings and unintended signals that drove the crisis forward in a few short weeks. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, The Sleepwalkers is a dramatic and authoritative chronicle of Europe’s descent into a war that tore the world apart.

The Great Class War 1914-1918
The Great Class War 1914-1918

Author: Jacques R. Pauwels

Publisher: James Lorimer & Company

Published: 2016-04-06

Total Pages: 758

ISBN-13: 1459411072

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Historian Jacques Pauwels applies a critical, revisionist lens to the First World War, offering readers a fresh interpretation that challenges mainstream thinking. As Pauwels sees it, war offered benefits to everyone, across class and national borders. For European statesmen, a large-scale war could give their countries new colonial territories, important to growing capitalist economies. For the wealthy and ruling classes, war served as an antidote to social revolution, encouraging workers to exchange socialism's focus on international solidarity for nationalism's intense militarism. And for the working classes themselves, war provided an outlet for years of systemic militarization -- quite simply, they were hardwired to pick up arms, and to do so eagerly. To Pauwels, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in June 1914 -- traditionally upheld by historians as the spark that lit the powder keg -- was not a sufficient cause for war but rather a pretext seized upon by European powers to unleash the kind of war they had desired. But what Europe's elite did not expect or predict was some of the war's outcomes: social revolution and Communist Party rule in Russia, plus a wave of political and social democratic reforms in Western Europe that would have far-reaching consequences. Reflecting his broad research in the voluminous recent literature about the First World War by historians in the leading countries involved in the conflict, Jacques Pauwels has produced an account that challenges readers to rethink their understanding of this key event of twentieth century world history.

Europe's Last Summer
Europe's Last Summer

Author: David Fromkin

Publisher: Vintage

Published: 2007-12-18

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0307425789

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When war broke out in Europe in 1914, it surprised a European population enjoying the most beautiful summer in memory. For nearly a century since, historians have debated the causes of the war. Some have cited the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand; others have concluded it was unavoidable. In Europe’s Last Summer, David Fromkin provides a different answer: hostilities were commenced deliberately. In a riveting re-creation of the run-up to war, Fromkin shows how German generals, seeing war as inevitable, manipulated events to precipitate a conflict waged on their own terms. Moving deftly between diplomats, generals, and rulers across Europe, he makes the complex diplomatic negotiations accessible and immediate. Examining the actions of individuals amid larger historical forces, this is a gripping historical narrative and a dramatic reassessment of a key moment in the twentieth-century.

An Introduction to the Causes of War
An Introduction to the Causes of War

Author: Greg Cashman

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2021-04-07

Total Pages: 467

ISBN-13: 1538127806

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This pioneering book, now thoroughly updated to incorporate important research, explains the causes of war through a sustained combination of theoretical insights and detailed case studies. Cashman and Robinson find that while all wars have multiple causes, certain factors typically combine in identifiable “dangerous patterns.” Through their examination of World War I, World War II in the Pacific, the Six-Day War, the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971, the Iran-Iraq War, and the US invasion of Iraq, the authors lay out the complex multilevel processes by which disputes between countries erupt into bloody conflicts. Ideal for a range of courses in international relations at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, this focused text clearly explains theory and applies it to concrete case-study examples in a way that allows students to fully understand the origins of war.

Explaining War and Peace
Explaining War and Peace

Author: Jack Levy

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2007-06-18

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 1134101392

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This edited volume focuses on the use of ‘necessary condition counterfactuals’ in explaining two key events in twentieth century history, the origins of the First World War and the end of the Cold War. Containing essays by leading figures in the field, this book analyzes the causal logics of necessary and sufficient conditions, demonstrates the variety of different ways in which necessary condition counterfactuals are used to explain the causes of individual events, and identifies errors commonly made in applying this form of causal logic to individual events. It includes discussions of causal chains, contingency, critical junctures, and ‘powder keg’ explanations, and the role of necessary conditions in each. Explaining War and Peace will be of great interest to students of qualitative analysis, the First World War, the Cold War, international history and international relations theory in general.

