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....

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....

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 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....

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.

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.

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....

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

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....

Perfect for fans of Peter Hart, Max Hastings, and Barbara W. Tuchman, this is the astounding account of one young infantryman's personal experience of the Western Front in the last year of World War One....

The predominant image of this first world war is of mud and trenches, barbed wire, machine guns, poison gas, and slaughter. A generation of European manhood was massacred, and a wound was inflicted on European civilization that required the remainder of the twentieth century to heal....

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....

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

In 1914 Vera Brittain was 20, and as war was declared she was preparing to study at Oxford....

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....

A dark tale of violence, ideals and a country at war, in Blood and Power, historian John Foot draws on decades of research to chart the turbulent years between 1915 and 1945, and beyond....

The Western Front dominates our memories of the First World War. Yet a million and half men died in northeast Italy in a war that need never have happened....

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....

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....

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....

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.

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 ...

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.

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.