World War I: The 'Great War' (Audiobook) | Date: 23 May 2011, 19:28
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From August 1914 to November 1918, an unprecedented catastrophe gripped the world that continues to reverberate into our own time. World War I was touched off by a terrorist act in Bosnia and all too quickly expanded far beyond the expectations of those who were involved to become the first "total war"—the first conflict involving entire societies mobilized to wage unrestrained war, devoting all their wealth, industries, institutions, and the lives of their citizens to win victory at any price.
The cost was ghastly: Altogether, at least nine million soldiers died. Twenty million were wounded, seven million of them permanently disabled. Some estimates put the civilian deaths at almost six million. And countless survivors suffered from psychological trauma for decades after.
The world itself would never be the same. Governments had been given broad new powers to marshal resources for the battle to the death, and these powers have persisted ever since, even in peacetime. Another legacy can be seen almost daily in today's headlines, as border disputes, ethnic conflicts, and ideological arguments smolder on, almost a century after they were first ignited in the Great War.
[b]Riveting, Tragic, Cautionary[/b]
World War I: The "Great War" tells the riveting, tragic, and cautionary tale of this watershed historical event and its aftermath in 36 half-hour lectures delivered by Professor Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius of the University of Tennessee. Professor Liulevicius has a gift for cutting through the tangle of historical data to uncover the patterns that make sense of complex events. And few events are as complex as World War I, which pitted the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Ottoman Turkey, later joined by Bulgaria, against the Allies, principally France, Great Britain, Russia, Italy, Japan, and, after 1917, the United States.
Most narratives of the war focus on the Western Front in France and Flanders, with its mazelike trenches, gas attacks, constant shelling, assaults "over the top" into withering machine gun fire, and duels of dog-fighting aviators in the sky. Professor Liulevicius devotes great attention to this theater, which has become emblematic of World War I in the popular imagination. But the war had other important arenas of engagement that you will also explore in depth, including:
[list][*][b]Eastern Front: [/b]In his writings Winston Churchill called this theater the "Unknown War," and its battles throughout Eastern Europe were much more fluid than those in the West—but certainly equally bloody.
[*][b]Southern Fronts:[/b] In a disastrous attempt to break the stalemate in the West, the Allies landed troops at Gallipoli in the Turkish Dardanelles in 1915. Major action also raged in the southern Alps, Serbia, and northern Greece.
[*][b]War at Sea: [/b]The war introduced submarines as a potentially decisive strategic weapon, particularly as deployed by Germany against Allied shipping. On the Allied side, Great Britain used its naval supremacy to blockade German ports.
[*][b]Arab Revolt:[/b] Aided by archaeologist turned intelligence officer T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), the British encouraged Arab attacks against Turkish forces in the Middle East, feeding the cause of Arab nationalism.
[*][b]Communist Revolution: [/b]A battle-exhausted Russia succumbed to the Bolshevik seizure of power in the fall of 1917, introducing a new factor into world politics: the ideologically guided utopian state, which would cast a dark shadow over subsequent history.
[*][b]Armenian Massacre: [/b]The war formed the backdrop for the first full-scale modern genocide: the 1915 Armenian massacres in Ottoman Turkey, in which as many as one million men, women, and children of the Armenian minority were killed or died from abuse.
[*][b]Spanish Influenza:[/b] As a crowning horror in the concluding stages of the conflict, a worldwide pandemic swept the globe. The Spanish Influenza killed an estimated 50 million people, exceeding the war itself in lethality.
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[hide=Course Lecture Titles][list][*]1. The Century's Initial Catastrophe
[*]2. Europe in 1914
[*]3. Towards Crisis in Politics and Culture
[*]4. Causes of the War and the July Crisis, 1914
[*]5. The August Madness
[*]6. The Failed Gambles—War Plans Break Down
[*]7. The Western Front Experience
[*]8. Life and Death in the Trenches
[*]9. The Great Battles of Attrition
[*]10. The Eastern Front Experience
[*]11. The Southern Fronts
[*]12. War Aims and Occupations
[*]13. Soldiers as Victims
[*]14. Storm Troopers and Future Dictators
[*]15. The Total War of Technology
[*]16. Air War
[*]17. War at Sea
[*]18. The Global Reach of the War
[*]19. The War State
[*]20. Propaganda War
[*]21. Endurance and Stress on the Home Front
[*]22. Dissent and Its Limits
[*]23. Remobilization in 1916–1917
[*]24. Armenian Massacres—Tipping into Genocide
[*]25. Strains of War—Socialists and Nationalists
[*]26. Russian Revolutions
[*]27. America’s Entry into the War
[*]28. America at War—Over There and Over Here
[*]29. 1918—The German Empire’s Last Gamble
[*]30. The War’s End—Emotions of the Armistice
[*]31. Toppled Thrones—The Collapse of Empires
[*]32. The Versailles Treaty and Paris Settlement
[*]33. Aftershocks—Reds, Whites, and Nationalists
[*]34. Monuments, Memory, and Myths
[*]35. The Rise of the Mass Dictatorships
[*]36. Legacies of the Great War
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