Download or read book The First World War written by Manfried Rauchensteiner and published by Böhlau Wien. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 1063 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The well-respected historian Manfried Rauchensteiner analyses the outbreak of World War I, Emperor Franz Joseph's role in the conflict, and how the various nationalities of the Habsburg Monarchy reacted to the disintegration of this 640-yearold empire in 1918. After Archduke Franz Ferdinand"s assassination in Sarajevo in 1914, war was inevitable. Emperor Franz Joseph intended it, and everyone in Vienna expected it. How the war began and how Austria-Hungary managed to avoid capitulation only weeks later with the help of German troops reads like a thriller. Manfried Rauchensteiner"s book is based on decades of research and is a fascinating read to the very end, even though the final outcome, the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, is already known. Originally published in German in 2013 by Böhlau, this standard work is now available in English.

Download or read book July 1914 written by Sean McMeekin and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2014-04-29 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Great Disorder written by Gerald D. Feldman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-06 with total page 1032 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents a comprehensive study of the most famous and spectacular instance of inflation in modern industrial society--that in Germany during and following World War I. A broad, probing narrative, this book studies inflation as a strategy of social pacification and economic reconstruction and as a mechanism for escaping domestic and international indebtedness. The Great Disorder is a study of German society under the tension of inflation and hyperinflation, and it explores the ways in which Germany's hyperinflation and stabilization were linked to the Great Depression and the rise of National Socialism. This wide-ranging study sets German inflation within the broader issues of maintaining economic stability, social peace, and democracy and thus contributes to the general history of the twentieth century and has important implications for existing and emerging market economies facing the temptation or reality of inflation.

Download or read book The Wars of Yesterday written by Katrin Boeckh and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2018-01-31 with total page 446 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though persistently overshadowed by the Great War in historical memory, the two Balkan conflicts of 1912–1913 were among the most consequential of the early twentieth century. By pitting the states of Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro against a diminished Ottoman Empire—and subsequently against one another—they anticipated many of the horrors of twentieth-century warfare even as they produced the tense regional politics that helped spark World War I. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this volume applies the social and cultural insights of the “new military history” to revisit this critical episode with a central focus on the experiences of both combatants and civilians during wartime.

Download or read book The Great War written by Ian F. W. Beckett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 812 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The course of events of the Great War has been told many times, spurred by an endless desire to understand 'the war to end all wars'. However, this book moves beyond military narrative to offer a much fuller analysis of of the conflict's strategic, political, economic, social and cultural impact. Starting with the context and origins of the war, including assasination, misunderstanding and differing national war aims, it then covers the treacherous course of the conflict and its social consequences for both soldiers and civilians, for science and technology, for national politics and for pan-European revolution. The war left a long-term legacy for victors and vanquished alike. It created new frontiers, changed the balance of power and influenced the arts, national memory and political thought. The reach of this acount is global, showing how a conflict among European powers came to involve their colonial empires, and embraced Japan, China, the Ottoman Empire, Latin America and the United States.

Download or read book The Great War in East Central Europe written by Włodzimierz Borodziej and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Włodzimierz Borodziej and Maciej Górny set out to salvage the historical memory of the experience of war in the lands between Riga and Skopje, beginning with the two Balkan conflicts of 1912-1913 and ending with the death of Emperor Franz Joseph in 1916. The First World War in the East and South-East of Europe was fought by people from a multitude of different nationalities, most of them dressed in the uniforms of three imperial armies: Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian. In this first volume of Forgotten Wars, the authors chart the origins and outbreak of the First World War, the early battles, and the war's impact on ordinary soldiers and civilians through to the end of the Romanian campaign in December 1916, by which point the Central Powers controlled all of the Balkans except for the Peloponnese. Combining military and social history, the authors make extensive use of eyewitness accounts to describe the traumatic experience that established a region stretching between the Baltic, Adriatic, and Black Seas.

