World War I Past Readings

2025

    • Robert Massie, Castles of Steel
    • Barbara W. Tuchman, The Guns of August
    • Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order 1916-1931
    • Pat Barker, Regeneration (Book 1)
    • Gabriel Chevallier, Fear: A Novel of World War I
    • G. J. Meyer, A World Undone

2024

    • Giles Foden, The Bizarre Battle of Lake Tanganyika
    • Jonathan Wyrtzen, Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East
    • Charles Glass, Soldiers Don’t Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood, Poetry, and Mental Illness During the First World War
    • Steven Ujifusa, Last Ships from Hamburg The: Business, Rivalry, and the Race to Save Russia’s Jews on the Eve of World War I
    • Georgina Howell, Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations
    • ATimothy C. Dowling, The Brusilov Offensive (Twentieth-Century Battles)
    • Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919
    • Robert Massie, Castles of Steel

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