Reading World War I, 100 years later

It seems like a long time ago. Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated on June 28, 1914. But the repercussions still affect us.

World War I—the Great War, the “war to end all wars”—caused empires to fall or be overthrown, redrew maps and introduced the United States as a leader on the world stage. Nations were created—Yugoslavia, Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states, for instance—and disappeared—the Ottoman, German and Russian empires.

Did you notice Syria, Iraq and Iran are on that list? Yep, WWI is still relevant. And, as one might expect, 100 years after the start of it, there are a slew of new books that purport to offer modern insight.

The Trigger: Hunting the Assassin Who Brought the World to War by Tim Butcher (Grove Press, $26) is among the better books addressing the war's precipitating event. It's an odd amalgam of history, biography, memoir and travel writing that really works to bring the inception point of the war into focus. Butcher covers the same terrain, on foot and by train, that Gavrilo Princip—the man who assassinated the archduke and duchess—traveled when he left his Bosnian Serb village in the mountains as a youth.

Since Butcher, a journalist, covered the Balkan Wars of the 1990s fought as Yugoslavia broke up, he's got a lot of experience to draw on when discussing the complicated situation in this part of the world. His firsthand account of how deeply ingrained the hostilities are and how close to the surface the urge toward war remain in the area provides necessary perspective on WWI.

Given recent events in Ukraine and the South China Sea, it's also worth reading July Crisis: The World's Descent into War, Summer 1914 by T.G. Otte (Cambridge University Press, $29.99). Otte, a British history professor, is concerned with the diplomatic failures that occurred between the assassination and the start of the war a month later. War wasn't inevitable, he argues; rather, it was the result of a series of decisions made by deeply misinformed men. The limitations of the leadership of the time—including intellectual limitations, which is an argument for really smart diplomats—are threaded throughout, as is some pointed criticism of Kaiser Wilhelm II and his chancellor for encouraging the Austro-Hungarian Empire to take retribution on Serbia for its role in the assassination.

In The Month That Changed the World: July 1914 (Oxford University Press, $34.95), historian Gordon Martel also focuses on that period between the assassination and Russia's mobilization, an act which guaranteed that everyone else would take the field rather than wait to be attacked. Even though he uses primary sources, Martel is very reader friendly, with an organization that includes a guide to the people involved.

WWI wasn't the absolute beginning of current struggles. But it helps to understand that the same urges to national identity, self-determination, retention of natural resources and political influence continue to drive global conflict. It's just that the big picture sometimes brings into focus exactly where we are now.