Crucible : the long end of the Great War and the birth of a New World, 1917-1924

"The gripping story of the years that ended the Great War and launched Europe and America onto the roller coaster of the twentieth century, Crucible is filled with all-too-human tales of exuberant dreams, dark fears, and the absurdities of chance. In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style. Lenin and Hitler, Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rosa Luxemburg and Mustafa Kemal--these are some of the protagonists in this dramatic panorama of a world in turmoil. Revolutions and civil wars erupt across Europe. A red scare hits America. Women win the vote. Marching tunes are syncopated into jazz. The real becomes surreal. Encompassing both tragedy and humor, the celebrated author of 1913 brings immediacy and intimacy to this moment of deep historical transformation that molded the world we would come to inherit."-- Jacket page [ii] Nobody believed a modern war could last so long—but by 1917, Europe had already been at war for three years. The fabric of the continent had unraveled and now, just as the first American troops docked in European ports, the continent began to collapse from the inside: first Russia, then Austria-Hungary, soon Germany, then the Ottoman Empire. Historians have long divided World War I into neat divisions of conflict—1914 to 1918—and peace, after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Yet in his new, remarkable history, Charles Emmerson reveals that Europe had already begun its metamorphosis long before the war's end—and that the finale was longer, bloodier, and more complex than we've previously been told. As Russia spiraled into revolution with the fall of the Romanovs and the rise of the Bolsheviks, Germany was violently combatting communism within its own borders. As civil war fomented in Ireland, Mustafa Kemal was reinventing himself as father of the...