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...

An overview of the causes of World War I.

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • “A brilliant piece of military history which proves up to the hilt the force of Winston Churchill’s statement that the first month of World War I was ‘a drama never surpassed.’”—Newsweek
 
Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time
In this landmark account, renowned historian Barbara W. Tuchman re-creates...

Johan Thoms (pronounced Yo-han Tomes) was born in Argona, a small town twenty-three miles south of Sarajevo, during the hellish depths of winter 1894. Little did he know that his inability to reverse a car would change the course of 20th Century History forever...

"The Austro-Hungarian army that marched east and south to confront the Russians and Serbs in the opening campaigns of World War I had a glorious past but a pitiful present. Speaking a mystifying array of languages and lugging outdated weapons, the Austrian troops were hopelessly unprepared for the industrialized warfare that would shortly consume Europe. As prizewinning historian Geoffrey Wawro explains in A Mad Catastrophe, the doomed Austrian conscripts...

"'War is the locomotive of history,' claimed Trotsky, a remark thought to acknowledge the opportunity the First World War offered the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia 1917. And here Peter Clarke uses it on a broader canvas to explore how war, rather than socioeconomic forces or individuals, is the prime mover of history. Twentieth-century warfare, based on new technologies and mass armies, saw the locomotive power of war geared up to an unprecedented...