The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914

The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914Description by Margaret MacMillan Paperback From the bestselling 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. The century since the end of the Napoleonic wars had been the most peaceful era Europe had known since the fall of the Roman Empire. In the first years of the twentieth century, Europe believed it was marching to a golden,

He assesses the changing values attached to the Panthéon and argues that the panorama’s status and frequent reshaping have both informed and been informed by the experience and memory of the First World War in France and the United States—and also reflects on how it has promoted a politically and culturally conservative agenda

Williams reveals the central role of African American soldiers in World War I and how they

and other technologies appeared

offering a new perspective on such issues as the ethno-religious bloodletting and forced population transfers which attended the breakup of empire

and on what this history has to teach us

An exciting

but the war challenged their notions of citizenship

domestic food production was higher at the end of the war than at the start

and the loss of so many of their brethren

Soldier after soldier came in with the most dreaded kinds of casualty: awful

the average calorific value of the British diet barely changed and bread never had to be rationed here

while the ethnic tensions would erupt into further bloodshed after the Cold War ended as Yugoslavia collapsed during the 1990s