Download or read book Germany After the First World War written by Richard Bessel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A social history of Germany in the years following the First World War, this book explores Germany's defeat and the subsequent demobilization of its armies, events which had devastating social and psychological consequences for the nation. Bessel examines the changes brought by the War to Germany, including those resulting from the return of soldiers to civilian life and the effects of demobilization on the economy. He demonstrates that the postwar transition was viewed as a moral crusade by Germans desperately concerned about challenges to traditional authority; and he assesses the ways in which the experience of the War, and memories of it, affected the politics of the Weimar Republic. This is an original and scholarly book, which offers important insights into the sense of dislocation, both personal and national, experienced by Germany and Germans in the 1920s, and its damaging legacy for German democracy.

Download or read book The Great Train Race written by Allan Mitchell and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2000-09-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From their origins, railways produced an intense competition between the two major continental systems in France and Germany. Fitting a new technology into existing political institutions and social habits, these two nations became inexorably involved in industrial and commercial rivalry that eventually escalated into the armed conflict of 1914. Based on many years of research in French and German archives, this study examines the adaptation of railroads and steam engines from Britain to the continent of Europe after the Napoleonic age. A fascinating example of how the same technology, borrowed at the same time from the same source, was assimilated differently by the two continental powers, this book offers a groundbreaking analysis of the crossroads of technology and politics during the first Industrial Revolution.

Download or read book Von Richthofen bis Remarque written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2016-08-09 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Der Band Von Richthofen bis Remarque ergänzt und schließt formal und inhaltlich an den von Hans Wagener 1997 herausgegebenen Band zur deutschen Kriegsprosa nach 1945, Von Böll bis Buchheim (Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik 42), an, indem die Beiträge einzelne deutschsprachige Prosatexte zum I. Weltkrieg thematisieren. Der Schwerpunkt der Analyse in den 23 Beiträgen liegt auf den in den repräsentativen Beispieltexten vermittelten Kriegsbildern und bezieht die Rezeption der Texte und ihre Wirksamkeit für das Bild vom I. Weltkrieg sowohl in der unmittelbaren Nachkriegszeit als auch in der Gegenwart ein. Unter der Prämisse der Analyse der Wandlung des Bildes vom ‘modernen’ Krieg, als dessen paradigmatisches Beispiel der I. Weltkrieg bis heute gilt, in der deutschsprachigen Kriegsprosa beschränkt sich die Auswahl der Texte nicht nur auf die heute dem Kanon der Kriegsliteratur zugerechneten Texte (Remarque, Renn, Koeppen etc.). Mit einbezogen werden Texte, die aufgrund ihrer Verbreitung (Plüschow, Flex, Richthofen, Zöberlein), ihrer kontroversen Rezeption (Carossa, Vogel) oder der vermeintlich historisch-’authentischen’ Darstellung (Schlachten des Weltkrieges) zur Diskussion um das ‘wahre’ Bild des Krieges in der Weimarer Republik und bis in die Gegenwart beigetragen haben. Die Textauswahl strebt darüber hinaus Repräsentativität an, indem auch Texte von Autorinnen (Adrienne Thomas), eine Briefsammlung (Witkop) sowie ein Bild/Text-Band (Schauwecker) einbezogen werden sowie nahezu alle in der Weimarer Republik vertretenen politischen Richtungen berücksichtigt wurden.

