920: 1/8 The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century, by David Reynolds
Image: Blimp. On August 4th, 2015, Warsaw, the capital of Russian Poland, surrendered to Germans without a fight. Fortresses at Kovno and Brest-Litovsk, among several others, capitulated. By September 18th when the fortress at Vilna surrenders to German forces the rout was complete. The German and Austro-Hungarian forces had pushed the Eastern Front 500 kilometers (310 miles) back. This unprecedented outcome became known as the Great Retreat to the Russians. They had suffered 500,000 casualties and nearly a million had been captured. Paradoxically, the retreat in many ways strengthened their overall Russian strategic position. The German and Austro-Hungarian supply lines became stretched beyond limits. The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century, by David Reynolds One of the most violent conflicts in the history of civilization, World War I has been strangely forgotten in American culture. It has become a ghostly war fought in a haze of memory, often seen merely as a distant preamble to World War II. In The Long Shadow critically-acclaimed historian David Reynolds seeks to broaden our vision by assessing the impact of the Great War across the twentieth century. He shows how events in that turbulent century—particularly World War II, the Cold War, and the collapse of Communism—shaped and reshaped attitudes to 1914–18. By exploring big themes such as democracy and empire, nationalism and capitalism, as well as art and poetry, The Long Shadow is stunningly broad in its historical perspective. Reynolds throws light on the vast expanse of the last century and explains why 1914–18 is a conflict that America is still struggling to comprehend. Forging connections between people, places, and ideas, The Long Shadow ventures across the traditional subcultures of historical scholarship to offer a rich and layered examination not only of politics, diplomacy, and security but also of economics, art, and literature. The result is a magisterial reinterpretation of the place of the Great War in modern history. https://www.amazon.com/Long-Shadow-Legacies-Twentieth-Century-ebook/dp/B00FQUDRAE/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=