Why was World War I called The Great War?

ya p much

neither my wife nor i remember learning about how ww1 ended in american high school. i didn't have history classes in high school but i did take the reagants and had to study independently for both the american history and world history tests and i don't remember it being a part of the curriculum for either.

Pretty sure we just learned about WWI as prelude to WWII--("Germany had all these reparations to pay. Why? Because there was this other war that wasn't as interesting.")

A good recent book about U.S. involvement confirms the thesis advanced by Walter Karp thirty years ago which refutes what we learned in high school about a noble, reluctant Woodrow Wilson. The consequences of the peace put in stark relief too.

i don't remember how it's taught in school in america -- probably just that we swooped in and won it at the end + the french are wusses.

uh this is definitely not how it was taught at my school

At my high school (early 80s, private American), WWI was framed in roughly equal parts of "Europe shaking off monarchy and transitioning to nation-states" and "hey, hey world, we're the Americans." I knew what the Zimmerman Telegram and the Palmer Raids were going into the final and aced it.

In college (at good ole UC Irvine of all places!) I lucked into a Topics in 20th Century History class that ended up being entirely about WWI. Three weeks alone on August 1914. What I remember most was reading an editorial printed in one of the London papers around 1916. No explanation for the cause of the Great War made sense other than "people just got tired of being peaceful."

40 maps that explain World War I
http://www.vox.com/a/world-war-i-maps

this may not be the right thread for this question, but I am trying to track down an anecdote involving I think Bismarck and William I in hopes that I did not imagine it. I think they were on a train or carriage riding past a square and William said something like he feared that some action they had recently taken would result in them both being executed in that square and Bismarck replying along the lines of "yes but what a thrilling way to die that would be." The details are really fuzzy at this point so I suppose it could have been some other monarch/advisor combo but I think it was William I/Bismarck. Anyway, hoping this rings a bell for someone...

ended up finding it myself after all, for the record, it was a conversation after the blood and iron speech:

Bismarck thought that the words he had spoken
on the 30th of September, 1862, might have been
used against him with Wilhelm, and he was right.
Having gone to meet him when travelling, and
getting with him into an ordinary first-class car-
riage, he found him " visibly depressed." The
King was still under the impression of his talks
with Queen Augusta. Bismarck wanted to explain
his words, but Wilhelm interrupted him :

" I foresee exactly how it will all end. Down there,
in the Opern Platz, beneath my windows, they'll
cut off your head, and then, a little later, mine."

Bismarck simply answered, " And after that,
sire ? " " Well, after that we shall be dead."

"Yes," vehemently retorted Bismarck, "after
that we shall be dead ; but one must needs die
sooner or later, and could we perish in a worthier
way ?

I like how you can tell Julius Caesar is mortally wounded because he starts speaking Latin.

they are currently repeating the 10 part The First World War series from 2003 on BBC4. It is very good, in fact brilliant.

sounds great, must look for a rip

World War I was a great war... for me to poop on

xp
I got one, that took ages to dl and is 7.3gb. But it was worth the loss of memory space.

this series isn't as myopic as others and goes into the World aspect of it tbf

^^^this series is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. It's good!

I'm almost done w/The Guns of August, likely plunging into The Sleepwalkers and Catastrophe 1914 soon.

any recommendations on books covering the whole of the war or other periods of the war?

The Deluge by Tooze is a brilliant book on the "20 year armistice"* between the wars. Sleepwalkers is a really great as well.

* 1919 quote from some French general at Versailles, 20 years to the day of Hitler invading Poland.

The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of Global Order is the full title.

thanks that looks right up my alley!

I was thinking recently about the cultural invisibility of WWI in the states, which makes sense in a lot of ways. The U.S. was far less involved, and consequently it has been overshadowed by WWII. It is a very complicated war with no outsized heroes or villains (not saying there were no heroes or villains, clearly Albert of Belgium is a significant example in the former camp) so it's harder to pin down, you've got to dig into pre-war geopolitics a bit and I still have to get into it more. (Probably should get that AJP Taylor book folks have raved about.)

Which leads to the limited understanding I had growing up, via textbooks, which is that "Archduke Ferdinand got shot and everyone got very angry and fought."

But it's maybe an even better example of the insanity of war in terms of how wars come about than WWII.

there are loads of good bbc programmes on the buildup and complex causes but damned if i remember any of em

Capitalism, amirite?

men

caucasians (balkans but fuckit)

^ white men

Austrians. The whitest of white men.