Download or read book Pandora s Box written by Jörn Leonhard and published by Belknap Press. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 1105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Norman B. Tomlinson, Jr. Prize “The best large-scale synthesis in any language of what we currently know and understand about this multidimensional, cataclysmic conflict.” —Richard J. Evans, Times Literary Supplement In this monumental history of the First World War, Germany’s leading historian of the period offers a dramatic account of its origins, course, and consequences. Jörn Leonhard treats the clash of arms with a sure feel for grand strategy. He captures the slow attrition, the race for ever more destructive technologies, and the grim experiences of frontline soldiers. But the war was more than a military conflict and he also gives us the perspectives of leaders, intellectuals, artists, and ordinary men and women around the world as they grappled with the urgency of the moment and the rise of unprecedented political and social pressures. With an unrivaled combination of depth and global reach, Pandora’s Box reveals how profoundly the war shaped the world to come. “[An] epic and magnificent work—unquestionably, for me, the best single-volume history of the war I have ever read...It is the most formidable attempt to make the war to end all wars comprehensible as a whole.” —Simon Heffer, The Spectator “[A] great book on the Great War...Leonhard succeeds in being comprehensive without falling prey to the temptation of being encyclopedic. He writes fluently and judiciously.” —Adam Tooze, Die Zeit “Extremely readable, lucidly structured, focused, and dynamic...Leonhard’s analysis is enlivened by a sharp eye for concrete situations and an ear for the voices that best convey the meaning of change for the people and societies undergoing it.” —Christopher Clark, author of The Sleepwalkers

Download or read book God on the Western Front written by Joseph F. Byrnes and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2023-04-26 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From 1914 to 1918, religious believers and hopeful skeptics tried to find meaning and purpose behind divinely willed destruction. God on the Western Front is a history of lived religion across national boundaries, religious affiliations, and class during World War I, utilizing an expansive record of primary sources. Joseph F. Byrnes takes readers on a tour of the battlefields of France, listening to the words of German, French, and English soldiers; going behind the lines to hear from the men and women who provided pastoral and medical care; and reviewing the religious writings of priests, bishops, ministers, and rabbis as they tried to make sense of it all. The story begins with citizens at home as they responded to the obligation to make war and then focuses on the “God-talk” and “nation-talk” that soldiers used to express their foundational religious experiences. Byrnes’s study attends to the words of average men who struggled to articulate their religious sentiments, alongside the generals Helmuth von Moltke, Ferdinand Foch, and Douglas Haig and the soldier theologians Franz Rosenzweig, Paul Tillich, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy. In doing so, he shows how religious and battle experience are intertwined and showcases the wide range of spiritual responses that emerged across boundaries. Going beyond the typical constraints of studies focused either on one nation or one confessional affiliation, Byrnes’s international and interfaith approach breaks new ground. It will appeal to scholars and students of modern European history, religious history, and the history of war.

Download or read book Catastrophe 1914 written by Max Hastings and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2013-09-24 with total page 905 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the acclaimed military historian, a history of the outbreak of World War I: the dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles—the Marne, Ypres, Tannenberg—that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches. In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud and futility. He traces the path to war, making clear why Germany and Austria-Hungary were primarily to blame, and describes the gripping first clashes in the West, where the French army marched into action in uniforms of red and blue with flags flying and bands playing. In August, four days after the French suffered 27,000 men dead in a single day, the British fought an extraordinary holding action against oncoming Germans, one of the last of its kind in history. In October, at terrible cost the British held the allied line against massive German assaults in the first battle of Ypres. Hastings also re-creates the lesser-known battles on the Eastern Front, brutal struggles in Serbia, East Prussia and Galicia, where the Germans, Austrians, Russians and Serbs inflicted three million casualties upon one another by Christmas. As he has done in his celebrated, award-winning works on World War II, Hastings gives us frank assessments of generals and political leaders and masterly analyses of the political currents that led the continent to war. He argues passionately against the contention that the war was not worth the cost, maintaining that Germany’s defeat was vital to the freedom of Europe. Throughout we encounter statesmen, generals, peasants, housewives and private soldiers of seven nations in Hastings’s accustomed blend of top-down and bottom-up accounts: generals dismounting to lead troops in bayonet charges over 1,500 feet of open ground; farmers who at first decried the requisition of their horses; infantry men engaged in a haggard retreat, sleeping four hours a night in their haste. This is a vivid new portrait of how a continent became embroiled in war and what befell millions of men and women in a conflict that would change everything.

