A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall Of The Ottoman Empire And The Creation Of The Modern Middle East

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World

Margaret MacMillan · 624 pages

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

Scott Anderson · 577 pages

This book is a thrilling and revelatory narrative of one of the most epic and consequential episodes in twentieth-century history -- the Arab Revolt and the secret "great game" to control the Middle East. The Arab Revolt against the Turks in World War I was, in the words of T.E. Lawrence, "a sideshow of a sideshow." Amidst the slaughter in European trenches, the Western combatants paid scant atten

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914

Christopher Clark · 736 pages

On the morning of June 28, 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo railway station, Europe was at peace. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that resulted would kill more than fifteen million people, destroy three empires, and permanently alter world history. The Sleepwalkers reveals in gripping detail how the crisis leading to World Wa

George, Nicholas and Wilhelm: Three Royal Cousins and the Road to World War I

Miranda Carter · 498 pages

In the years before World War I, the great European powers were ruled by three first cousins: King George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Tsar Nicholas II. Carter uses the cousins' correspondence and a host of historical sources to tell their tragicomic stories.

The Guns of August

Barbara W. Tuchman · 575 pages

Published to immediate acclaim in 1962 and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1963, The Guns of August is the classic account of the cataclysmic outbreak of World War I in 1914 and the 30 days of battle that followed. This opening clash determined the future course of the war and shaped the history of our century. Its tense drama continues to enthrall readers of Barbara W. Tuchman's magnificent b

Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War

Robert K. Massie · 1,007 pages

Describes the diplomatic minuets and military brinkmanship as Germany grew to be a continental superpower at the end of the nineteenth century and became a threat to Great Britain's naval superiority and isolationist policies.

Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania

Erik Larson · 464 pages

It is a story that many of us think we know but don't, and Erik Larson tells it thrillingly, switching between hunter and hunted while painting a larger portrait of America at the height of the Progressive Era. Full of glamour and suspense, Dead Wake brings to life a cast of evocative characters, from famed Boston bookseller Charles Lauriat to pioneering female architect Theodate Pope to President

July 1914: Countdown to War

Sean McMeekin · 461 pages

When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, the world seemed unmoved. Even Ferdinand's own uncle, Franz Josef I, was notably ambivalent about the death of the Hapsburg heir, saying simply, "It is God's will." Certainly, there was nothing to suggest that the episode would lead to conflict much less a world war of such massive and horrific proportions that

All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror

Stephen Kinzer · 272 pages

This is the first full-length account of the CIA's coup d'etat in Iran in 1953--a covert operation whose consequences are still with us today. Written by a noted New York Times journalist, this book is based on documents about the coup (including some lengthy internal CIA reports) that have now been declassified. Stephen Kinzer's compelling narrative is at once a vital piece of history, a cautiona

The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991

Eric Hobsbawm · 627 pages

In this masterful and highly accessible study of our times, one of the world's leading historians sheds exciting new light on our understanding of the twentieth century, with incisive assessments of events that have marked this turbulent period. Eric Hobsbawm, whose own life spans this century, deftly examines from both personal and scholarly perspectives such events as the great economic depre

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931

Adam Tooze · 672 pages

"A century after the outbreak of the First World War, a powerful explanation of why the war's legacy continues to shape our world. The war would make a celebrity out of Woodrow Wilson and would ratify the emergence of the US as the dominant force in the world economy"--

The First World War: A Complete History

Martin Gilbert · 688 pages

The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Visions of Glory 1874-1932

William Manchester · 896 pages

The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century

David Reynolds · 516 pages

One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In The Long Shadow critically acclaimed historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the twentieth cent

Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War

Max Hastings · 628 pages

From the acclaimed military historian, a new history of the outbreak of World War I: the dramatic stretch from the breakdown of diplomacy to the battles -- the Marne, Ypres, Tannenberg -- that marked the frenzied first year before the war bogged down in the trenches. In Catastrophe 1914, Max Hastings gives us a conflict different from the familiar one of barbed wire, mud and futility. He traces th

The Economic Consequences of the Peace

John Maynard Keynes

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

Ned Blackhawk · 596 pages

John Adams

David McCullough · 751 pages

In this powerful, epic biography, David McCullough unfolds the adventurous life-journey of John Adams, the brilliant, fiercely independent, often irascible, always honest Yankee patriot who spared nothing in his zeal for the American Revolution; who rose to become the second President of the United States and saved the country from blundering into an unnecessary war; who was learned beyond all but

Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine

Eugene Finkel · 336 pages

1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

Charles C. Mann · 631 pages

From the author of 1491 -- the best-selling study of the pre-Columbian Americas -- a deeply engaging new history of the most momentous biological event since the death of the dinosaurs. More than 200 million years ago, geological forces split apart the continents. Isolated from each other, the two halves of the world developed radically different suites of plants and animals. When Christopher C

American Colonies: The Settling of North America

Alan Taylor · 535 pages

"In American Colonies, historian Alan Taylor challenges the traditional Anglocentric focus of colonial history by exploring the many cultural influences that gave birth to America. The result is a superlative history of the prerevolutionary era in North America that is unprecedented in its scope and sure to become a landmark."--BOOK JACKET.

A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East

James Barr · 464 pages

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany

William L. Shirer · 1,264 pages

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World

Peter Frankopan · 382 pages

"Our world was made on and by the Silk Roads. For millennia it was here that East and West encountered each other through trade and conquest, leading to the spread of ideas and cultures, the birth of the world's great religions, the appetites for foreign goods that drove economies and the growth of nations. From the first cities in Mesopotamia to the growth of Greece and Rome to the depredations b