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Adult study of WWI


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My husband and I are history buffs. Recently I realized we had a lot of WWII history but not WWI. So I went out looking for things talking about WWI and I realized there isn't much out there! My husband just found a very great documentary on WWI that was done in the 1960's in Britten but we can't find much else.

 

Where is the study for WWI? Is there anything out there that anyone could recommend? To me you really need to understand WWI before you can even begin to grasp WWII. My son is a long ways from really needing to know about either war, but I know I wasn't taught about either in school so I need time to catch up!

 

Thank you for the help!

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To me you really need to understand WWI before you can even begin to grasp WWII.

 

As a child, I sort of got the idea that WWI was just a prelude to WWII, like a teaser before the episode starts.

 

As an adult, I've become more and more aware that WWI set the stage for the whole of 20th century history, and the repercussions are still affecting us today. It was a shock, let me tell you.

 

So, yeah, we could all do with a better understanding. Thankfully, we're heading up on the 100th anniversary of the Armistice, so there must be scads of good resources out there by now.

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I don't have any comprehensive WW1 books on my shelves but books I like include:

 

Barbara Tuchman's "Guns of August" is a good book on the start of WW1.

 

MacMilan's "Paris 1919" is an absolutely great look at the peace conference leading up to the Versailles treaty.  

 

Peter Englund's "The Beauty and the Sorrow" is a fascinating book. It is a narrative history of WW1 told through the experiences of 20 very different people. It is told largely through primary source diary entries and letters. I found it somewhat heavy going, but it gives a unique perspective on WW1 and is unlike most other history books.

 

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Yes, I totally agree -- to have a fuller understanding of the 20th century, and to understand WW2, you have to understand WW1 -- and to understand WW1, you really need to understand the world events and thinking of the last few decades of the 1800s, and the first years of the early 1900s -- things like Europe's colonization craze and nationalism, as well as the factors of the economy, social class unrest and the development of socialism, and the leap forward in technology and industrialization -- and how these things worked to set the stage for WW1.

 

I know you're looking for meaty, in-depth resources, but... For a simple but clear introduction into some of the events, I thought SWB's Story of the World vol. 4 was a great, and quick, intro read for an *adult*. We actually used those chapters (before WW1 through WW1) from SOTW as one of our resources in our high school study of the 20th century. :) This 6-minute video on the M-A-I-N Causes of WW1 is also a very clear, concise intro to what forces led up to the war.

 

Then you might look at Stokesbury's A Short History of World War 1 for a short history of the war, and then any other longer works that are overviews or in-depth histories of the war.

 

And then from there, you could go into more depth with adult non-fiction on specific topics of WW1 --Raptor_Dad in his post above listed some very interesting-sounding ones! :) A few others (no personal experience, but they kept popping up as I searched for resource ideas): Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August focuses on the first months of WW1 and how that set the stage for locking the war into a protracted trench war of attrition, while Vera Brittain's memoir Testament of Youth provides the the woman's point of view of WW1 from her actual experiences as a nurse (and as an aside, this memoir was a major contributor in the development of the modern autobiography genre).

 

All Quiet on the Western Front (Remarque) is an incredibly powerful work of writing for what the trench soldier's experience was. It is a classic work of fiction, but drawn from Remarque's own experiences of WW1. He was German and served for Germany, but his experiences are absolutely universal. Reading this one really helped me understand how nationalism and extreme patriotism led young men into joining up for the war; how the technology (bombs and machines able to kill mass numbers and from a distance) "dehumanized" war; and how the "Lost Generation" mindset of the 1920s came from those who came out of WW1 who were completely stripped of a sense of humanity or faith in anything...

 

For a video documentary resource:

One of my adult sons has been watching The Great War Channel on YouTube and enjoying them. Every Thursday, a new 7-10 minute video comes out that covers what happened in WW1 that week in the war, so, 100 years after it happened. They are currently 2 years into what will be a 4-year series of weekly videos, as we are currently 2 years into the 100-year anniversary (2014-2018) of WW1 (1914-1918). The series also provides some prelude videos to get you up to speed on what were some of the events leading up to WW1 and who were the countries involved, and why.

Edited by Lori D.
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There are a ton of free public domain books on WW1.

https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/World_War_I_(Bookshelf)

 

WW1 was an important topic to the people who lived through it, even if those of us that came after it, are much more interested in WW2.

 

There is even a large collection of fiction for kids.

https://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/World_War_I_(Bookshelf)#Juvenile

Edited by Hunter
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There's currently a couple documentaries on Netflix by David Reynolds, on WWI and its impact on the world. Long Shadow and Armistice. I enjoyed them as it also presented why we look at soldiers and sailors the way we do now, and the documentation of wars since. I have been using it as a springboard for research. The first episode of one of them has given me over three weeks of further reading fodder.

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