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....

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....

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....

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

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.....

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....

From the acclaimed military historian, a new 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....

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....

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.

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....

Lindsey Fitzharris, the award-winning author of The Butchering Art, presents the compelling, true story of a visionary surgeon who rebuilt the faces of the First World War’s injured heroes, and in the process ushered in the modern era of plastic surgery....

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....

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....

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....

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 this narrative of extraordinary richness, depth, and authority, America's preeminent biographer/historian explored the German national character as no other writer has done....

On New York City's Washington Square lives Catherine Sloper, a shy and plain-looking young woman who is tyrannized by her wealthy, overbearing father....

When war broke out in Europe in August 1914, the new German luxury ocean liner SS Vaterland was interned in New York Harbor....

A new biography exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s wartime experiences and their impact on his life and his writing of The Lord of The Rings....

More than three million American men, many of them volunteers, joined the AEF in the first twenty months of US involvement in the First World War. Of these, over 50,000 were killed on European soil. These were the Doughboys....

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

By the author of acclaimed biographies of Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Adams, a penetrating biography of one of the most high-minded, consequential, and controversial US presidents, Woodrow Wilson....

The Pity of War makes a simple and provocative argument: the human atrocity known as the Great War was entirely England's fault. According to Niall Ferguson, England entered into war based on naive assumptions of German aims....

Unlike most history audiobooks, this one doesn't stop at describing how a particular hero made their contribution to a prominent wartime event. Each chapter highlights one World War I actor, including their personal and professional traits

In 1914, Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, explained to his Parliament the danger posed by German aggression. In The British Rational for Entering World War I, he said moral and security interests necessitated British involvement. Morally, Britain needed to defend Belgium and uphold independence for the Low Countries. As for security, a stronger Germany in control of Western Europe threatened British dominance. Grey pointed out that Britain would suffer whether or not she entered the war. Financing the war and British casualties would hurt her if she entered the war and, if ...

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.

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.

In the second volume of his landmark First World War trilogy, Professor Nick Lloyd tells the story for the first time of what Winston Churchill once called the 'unknown war': the vast conflict in Eastern Europe and the Balkans that brought about the collapse of three empires. Lloyd reconstructs the full story of a war that began in the Balkans as a local struggle between Austria-Hungary and Serbia, and which sucked in Russia, Germany and Italy, right through to the final collapse of the Habsburg Empire in 1918.

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.