The Great War: The War to End All Wars by Russell Freedman

European powers had been fighting one another for centuries, but as 1914 began, Europe was at peace.... There were blood ties linking Europe's royal houses. Except for France and Switzerland, every nation in Europe was a monarchy, and almost every European head of state to was related to every other.

Most Europeans looked forward to a peaceful future. 'The world is moving away from military ideals,' declared the influential British journal Review of Reviews, 'and a period of peace, industry, and world-wide friendship is dawning.' It was easy enough to ignore the rivalries and suspicious among Europe's great powers that spelled trouble ahead.

Indeed, the kingdoms of Europe had close family ties, many through the notably fecund Queen Victoria. Her grandson Kaiser Wilhelm dashed off affectionate, handwritten "Dear Nicky," notes to Czar Nicholas, married to Victoria's granddaughter Alexandra, signing them "Your very sincere and devoted cousin Willy." George V of England also penned personal notes to Willy and Nicky, and Spain's Queen Ena, also one of Victoria's grandchildren, was cousin to Kaiser Wilhelm, George V, and Alexandra of Russia.

Underneath these bonds of blood and marriage, however, there were powerful disruptive forces at work, forces brought about through the divisions of territory and the separation of ethnic groups following previous wars and the inevitable conflict of mercantile and colonial interests around the world. These rivalries led to an arming of Europe which Czar Nicholas lamented. "The accelerating arms race" he said, would transform "the armed peace into a crushing burden that weighs on all nations and, if prolonged, will lead to the very cataclysm it seeks to avert." Although most of the kingdoms of Europe were nominal democracies of one sort or another, nationalistic and ethnic loyalties trumped the powerful drive for peace and prosperity and the ties of friendship and blood, leading to an essentially European tribal conflict, another "cousins' war." like many before it. Eventually almost all of Europe, their far-flung colonies, and their American cousins as well were drawn into what came to be called The World War.

It began with two deaths, the bloody shooting by Serbian nationalists of the presumed heir and heiress to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Germany's closest ally, on June 28, 1914. Fearing an uprising by the ethnic Serbians within their patchwork nation, the Austria-Hungarian throne had reason to fear that the Russians would intervene in the interest of their Slavic brothers. Soon, despite desperate diplomatic intervention and the private pleadings of the royal cousins, the nations of Europe took sides in the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy, and the Triple Entente, which eventually included England, France, and Russia. Both sides felt they were defending national honor and territory and were certain the war would be a short one. Before the fighting began, a German soldier wrote home confidently:

"It is a joy to go to the Front with such comrades. We are bound to be victorious! My dear ones, be proud that you live in such times and in such a nation, and that you too have the privilege of sending several of those you love into this glorious struggle."

But because of their rearmament with fearsome new weapons--the Maxim gun, tanks, flamethrowers, poison gas, long-range artillery ("Big Berthas"), and the airplane--during the early years of the twentieth century, the opposing forces quickly fell into stalemates along several fronts, and their fearsome battles that slaughtered hundreds of thousands on both sides still ring in memory and dot the landscape with vast burial grounds--"the Great Retreat" across Belgium, the battles of the Marne, Nueve-Chappelle, Verdun, the Somme, Chateau Thierry, Gallipoli, Belleau Wood. Meanwhile, the German U-boat blockade of England threatened the populace with slow starvation, and in the process of shipping food and war materiel, the United States was finally drawn into the conflict after the sinking of the passenger liners Lusitania and Laconiaia. With the aid of the Americans under General Pershing and the exhaustion of German manpower and war production, by 1918 the Battles of Saint-Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne were decisive for the Allies. The Russian Empire had already fallen to the Red Revolution and cousins Nicky and Alexandra were dead. Germany was on the brink of internal turmoil, and with cousin Willy abdicating, Germany capitulated, its society and economy in shambles and a generation shattered.

Most of Europe was in similar economic decimation, with over eight million young men dead, the same number missing, and 21 million wounded, many permanently disabled. Society was permanently changed, with women who had replaced the soldiers in the home workforce never again willing to become second-class citizens. Germany was never again a monarchy, and the old boundaries of Europe and its colonies were changed forever. The controversial Treaty of Versailles separated much of the German kingdom and that of Austria-Hungary into rivalrous ethnic enclaves. Even the Ottoman Empire, formerly at some remove from European conflicts, ceased to exist, and the artificially designated states of Iraq and Palestine came into being to haunt their creators.

But was it the "war to end all wars?" President Woodrow Wilson believed that the memory of devastation would enable the League of Nations to ensure that "great and small states alike" would "settle their differences peacefully instead of going to war." But Britain's Lloyd George prophetically warned that this treaty meant that "we shall have to fight another war all over again in twenty-five years." Indeed, George's prediction was overly optimistic: the next war, to be named World War II, came shortly after the twentieth anniversary of the Treaty of Versailles.