Download or read book Gender and Rural Modernity written by Elizabeth B. Jones and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the end of the First World War, women's labor was viewed by contemporary observers as fundamental to the survival of family farms in Germany and consequently to the nation's economic and social stability. At the same time, however, the overburdening of farm women sparked increasingly acrimonious conflicts between young hired women, or Mägde, their employers, and state officials. The progressive feminization of agricultural work in Germany during the prewar decades and attempts after the war to prevent young women's flight from family farms is the focus of this new study. Concentrating principally on developments in the Kingdom, later the Freestate, of Saxony, the author highlights the ways that previously invisible historical actors -young rural women- actively shaped state policies: in disputes over work between Mägde and their employers before village magistrates; in the thorny debates over rural social welfare reform and the campaigns to professionalize farm wives and daughters; and in state officials' uneven enforcement of agricultural employment laws and their struggles to maintain the food supply during and after the First World War. The book furthermore challenges established narratives of German history that equate modernity with the industrial and the urban, instead suggesting that rural inhabitants participated actively in the broader debates and crises that defined modernity in the Imperial and Weimar eras, particularly concerning debates over individual rights versus collective national duties, the future health and prosperity of the Volk, and the meanings of Germanness.

Download or read book Goal written by Christian Koller and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2015-06-26 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Goal! covers the history of the beautiful game from its origins in English public schools in the early 19th century to its current role as a crucial element of a globalized entertainment industry. The authors explain how football transformed from a sport at elite boarding schools in England to become a pastime popular with the working classes, enabling factories such as the Thames Iron Works and the Woolwich Arsenal to give birth to the teams that would become the Premier League mainstays known as West Ham United and Arsenal. They also explore how the age of amateur soccer ended and, with the advent of professionalism, how football became a sport dominated by big clubs with big money and with an international audience.

Download or read book Epistolary Selves written by Rebecca Earle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume of ten essays discusses the pivotal role that letters have played in social, economic and political history from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. The recent scholarly interest in the history of reading has as yet yielded few studies which consider letters as a category of readable material. The contributors to this book seek to redress this oversight, viewing letters as texts which can reveal information, not only about their writers and readers, but about the wider historical context in which they were written. Topics covered include the mercantile letter, diplomatic correspondence, and what these epistolary forms suggest about the rise of a polite, literate culture in the eighteenth century; the experience of immigration from Europe to America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the relationship through the letter; and the working of gender in the epistolary form. Rebecca Earle provides an overview of how the study of letter-writing can open up new avenues of historical as well as literary investigation. This, together with contributions form leading international scholars, makes Epistolary Selves an essential text for those researching the letter genre.

Download or read book The Great War 1914 1918 written by Ian Frederick William Beckett and published by Longman Publishing Group. This book was released on 2001 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Der Krieg auf dem Balkan War in the Balkans written by Andreas Schwarcz, Peter Soustal, Antoaneta Tcholakova and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Am 14. Oktober 1915 trat Bulgarien auf der Seite der Mittelmächte in den Ersten Weltkrieg ein, was letztlich zu großen Verlusten an Menschenleben, aber auch an Gebieten führte. Der 100. Wiederkehr dieses tragischen Datums war 2015 eine Tagung im Haus Wittgenstein gewidmet, deren Ergebnisse nun in diesem Band vorliegen. Insgesamt acht Beiträge behandeln die Vorgeschichte des Kriegseintritts, die Beziehungen Bulgariens zu seinen Nachbarn und zu Österreich-Ungarn sowie die Rezeption in österreichischen Schulbüchern und Ausstellungen. On 14 October 1915, Bulgaria entered World War I on the side of the Central Powers, which ultimately led to great losses of human life, but also of territories. The 100th anniversary of this tragic date was the subject of a conference in 2015 at Haus Wittgenstein, the results of which are now available in this volume. A total of eight contributions deal with the prehistory of the entry into the war, Bulgaria's relations with its neighbours and with Austria-Hungary, as well as its representation in Austrian educational textbooks and exhibitions.