The World War I Reader

Almost 100 years after the Treaty of Versailles was signed, World War I continues to be badly understood and greatly oversimplified. Its enormous impact on the world in terms of international diplomacy and politics, and the ways in which future military engagements would evolve, be fought, and ultimately get resolved have been ignored. With this reader of primary and secondary documents, edited and compiled by Michael S. Neiberg, students, scholars, and war buffs can gain an extensive yet accessible understanding of this conflict. Neiberg introduces the basic problems in the history of World War I, shares the words and experiences of the participants themselves, and, finally, presents some of the most innovative and dynamic current scholarship on the war.
Neiberg, a leading historian of World War I, has selected a wide array of primary documents, ranging from government papers to personal diaries, demonstrating the war’s devastating effect on all who experienced it, whether President Woodrow Wilson, an English doughboy in the trenches, or a housewife in Germany. In addition to this material, each chapter in The World War I Reader contains a selection of articles and book chapters written by major scholars of World War I, giving readers perspectives on the war that are both historical and contemporary. Chapters are arranged chronologically and by theme, and address causes, the experiences of soldiers and their leaders, battlefield strategies and conditions, home front issues, diplomacy, and peacemaking. A time-line, maps, suggestions for further reading, and a substantive introduction by Neiberg that lays out the historiography of World War I round out the book.

Michael S. Neiberg is the author of Fighting the Great War: A Global History, Foch: Allied Commander in the Great War, and Making Citizen-Soldiers: ROTC and the Ideology of American Military Service.

. . . [A] valuable text to introduce students to the broad parameters of World War I. Students whose intellectual appetites are whetted by this collection will appreciate the extensive list of books matched to each category at the end of the book.

Jennifer D. Keene,author of Doughboys, the Great War, and the Remaking of America:
This first-rate collection of primary documents and excerpts from leading historical works on World War I allows students to enter directly into current debates surrounding the wars meaning and significance. These selections provide a window into the varied wartime experiences of statesmen, generals, women, and soldiers, challenging students to discard over-simplistic interpretations of the war.

Dennis Showalter,author of Patton and Rommel: Men of War in the Twentieth Century:
The Great War of 1914-1918 is increasingly understood as the defining event of the twentieth century. . . . Neiberg has done a remarkable job of covering all the appropriate bases and tipping his intellectual hat to the major schools of thought past and present.