Jay Winter

The Great War and the Twentieth Century Jay Winter

Publisher Marketing: World War I, the first total war in history, set in motion profound changes in the economies, demographics, and philosophies of the warring states. In this book, leading experts on the Great War discuss its causes, character, and legacy. Their writings show that to study World War I is to encounter not only the dissolution of the four defeated empires-Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey-but also the collapse of the optimistic assumption of progress that had defined the nineteenth century. The analysis of the Great War, in fact, provides an essential framework for our understanding of the entire twentieth century. The book draws together military history, international history, and cultural history to offer a wide-ranging summary of current knowledge and debate regarding the First World War. Contributors to this volume: Modris Eksteins, Gerald Feldman, William C. Fuller, Jr., Mary R. Habeck, Holger H. Herwig, John Horne, Michael Howard, A. S. Kanya-Forstner, Leonard V. Smith, Zara Steiner, David Stevenson Contributor Bio:  Winter, Jay Jay Winter is Charles J. Stille Professor of History at Yale University. He came to Yale from Cambridge where he took his doctorate and where he taught history from 1979 to 2001 and was a Fellow of Pembroke College. He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (1995); Remembering War (2006) and Dreams of Peace and Freedom (2006). In 1997, he received an Emmy award for the best documentary series of the year as co-producer and co-writer of 'The Great War and the Shaping of the Twentieth Century', an eight-hour series broadcast on PBS and the BBC, and shown subsequently in 28 countries. He is one of the founders of the Historial de la grande guerre, the international museum of the Great War, in Peronne, Somme, France. His biography of Rene Cassin, written with Antoine Prost, published by Fayard in French in 2011, will appear in an English edition in 2013, published by Cambridge University Press. Contributor Bio:  Parker, Geoffrey Geoffrey Parker is Andreas Dorpalen Professor of History, The Ohio State University and a Fellow of the British Academy. He is one of the world's most prolific and distinguished historians of early modern Europe, above all on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish and military history.