July 1914
July 1914

Author: Sean McMeekin

Publisher: Basic Books

Published: 2014-04-29

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 0465038867

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When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand's own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, "It is God's will." Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflict -- much less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that it would fundamentally reshape the course of human events. As acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might have been avoided entirely had it not been for a small group of statesmen who, in the month after the assassination, plotted to use Ferdinand's murder as the trigger for a long-awaited showdown in Europe. The primary culprits, moreover, have long escaped blame. While most accounts of the war's outbreak place the bulk of responsibility on German and Austro-Hungarian militarism, McMeekin draws on surprising new evidence from archives across Europe to show that the worst offenders were actually to be found in Russia and France, whose belligerence and duplicity ensured that war was inevitable. Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind, each of the men involved -- from Austrian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold and German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov and French president Raymond Poincaré- sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand's murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen. A revolutionary account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 tells the gripping story of Europe's countdown to war from the bloody opening act on June 28th to Britain's final plunge on August 4th, showing how a single month -- and a handful of men -- changed the course of the twentieth century.

A Pretext for War
A Pretext for War

Author: James Bamford

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2005-05-10

Total Pages: 482

ISBN-13: 0307275043

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A Pretext for War reveals the systematic weaknesses behind the failure to detect or prevent the 9/11 attacks, and details the Bush administration’s subsequent misuse of intelligence to sell preemptive war to the American people. Filled with unprecedented revelations, from the sites of “undisclosed locations” to the actual sources of America’s Middle East policy, A Pretext for War is essential reading for anyone concerned about the security of the United States. Acclaimed author James Bamford–whose classic book The Puzzle Palace first revealed the existence of the National Security Agency–draws on his unparalleled access to top intelligence sources to produce a devastating expose of the intelligence community and the Bush administration.

Hidden History
Hidden History

Author: Gerry Docherty

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2013-07-04

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 1780577494

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Think you know about British history and the causes of the First World War? Think again. This fascinating and gripping study of events at the turn of the Twentieth Century is a remarkable insight into how political and social factors that we widely accept to be the causes of The Great War, were really just a construct put together by a very small, but powerful, political elite... 'Thought-provoking . . . Docherty and Macgregor do not mince their words . . . their arguments are powerful' -- Britain at War 'Simply astonishing' -- ***** Reader review 'Very illuminating' -- ***** Reader review 'You simply MUST read this book' -- ***** Reader review 'This is a page-turner' -- ***** Reader review *********************************************************************************** Hidden History uniquely exposes those responsible for the First World War. It reveals how accounts of the war's origins have been deliberately falsified to conceal the guilt of the secret cabal of very rich and powerful men in London responsible for the most heinous crime perpetrated on humanity. For ten years, they plotted the destruction of Germany as the first stage of their plan to take control of the world. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was no chance happening. It lit a fuse that had been carefully set through a chain of command stretching from Sarajevo through Belgrade and St Petersburg to that cabal in London. Our understanding of these events has been firmly trapped in a web of falsehood and duplicity carefully constructed by the victors at Versailles in 1919 and maintained by compliant historians ever since. The official version is fatally flawed, warped by the volume of evidence they destroyed or concealed from public view. Hidden History poses a tantalising challenge. The authors ask only that you examine the evidence they lay before you . . .

Honor
Honor

Author: James Bowman

Publisher: Encounter Books

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 394

ISBN-13: 1594031983

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"From the earliest records of human civilization until the dawn of the twentieth century, and in widely separated cultures throughout the world, the story of honor was inseparable from the story of mankind. Today, an acquaintance with the concept of honor is indispensable to understanding the culture of the Islamic world and its sense of grievance against the West, where honor has been disregarded or actively despised for three-quarters of a century." "James Bowman draws from an wealth of sources across many centuries to illuminate honor's curious history in our own culture, and he discovers that Western honor was always different from that found elsewhere. Its idiosyncratic qualities derived partly from the classical tradition but mainly from the Judeo-Christian heritage, whose emphases on individual morality and, more recently, on sincerity and authenticity in private and personal life have acted as continual challenges to the traditional notion of honor as it is still maintained in other parts of the world. These challenges to honor and the accommodations with it that they ultimately produced are a fundamental theme in our own culture's distinctive history; and the eventual collapse of the honor culture in the West is the background against which the War on Terror and the Clash of Civilizations ought to be seen."--Jacket.