Ring of Fire: A New Global History of the Outbreak of the First World War

(Hardback)

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'Churchill and Eberholst put the world back into First World War.' Dan Snow

A remarkable, eyewitness-based view of the outbreak of the First World War.

As war broke out in the summer of 1914, not a nation on Earth understood the magnitude of what they were about to face. To win it, whole populations must be mobilised, and neutrality was impossible to practice.
Our understanding of this complex conflict has been coloured by a blinkered approach to popular history. It has ignored the fact that Denmark actively participated in laying minefields as soon as war began; that the first British shots were fired in West Africa, by a black man; and the first Australian casualties occurred not at Gallipoli, but in the Pacific.
The authors have scoured the globe in search of an enormous quantity of fresh material. This is not history as told by 'great men', this is a people's view of the war, translated from more than a dozen languages to fashion a new inclusive, touching and surprising tale of events that we thought we knew...

Reviews

Challenged everything I thought I knew about this war. * Iain Dale *
Churchill and Eberholst put the world back into the First World War. They portray the astonishing scale and reach of a war that might have started in Europe but was a genuinely global catastrophe. * Dan Snow *
By focussing on the immense impact the conflict had on common people from colonial subjects to women and even children Ring of Fire prompts a dramatic reassessment of how we should view and tell the history of this terrible war. * James Holland *
An eye-opening alternative to the well worn stories of brave tommies marching off to bash the Boche. * Charlie Higson *
Wears its evident scholarship lightly on its sleeves, probes deeply, casts its net wide, and amounts to the new gold standard. -- Peter Caddick-Adams, author of * 1945: Victory in the West *

Author Bio

Alexandra Churchill is an experienced historian and television and podcast presenter. Her specialties are the Western Front and the Middle East. Nicolai Eberholst is a Danish archivist working in Copenhagen, and his specialities are the Eastern and Italian Fronts, and neutrality in the First World War. Between them they have expertise in nine languages. Together, Alex and Nicolai have been instrumental in the formation of a charity, the Great War Group, which was established to make the subject more inclusive and to break down national barriers in sharing information about the war.