World War I Past Readings

2023

  • Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
  • Margaret MacMillan, The War to End All Peace: The Road to 1914
  • Dominic Lieven, The End of Tsarist Russia
  • David Fromkin, The Peace to End All Peace
  • Chad Williams, The Wounded World: W.E.B. Du Bois and the First World War
  • Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli
  • Nick Lloyd, The Western Front: A History of the First World War
  • Michael S. Neiberg, The Second Battle of the Marne
  • Philip Ziegler, Between the Wars: 1919–1939
  • Rupert Brooke’s 1914, and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland and The Hollow Men
  • C. S. Forster, The General

2022

  • Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
  • Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion 1914–1918
  • Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
  • Scott Anderson, Lawrence In Arabia
  • Sean McMeekin, The Russian Origins of the First World War
  • Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans
  • Jack Beatty, The Lost History of 1914
  • Mark Arsenault, The Imposter’s War: The Press, Propaganda, and the Battle for the Minds of America
  • Gordon Martel, The Month That Changed the World
  • Stephen Broadberry, The Economics of World War I
  • Elizabeth Cobbs, Hello Girls: America’s First Women Soldiers

2021

  • F. W. Beckett, The Making of the First World War
  • Laurence LaFore, The Long Fuse
  • Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End

2020

  • Jack Beatty, The Lost History of 1914
  • Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans
  • Nigel Jones, The Birth of the Nazis

2019

  • Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916–1931
  • George F. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia and the Coming of the First World War
  • Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life
  • Geoffrey Wawro, The Franco-Prussian War: The German Conquest of France in 1870–71
  • T. G. Otte, July Crisis: The World’s Descent into War, Summer 1914
  • Jörn Leonhard, Pandora’s Box: A History of the First World War
  • E. R. Hooten, Prelude to the First World War: The Balkan Wars 1912–1913
  • Robert K. Massie, Dreadnaught: Great Britain, Germany and the Coming of the First World War
  • Fritz Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War
  • Philipp Blom, The Vertigo Years
  • Steven Beller, The Habsburg Monarchy 1815–1918
  • Geoffrey Wawro, Sons of Freedom: The Forgotten American Soldiers Who Defeated Germany in World War I

2018

  • Xu Guoqi, Asia and the Great War
  • Sean McMeekin, The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908–1923
  • Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924
  • Hew Strachan, The First World War
  • G. J. Meyer, The World Remade:​ America in World War
  • David Stevenson, The First World War and International Politics
  • Christopher Capozzola, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen
  • David Stevenson, 1917: War, Peace, & Revolution
  • Jonathan Boff, Haig’s Enemy: Crown Prince Rupprecht and Germany’s War on the Western Front
  • George F. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: Franco-Russian Relations 1875–1890
  • Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916–1931
  • George F. Kennan, The Fateful Alliance: France, Russia and the Coming of the First World War
  • Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life

2017

  • John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequence of the Peace
  • David Reynolds, The Long Shadow:  The Legacy of the Great War on the Twentieth Century
  • G. J. Meyer​, A World Undone​
  • Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished
  • Richard M. Watt, The Kings Depart: The Tragedy of Germany—Versailles and the German Revolution
  • Richard M. Watt, Dare Call It Treason
  • Andrew Carroll, My Fellow Soldiers​: General John Pershing and the Americans Who Helped Win the Great War

2016

  • Mark Thompson, The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front 1915–1919
  • Harold Nicholson, Peacemaking 1919
  • Dominic Lieven, The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution
  • Peter Hart, The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front
  • Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern
  • Winston Churchill, The Aftermath
  • Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916–1931
  • Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919

2015

  • David From, A Peace to End All Peace
  • Ian F. W. Beckett, The Making of the First World War
  • Louis Barthas, Poilu: The World War I Notebooks of Louis Barthas, Barrelmaker, 1914–1918
  • Alexander Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War
  • A.J.P. Taylor, War By Timetable
  • Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer
  • David Stevenson, Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy
  • Ross Anderson, The Forgotten Front: The East African Campaign, 1914–1918

2014

  • Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914
  • Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914
  • G. Irving Root, Battles East
  • Norman Stone, The Eastern Front 1914 – 1917
  • Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory
  • Paul Jankowski, Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great War
  • Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (Chapters 1-7)
  • Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, The First World War in the Middle East
  • David Fromkin, Peace to End all Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914-1922

2013

  • Tuchman, The Proud Tower
  • Norman Stone, World War One: A Short History
  • Robert Graves, Good-Bye to All That
  • Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth