THE WAR TO END ALL WARS
America and the First World War, 1914–1919By Margaret Elspeth Holbrook
Length7h 21m
About this audiobook
World War I history — America and the First World War 1914-1919: Wilson's neutrality, the Lusitania, the Zimmermann Telegram, the Western Front, the influenza pandemic, and the Treaty of Versailles that planted the seeds of the next catastrophe.
On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip stepped forward from the crowd outside a Sarajevo delicatessen and fired twice. Both the Archduke and his wife were dead within the hour. Within thirty-seven days, the alliance machinery of Europe had transformed a Balkan assassination into a continental war. The United States watched from three thousand miles away — and was dragged in anyway, not by any single act of will but by finance, submarines, propaganda, and the structural impossibility of neutrality when $2.3 billion in American bank loans had already tied the country's economy to an Allied victory.
This World War I history follows America's full arc from August 1914 through the Senate's rejection of the League of Nations in 1920. Woodrow Wilson, Henry Cabot Lodge, John Pershing, W.E.B. Du Bois, Eugene Debs, Colonel Edward House, Secretary William Jennings Bryan, and the two million doughboys of the American Expeditionary Forces — along with the 675,000 Americans killed by the influenza pandemic, more than all twentieth-century combat deaths combined — move across twenty-four chapters of the most transformative five years in modern American history.
Inside this World War I history:
The Lusitania's 18 minutes — U-20's single torpedo, 1,198 dead including 128 Americans, and how Germany's legally defensible military argument was politically catastrophic (Chapter 3)
The Western Front's industrial killing — 57,470 British casualties on July 1, 1916 alone; men walking upright into intact machine guns because commanders believed the artillery had cleared them (Chapter 9)
Wilson's impossible neutrality — exports to the Allies rising from $824 million in 1914 to $3.2 billion by 1916; Bryan resigning rather than sign the second Lusitania note; the Sussex Pledge's fragility from the moment Wilson accepted it (Chapter 2)
Influenza at the peace conference — Wilson's April 1919 illness, the cognitive changes his advisers noticed, and the concessions on reparations and the war guilt clause made in his final weeks at Paris (Chapter 16)
Black Americans in the war — the 369th Infantry's 191 days in the French front line, more than any other American unit, and the race riots greeting their return in 1919 (Chapter 14)
The Senate's fatal arithmetic — 23 Wilson-loyal Democrats voting against the treaty with reservations; a shift of 7 votes would have passed it; what the League's absence from American membership cost (Chapter 19)
Holbrook's World War I history delivers the complete American story: why a neutral nation became a belligerent, what it paid, what Wilson promised at Paris, and why the gap between the Fourteen Points and the Treaty of Versailles was the wound through which the next war entered.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length7 hrs 21 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
20Chapter 13: The Lost Generation — American Casualties and Their Stories
2Author’s Note
21Chapter 14: Black Americans in the War — Serving a Country That Excluded Them
3Prologue: The World Before the War
22Chapter 15: Women in the War — Nurses, Workers, and the Suffrage Connection
4PART ONE: THE ROAD TO WAR (1914–1917)
23Chapter 16: The Influenza Pandemic — The War's Deadliest Weapon
5Chapter 1: The Guns of August — Europe Goes to War
24PART FIVE: THE PEACE (1918–1919)
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 2: American Neutrality — Wilson's Impossible Balance
25Chapter 17: The Fourteen Points — Wilson's Vision for the World
7Chapter 3: The Submarine War — Germany's Gamble and America's Response
26Chapter 18: The Paris Peace Conference — Versailles and Its Compromises
8Chapter 4: The Zimmermann Telegram — The Final Provocation
27Chapter 19: The Senate Fight — The Treaty's American Defeat
9PART TWO: AMERICA MOBILIZES (1917)
28Chapter 20: The Red Scare — Fear, Repression, and the Postwar Crisis
10Chapter 5: Over Here — The Draft, Propaganda, and Wartime America
29PART SIX: LEGACIES
11Chapter 6: The Doughboys — Building the American Expeditionary Forces
30Chapter 21: What the War Did to America — The Transformation
12Chapter 7: The Home Front — Industry, Labor, and Sacrifice
31Chapter 22: The Failure of the League — Wilsonianism Without Wilson
13Chapter 8: The War on Dissent — Espionage Act and Civil Liberties
32Chapter 23: The War's Long Shadow — How WWI Led to WWII
14PART THREE: THE WESTERN FRONT (1917–1918)
33Chapter 24: Memory and Memorials — How America Remembers the Great War
15Chapter 9: The Trenches — Life and Death on the Western Front
34Epilogue: The Peace That Failed
16Chapter 10: America Arrives — Pershing and the AEF in France
35Acknowledgments
17Chapter 11: The German Spring Offensive of 1918 — The Last Gamble
36Selected Bibliography
18Chapter 12: The Hundred Days — The Allied Victory
37About the Author
19PART FOUR: THE WAR'S HUMAN COST
More from Margaret Elspeth Holbrook
MotherlandJulia Ioffe17h 52m$40 · $0.00
Where Cowards Go to DieBenjamin Sledge8h 42m$20 · $0.00
Frederick Douglass: All 3 Memoirs in One VolumeFrederick Douglass44h 9m$2 · $0.00
The Bark Canoes and Skin Boats of North America (Annotated)Howard Irving Chapelle, Tappan Adney13h 10m$2 · $0.00
I've Been to the MountaintopMartin Luther King48m5 (1)$11 · $0.00
RevolutionariesSanjeev Sanyal11h 23m$29 · $0.00
We Crossed a Bridge and It TrembledWendy Pearlman6h$24 · $0.00
Unbroken Bonds of BattleJohnny Joey Jones8h 31m$8 · $0.00
The Daughter of AuschwitzTova Friedman, Malcolm Brabant7h 54m$26 · $0.00
Lily's PromiseLily Ebert, Dov Forman8h 54m$29 · $0.00
Saving My EnemyBob Welch9h 11m$20
On Democracies and Death CultsDouglas Murray10h 38m$29 · $0.00
Across the RiverKent Babb11h 40m$29 · $0.00
Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir - Israel, Palestine and BeyondJohn Lyons12h 37m$33 · $0.00
The Fire Next TimeJames Baldwin2h 25m$15
EnduranceAlfred Lansing6h 1m$20
LES MISERABLES (Illustrated Edition)Victor Hugo66h 17m$1 · $0.00
BeyondStephen Walker15h 39m$33 · $0.00
Kings and PawnsHoward Bryant10h 9m$29 · $0.00
No EscapeNury Turkel9h 30m$28 · $0.00
You may also like
A True Account of the Battle of Jutland, May 31, 1916Thomas Goddard Frothingham1h 16m$1 · $0.00
The Gallipoli Diary Volume 2Ian Hamilton9h 55m$2.30
The Capture of Iwo JimaUnited States Navy4h 37m$1 · $0.00
The Battle for the RhineRobin Neillands12h 9m$23
The British Navy in BattleArthur Joseph Hungerford Pollen11h 13m$1 · $0.00
History of the WW1 (Complete 6 Volume Edition) (Annotated)Arthur Conan Doyle$2 · $0.00
One Christmas in WashingtonDavid Bercuson, Holger Herwig11h 4m$21
How Jerusalem Was WonW. T. Massey6h 17m$2 · $0.00
The Crisis of the Naval War: British Royal Navy in World War IJohn Rushworth Jellicoe8h 43m$1 · $0.00
Germany's High Seas Fleet in the WW1 (Annotated)Reinhard Scheer$2 · $0.00
The Battle of the RiversEdmund Dane4h 47m$2 · $0.00
Keith Murdoch’s Gallipoli LetterSir Keith Murdoch49m$8
My Year of the Great WarFrederick Palmer14h 14m$2 · $0.00
The Story of the Great War, Volume 4 of 8Various18h 50m$2.30
Battle Of Rocroi, 1643, In The Thirty Years' WarAndré Geraque Kiffer2h 12m$5 · $0.00
The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire: 1793-1812Alfred Thayer Mahan29h 57m$1 · $0.00
My Second Year of the WarFrederick Palmer6h 42m$2 · $0.00
With the British Army in The Holy LandH. O. Lock5h 9m$2.30
The Great War (All 8 Volumes)Various Authors153h 3m$1 · $0.00
Lessons of the War: Being Comments from Week to Week to the Relief of LadysmithSpenser Wilkinson3h 55m$1 · $0.00