'the sleepwalkers' is grebt

it's been twenty years since i read them, but i recall john keegan's and martin gilbert's full treatments being good. the section on the somme in keegan's 'the face of battle' is also very revealing on the actual mechanics of what was supposed to happen and why it didn't

haven't read niall ferguson's, but fuck that guy in general

'the war the infantry knew' is a kind of amazing account of day-to-day life drawn from (british) memoirs. still struck by how they marched all the fuck over france and belgium in august 1914 and had no idea where they were going or where the enemy might be

Christopher Clark is such a good writer I might read Sleepwalkers again at some point. His Iron Kingdom book about the rise and fall of Prussia is totally ace as well.

this is some prime Clark from Sleepwalkers:

When the American historian Bernadotte Everly Schmitt of the University of Chicago travelled to Europe with letters of introduction to interview former politicians who had played a role in events, he was struck by the apparently total immunity of his interlocutors to self-doubt. (The one exception was Grey, who 'spontaneously remarked' that he had made a tactical error in seeking to negotiate with Vienna through Berlin during the July Crisis, but the misjudgement alluded to was of subordinate importance and the comment reflected a specifically English style of mandarin self-deprecation rather than a genuine concession of responsibility.)

omar, I'm a fan of Margaret McMillan's Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World , which paints indelible portraits of Wilson, Orlando, their subalterns, and the wounded Clemenceau.

The involvement of the United States in WWI destroyed Progressive dreams for a generation. It turned Wilson into a blue-eyed tyrant, instigated horrendous race riots when it was over, and gave us the Espionage Act.

nice rec there Alf, sounds good.

Tony Judt's review.

the keegan review linked above was also by judt

Tony "Postwar" Judt.

i kind of like the crackpot revisionist theory that there was only _one_ world war and it just had a break of a decade or so between its two active phases

not really crackpot

yeah!

I think if the heads of state were largely similar that would be a pretty popular notion, I think when you bring Hitler and Stalin into the mix that's where folks begin to draw a serious line.

I think there is a (possibly inaccurate) common opinion that WWI-era Germany was much much more honorable than Nazi-era Germany. The Kaiser seems like a figure of old school nobility in a lot of historical narratives but I think a lot of that is colored by 1933-45.

a proto-Poppy Bush situation

would suggest that reparations had quite a lot to do with hitler's rise. not that i exactly blame the WWI allies for it -- i'd be pissed too -- but note the difference between that and the marshall plan/rebuilding of japan

and tbf the kaiser did not instigate the holocaust

honestly? i'm not a historical expert, but i think wilson getting the blame for the failed peace of versailles is only part of the story. i think the monarchist powers of europe bear as much, if not more, responsibility for the failed peace. wilson wanted to "make the world safe for democracy", and no matter how racist, eugenicist, and fundamentally flawed his vision of "democracy" was, i think one could argue that it was a bigger problem that he did not, in fact, accomplish this, either in america, who reverted to their isolationist past, or in europe, where colonial expansionism reached its apex in the wake of versailles. the marshall plan was great and all, but the abolition of monarchy gave them a certain advantage that the negotiators at versailles lacked. i can't imagine a "long peace" that didn't involve the dismantlement of the British Empire.

"and tbf the kaiser did not instigate the holocaust

― mookieproof"

world war ii started five years after the death of leopold ii

god dammit, do i need to have roman numerals banned too

world war one started five years after the death of leopold ii

not sure i follow, though -- all the european/usa powers were racist as hell and were barbaric in africa and other colonies, but i don't think it has much bearing on why either war began (apart from germany perhaps feeling left out of the colonial spoils leading up to WWI)

Aaaand Austria annexing Bosnia from the Ottoman Empire.

yeah i'm starting to lose coherence - i meant to type world war i, or "the great war", but i mixed up my roman numerals. :) my point is there's this certain school of thought that holds that the holocaust is a unique, or at least an unprecedented, event in human history, and that hitler was a uniquely evil person, and i'm not sure i'm entirely convinced of that.

there was definitely nothing unique about Hitler's Antisemitism, but his level of industrial murder was truly unique and still hasn't been "bettered" over such a relatively short period of time.

Otm. The more I read about other atrocities, the more the gas chambers seem unique. There's been other camps, plenty of other genocides, but the gas chambers are something else.

DV, formerly of this parish, has been blogging “100 years ago today in the Great War”, starting with the assassination (and going on until the treaty, though it’ll probably be a little quiet for the last bit).

https://ww1live.wordpress.com/

Traditionally, if you want to kill millions, you engineer a famine. Your victims will even voluntarily bury the dead for you. This is still the primary tool for killing people on that scale.

Hitler wanted to hand-pick his victims out of a much larger population, so a continent-wide famine was not the appropriate tool. Industrialized and particularized murder on the scale of multiple millions was indeed a new thing under the sun.