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World War I Officially Ends One Hundred Years Ago Today

Image from the British Museum Website (link found below).

As we honor those who have served our country on Veterans Day, we also observe the centennial of something crucially important to world history. On this date one hundred years ago, World War I officially came to an end. Originally referred to as “the Great War,” this conflict was one of the largest and deadliest in history. Not only was it responsible for the deaths of about nine million combatants (116,708 of them being American) and seven million civilians, but the unresolved tensions and hostilities at the war’s end also heavily contributed to the advent of World War 2. Further, the rippling effects of the social upheavals that were triggered by it are still felt today; the Bolshevik Revolution, the collapse of the centuries old Ottoman Empire, and political revolutions across Europe are just three examples of events caused by the WWI that changed the course of world history. The library has put together a few resources and essential book recommendations to help better understand such an important event in world history.

 

Online Resources

These websites are home to informative articles written by expert historians, pictures, original documents, letters, and much more.

The Library of Congress: Echoes of the Great War

The British Library World War One Website

Indian soldiers prepare for a gas attack (taken from the British Library Website).

 

A portrayal of the death of Peace after Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points are rejected
(taken from the Library of Congress website).

 

Book Recommendations

Image result for the guns of august book cover

The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman

“Historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Barbara Tuchman has brought to life again the people and events that led up to World War I. With attention to fascinating detail, and an intense knowledge of her subject and its characters, Ms. Tuchman reveals, for the first time, just how the war started, why, and how it could have been stopped but wasn’t. A classic historical survey of a time and a people we all need to know more about, THE GUNS OF AUGUST will not be forgotten.” -From Goodreads.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image result for to end all wars book cover

To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914 – 1918 by Adam Hochschild

“World War I stands as one of history’s most senseless spasms of carnage, defying rational explanation. In a riveting, suspenseful narrative with haunting echoes for our own time, Adam Hochschild brings it to life as never before. He focuses on the long-ignored moral drama of the war’s critics, alongside its generals and heroes. Thrown in jail for their opposition to the war were Britain’s leading investigative journalist, a future winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, and an editor who, behind bars, published a newspaper for his fellow inmates on toilet paper. These critics were sometimes intimately connected to their enemy hawks: one of Britain’s most prominent women pacifist campaigners had a brother who was commander in chief on the Western Front. Two well-known sisters split so bitterly over the war that they ended up publishing newspapers that attacked each other. Today, hundreds of military cemeteries spread across the fields of northern France and Belgium contain the bodies of millions of men who died in the war to end all wars. Can we ever avoid repeating history?” – From Goodreads.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thanks for reading!

-George, FTPL

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