History Curriculum/Book 22

Book twenty-two of the curriculum

The History of World War I

The twenty-second book in the curriculum and the fourth of the Late American History set. Nineteen chapters across four weeks — first the road to war: Europe before 1914, the armies, alliances and empires, the Balkans, and the murder at Sarajevo and the July Crisis; then the war of 1914–1916: the opening campaigns, the trenches, the new weapons, Verdun and the Somme, and the war in the east and beyond Europe; then total war and its turning points: the home fronts, the war at sea, America's entry, the war in the air, the revolutions in Russia and the last offensives; and last the peace settlement: the Treaty of Versailles, the new map of the world, and the war's legacy. TWO THINGS TO KNOW BEFORE YOU START. First, the first-person accounts in both printed editions are HISTORICAL FICTION — written to tell the story, informed by the surviving record, and not the words of the people named. Most narrators are real people, but some speak of things that happened after they died, and some meet in scenes that never took place. The record itself is very large: the notes, telegrams and treaties of the governments, the soldiers' and nurses' letters and diaries, the despatches and casualty returns, the newspapers, the photographs, and the excavations of the battlefields — and this course quotes them. Second, at the back of the Ultimate Guide, after the chapters (pages 358–395), there are Cross-Curricular sections — Math, Science, Social Studies and English — and tests, to use alongside this course. They are not a fifth week and there is nothing to hand in for them.