World War 1: Prologue to War - Collection Spotlight

A history of the outbreak of World War I, from the breakdown of diplomacy to the dramatic battles that occurred before the war bogged down in the trenches.

In the years before World War I, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II. During these years, Wilhelm, George, and Nicholas corresponded and wrote about each other in their diaries. The author uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell their tragicomic stories. This book the story of the self delusion of royalty: three monarchs, and their mistaken...

This is a magisterial new account of Europe's tragic descent into a largely inadvertent war in the summer of 1914. Thomas Otte reveals why a century-old system of Great Power politics collapsed so disastrously in the weeks from the 'shot heard around the world' on June 28th to Germany's declaration of war on Russia on August 1st. He shows definitively that the key to understanding how and why Europe descended into world war is to be found in the near-collective...

Beatty offers a highly original view of World War I, testing against fresh evidence the long-dominant assumption that it was inevitable.

"Fictional account of the life of the young Serbian terrorist, Gavrilo Princep, who touched off World War I in 1914 by assassinating the Archduke Franz Ferdinand"-- This much we know: On June 28, 1914, a young man stood on a street corner in Sarajevo, aimed a pistol into a stalled car carrying the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and pulled the trigger. Within a few minutes, the archduke was dead, and Europe would not know peace again for five...

"On a summer morning in Sarajevo almost a hundred years ago, a teenager took a pistol out of his pocket and fired not just the opening rounds of the First World War but the starting gun for modern history. By killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Gavrilo Princip started a cycle of events that would leave 15 million dead from fighting between 1914 and 1918 and proved fatal for empires and a way of ruling that had...