The catastrophe that shaped everything after it.
12 topics · 11 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Gallipoli
John Masefield · 1916
A participant's early defence of the Gallipoli campaign, arguing it was a bold strategic gamble undone by inadequate resources and poor execution…
+3 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Under Fire
Henri Barbusse · 1916
A French infantryman's fictionalised but closely observed account of trench warfare, arguing the war's real meaning was the shared suffering of…
+3 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Bismarck, the Man and the Statesman
Otto von Bismarck · 1898
Bismarck's own memoirs defend the intricate alliance system he built after 1871 as necessary to isolate France and prevent a two-front war, a…
+2 more at this level
11 works
John Masefield
A participant's early defence of the Gallipoli campaign, arguing it was a bold strategic gamble undone by inadequate resources and poor execution rather than by the plan itself — a minority view among historians even at the time.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Woodrow Wilson
Sets out fourteen conditions for a durable peace, including open diplomacy and self-determination, arguing a punitive settlement would only plant the seeds of a future war.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Reed
An American journalist's eyewitness account of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd, written as sympathetic history rather than neutral reporting and endorsed by Lenin himself.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Erich Maria Remarque
A German soldier's account arguing that trench warfare destroyed his generation's capacity for any life beyond it, regardless of who eventually won.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Henri Barbusse
A French infantryman's fictionalised but closely observed account of trench warfare, arguing the war's real meaning was the shared suffering of ordinary soldiers on both sides against the abstractions used to justify it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026John Maynard Keynes
Argues that the reparations imposed at Versailles exceeded Germany's capacity to pay and would wreck the European economy that the victors themselves depended on.
about 4.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Bernard M. Baruch
The WIB chairman's own report on directing American industry during the war, arguing centralised government control of production and prices was necessary to mobilise a modern economy for total war.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Jeffery K. Taubenberger and David M. Morens
Argues that the 1918 virus was the ancestor of all subsequent human influenza A pandemics, so later outbreaks are descendants of that event rather than independent emergences.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Otto von Bismarck
Bismarck's own memoirs defend the intricate alliance system he built after 1871 as necessary to isolate France and prevent a two-front war, a structure that unravelled within decades of his dismissal.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Great Britain Foreign Office
The British government's own wartime compilation of diplomatic correspondence, assembled to argue that German and Austro-Hungarian aggression, not Allied provocation, caused the war.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Erich Ludendorff
Germany's wartime chief of staff argues the Eastern Front campaigns, especially the encirclement at Tannenberg, could have won the war outright had home-front politics and resources not been diverted west.
link checked 17 Sept 2026