The Pivotal Conflict: A Comprehensive Chronology of the First World War, 1914-1919

(Hardback)

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This is a comprehensive chronology of World War I and how it transformed the world politically, economically, socially, technologically and culturally. Herman outlines the military actions and events of the Great War in chronological order, depicting the actions of the belligerents on the Western, Eastern and Southern Fronts, in the colonies, on sea and in the air, in the order in which they entered the war. His chronology juxtaposes these military events alongside international actions, showing how the events of the war led to treaties and declarations, conferences, meetings and various kinds of informal contacts and results. He goes on to outline domestic events in terms of political, economic, social, cultural and technological activities. The chronology should be of great use to all libraries, institutions and individuals seriously concerned with military history and modern world history.

Reviews

Recommended for history collections with a devoted World War I clientele.-ARBA
The Pivotal Conflict, an exhaustive chronology of World War I, views that complex of events as the wellspring of this century's harsh history of war, nationalism, and superpower stalemate. Its daily three-column format commences with the assassination on June 28, 1914, of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and concludes with the signing of the first of the Versailles treaties five years to the day later. Within those three columns covering military, international-diplomatic, and domestic (a relative term not confined to a single nation's internal affairs) events, a hierarchy of letters explained in the introduction organizes entries by front or type of event. The subject index, citing entries by date but not by column, would have been more useful had major subjects (e.g., Palestine, Woodrow Wilson) been subdivided and had headings been subjected to authority control to bring together terms separated alphabetically (e.g., American Jews, Jews, Polish Jews). This provides much more extensive coverage of diplomatic to-and-fro and domestic events in both combatant nations and the isolationist United States than Randal Gray's Chronicle of the First World War (New York: Facts on File, 1990), which, in its cleaner layout, offers more detail about the many efforts to end the war's long military quagmire. Comparison of the two chronologies' coverage of individual days shows considerable overlap in selection of the day's major event and considerable differences among lesser events. This illustrates the breadth and complexity of the world war rather than deficiency in either of these complementary chronologies. The Chronicle is a chronology of the world war, the Pivotal Conflict, a chronology of the worldat war.-Wilson Library Bulletin
"Recommended for history collections with a devoted World War I clientele."-ARBA
"The Pivotal Conflict, an exhaustive chronology of World War I, views that complex of events as the wellspring of this century's harsh history of war, nationalism, and superpower stalemate. Its daily three-column format commences with the assassination on June 28, 1914, of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and concludes with the signing of the first of the Versailles treaties five years to the day later. Within those three columns covering military, international-diplomatic, and domestic (a relative term not confined to a single nation's internal affairs) events, a hierarchy of letters explained in the introduction organizes entries by front or type of event. The subject index, citing entries by date but not by column, would have been more useful had major subjects (e.g., Palestine, Woodrow Wilson) been subdivided and had headings been subjected to authority control to bring together terms separated alphabetically (e.g., American Jews, Jews, Polish Jews). This provides much more extensive coverage of diplomatic to-and-fro and domestic events in both combatant nations and the isolationist United States than Randal Gray's Chronicle of the First World War (New York: Facts on File, 1990), which, in its cleaner layout, offers more detail about the many efforts to end the war's long military quagmire. Comparison of the two chronologies' coverage of individual days shows considerable overlap in selection of the day's major event and considerable differences among lesser events. This illustrates the breadth and complexity of the world war rather than deficiency in either of these complementary chronologies. The Chronicle is a chronology of the world war, the Pivotal Conflict, a chronology of the worldat war."-Wilson Library Bulletin

Author Bio

GERALD HERMAN is a tenured Assistant Professor of History and Special Assistant to the Office of General Counsel at Northeastern University. He is the author of a nine part miltimedia presentation and anthology on the culture of World War I entitled World War I: The Destroying Fathers Confirmed and of an award-winning National Public Radio program called War on the same subject.