Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (New York: Harper, 2013) ("It is the central argument of this book that the events of July 1914 make sense only when we illuminate the journeys travelled by the key decision-makers. To do this, we need to do more than simply revisit the sequence of international 'crises' that preceded the outbreak of war--we need to understand how those events were experienced and woven into narratives that structured perceptions and motivated behaviour. Why did the men whose decisions took Europe to war behave and see things as they did? How did the sense of fearfulness and foreboding that one finds in so many of the sources connect with the arrogance and swaggering we encounter--often in the very same individuals? Why did such exotic features of the pre-war scene as the Albanian Question and the 'Bulgarian loan' matter so much, and how were they joined up in the heads of those who had political power? When decision-makers discoursed on the international situation or on external threats, were they seeing something real, or projecting their own fears and desires on to their opponents, or both? The aim has been to reconstruct as vividly as possible the highly dynamic 'decision posiition' occupied by the key actors before and during the summer of 1913." Id. at xxx-xxxi. "In [a] sense, the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world." Id. at 562. "The last section of the book was written at the height of the Eurozone financial crisis or 2011-2012-- present-day event of baffling complexity. It was notable that the actors in the Eurozone crisis, like those of 1914, were aware that there was a possible outcome that would be generally catastrophic (the failure of the euro). All the key protagonists hoped that this would not happen, but in addition to this shared interest, they also had special--and conflicting--interests of their own. Given the inter-relationships across the system, the consequences of any one action depended on the responsive actions of others, which were hard to calculate in advance, because of the opacity of decision-making processes. And all the while, political actors in the Eurozone crisis exploited the possibility of the general catastrophe as leverage in securing their own specific advantages." Id. at 555. Also, see Harold Evans, "On The Brink," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 5/12/2013.).
Charles Emmerson, In Search of the World Before the Great War (New York: PublicAffairs, 2013) ("While enticing domestic migrants, California nonetheless had long feared foreign immigration, particularly from Asia, and had periodically sought to limit it. While the Chinese preferred San Francisco, Japanese migrant preferred the ear around Los Angeles, The numbers involved were small--8,000 Japanese in the whole LA county by 1910--but fear and prejudice were amplified by local politics, and a push-button issue was constructed out of little more than worked-up imaginings of the 'Yellow Peril'. 'Mu neighbor is a Jap', one farmer told a journalist: 'He has an eighty acre place next to mine and he is a smart fellow. He has a white woman living in his house and upon that white woman's knee is a baby. Now what is that baby? It isn't white. I isn't Japanese. I'll tell you what it is, It is the beginning of a problem--the biggest race problem the world has ever known.'" "In 1913 the California legislature in Sacramento prepared to pass legislation which would disbar Japanese farmers for owning land in the state. Washington advised California against it, on the basis that it would offend Asian sensibilities and might, as Japanese diplomats insisted, run counter to the United States' treaty commitments. The Los Angeles Times appealed to the legislators' common sense, leaving 'the Japanese in our midst to cultivate their vegetable gardens, and clean cloths, and make and sell kimonos without molestation'. Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was dispatched on a five-day trek to Sacramento to try and negotiate a for of word s which would allow all sides to claim a measure of victory. But the law Bryan lobbied against was passed in spite of him." Id. at 197.).
Max Hastings, Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (New Knopf, 2013) (See Max Boot, "If One Knew," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/27/2013.).
Margaret MacMillian, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914 (New York: Random House, 2013) ("The future Supreme Allied Commander in the Great War, Ferdinand Foch, then an instructor at the French Staff College, worked out an elaborate proof in 1903 to show that two battalions of attackers would fire 10,000 more bullets than one battalion of defenders and so gain the upper hand. Technology and the power of defense would be overcome by making sure that the attackers outnumbered the defense by a large margin. Far more important than numbers, though, was the psychological factor: soldiers must be motivated through their training and by appeals to their patriotism both to attack and to die. They, and their generals, must accept large losses without losing heart. So, for example, bayonet drill was seen as important because it imbued the soldiers with the desire to attack. And so were dashing uniforms: 'Le pantalon rouge, c'est la France!' exclaimed a formerWar Minister when his successor proposed to take away the traditional red trousers and put the French soldiers into camouflage dress." Id. at 330. Also see Richard Aldous,"How Did It All Happen?," NYT Book Review, Sunday, 10/27/2013.).
David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy (New York: Basic Books, 2004) (In America the Committee on Public Information was even more ambitious: 75,000 lectures by 'four-minute men', 6,000 press releases, exhibitions visited by over ten million people, and 75 million copies distributed in several languages over thirty pamphlets on the United States and the war. Its director, George Creel, and the publicists he co-opted had an evangelistic fervour for communicating the justice of America's cause, but American ideological mobilization had a darker side. The Sedition Act, passed in May 1918, prohibited abusive or disloyal language about the constitution, flag, government, and army or navy uniform, Wilson endorsing it to head off something even more extreme. The American Protection League, a private organization with federal government funding, enrolled 250,000 citizens to spy on neighbors and work colleagues. It opened mail, intercepted telegrams, and carried our raids against suspected draft evaders, preparing the ground for the post-war 'red scare'. The war became a disaster for the American progressive and pacifist movements, and by encouraging the growth of nationalist xenophobia (for example, in speeches condemning disloyal ethnic minorities) the president played sorcerer's apprentice, weakening the supporters of his diplomatic objectives. His home and foreign policies were poorly matched, and although he foresaw the danger his own actions magnified it. At the end of the war, when his ideals seemed to triumph abroad, he was politically humiliated at home." Id. at 374.).
David Stevenson, With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England: Belknap/Harvard U. Press, 2011).
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August; The Proud Tower, edited by Margaret MacMillian (New York: Library of America, 2012).
Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August; The Proud Tower, edited by Margaret MacMillian (New York: Library of America, 2012).
