Crucible

A bold, revisionist account of World War I's lingering end, the bloody years that followed, and the Western world's reeling transformation. Historians have long divided World War I into neat divisions of conflict--1914 to 1918--and peace, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Yet in his new, remarkable history, Charles Emmerson reveals that Europe had already begun its metamorphosis long before the war's end--and that the finale was longer, bloodier, and more complex than...
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A bold, revisionist account of World War I's lingering end, the bloody years that followed, and the Western world's reeling transformation. Historians have long divided World War I into neat divisions of conflict--1914 to 1918--and peace, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Yet in his new, remarkable history, Charles Emmerson reveals that Europe had already begun its metamorphosis long before the war's end--and that the finale was longer, bloodier, and more complex than we've previously been told. As Russia spiraled into revolution with the fall of the Romanovs and the rise of the Bolsheviks, Germany was violently combatting communism within its own borders. As civil war fomented in Ireland, Mustafa Kemal was reinventing himself as father of the Turks. Meanwhile, Freud was revolutionizing the study of the mind, André Breton was changing art forever, and New York's 15th Infantry was playing jazz in France. By 1924, Woodrow Wilson, Vladimir Lenin, Emperor Franz-Josef, and Tsar Nicholas II were all dead, and the metamorphosis of the western world was complete. New states had risen, America was isolated, Germany was embittered, and the French and British were weak and exhausted. Yet after twelve years, the Great War was over, finally. And, as Emmerson proves, it was in this extended eight-year ending--not in the trenches or the halls of Versailles--that the seeds of the future had been sown.