Russell Freedman, author of the Newbery Award-winning Lincoln: A Photobiography,(Houghton Mifflin social studies) and the noted Give Me Liberty: The Story of the Declaration of Independence, Children of the Great Depression (Golden Kite Awards (Awards)), The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane, and Immigrant Kids, has, in his latest, The War to End All Wars: World War I (Houghton Mifflin Clarion, 2010), a gripping historical study of the Great War which focuses initially on the political, ethnic, and familial rivalries which led to what was universally agreed to be an unnecessary war, and then turns to graphic descriptions of the horrific trench warfare whose futile "over the top" assaults led to the slaughter of a generation. In his text Freedman alludes only briefly to conflicts and subsequent changes in Europe's distant colonies in Africa and the Middle East and the roles of colonial recruits in the continental conflict, which regrettably limits his attention to the oft-recounted campaigns in western Europe, with opening and closing maps showing the changes wrought only in pre- and post-war Europe and Turkey.

Freedman's final focus, in the closing chapter, "Losing the Peace," succinctly summarizes some of the failures of the armistice--the humiliation of the German people through loss of territory and crushing reparations and the separation of ethnic and language groups in Europe and the Middle East into weak, artificial "nations" within which and among which ethnic rivalries soon festered. Indeed, today's turmoil within the old Ottoman sphere of influence can be traced to that armistice. Despite the incredible devastation of that war, Freedman asserts, "the war to end all wars" failed to solve the problems which caused the initial conflict and imbedded conflicts which led to the next, the even more widespread World War II, and its perilous postwar aftermath up to the present era.

For middle and young adult readers, Freedman's account of it all, The War to End All Wars: World War I, forthcoming August 2, will grab and hold the attention of young readers. Never lapsing into a mere recounting of battles, its primary virtue lies in focusing young readers on the interconnections in the sweep of history in the century just past and perhaps a better understanding of the complexities in solving these same problems and keeping the peace in modern times.

As School Library Journal's reviewer puts it, "Elegantly written and filled with vivid, powerful photographs, this masterful work demands a spot in every collection."

In addition to his Newbery Award, noted American nonfiction writer Russell Freedman has been honored with three Newbery Honor Awards, a National Humanities Medal, the Sibert Medal for young adult nonfiction, the Orbis Pictus Award, and the prestigious Laura Ingalls Wilder Award for lifetime achievement in literature for young people.

Doing History: Ain't Nothing But A Man: My Quest to Find the Real John Henry by Scott Reynolds Nelson

Studying history may seem to be about filling up with knowledge--like a car pulling into a gas station. Once you have a full tank, you are done.

But it is just the opposite. The more you know about the past, the more questions you ask.

Most kids feel that studying history is mainly the task of stuffing facts and conclusions into their brains until they know all they need to complete the course. Those of us who have lived through some history of our own realize that "known" history, no matter how diligently we study our "facts," seems like a jigsaw puzzle with most of the pieces missing and some of the rest apparently from a different puzzle altogether. We "see" history as if through a bunch of tiny peepholes drilled into the wall between us and the past, our brains seeking to make a whole out of the fleeting glimpses provided for us by artifacts, recorded accounts, opinion, legends, and folklore--which together give the illusion of truth. In reality history is a mystery which at once intrigues and eludes us.

Scott Reynolds Nelson's Ain't Nothing but a Man: My Quest to Find the Real John Henry is an engaging look at the process of doing history, of doing what historians do to find those elusive bits of reality that are part of the past. A historian at the College of William and Mary, Nelson has two purposes in this book--to try to solve the mystery of whether there was a real John Henry at the root of the legend and to show young readers how a working historian digs into the past and attempts to prove his historical hypothesis.

In easily accessible but engrossing prose, Nelson takes the reader into his process, which he likens to a scavenger hunt, first honing in on textual analysis of the various versions of the familiar "John Henry" folk song. Although richly overlaid with European motifs and different thematic approaches, the root of the story in Nelson's view lies in a work song which arose in West Virginia during the spanning of the Alleghenies by the Covington and Ohio Railroad (later the Chesapeake and Ohio, or C & O), which cited the Big Bend Tunnel as the setting of the song. Not finding any records of the crews who worked there, Nelson felt he had hit the end of the line until a library catalog search engine led him to the engineering records in the personal papers of the bosses of these railroad crews, which revealed that the C & O rented out chain gangs from the Virginia State Prison to build the tunnels and that an actual race between a steam drill and a hand drilling crew had occurred, not at the Big Bend Tunnel, but at the nearby Lewis Tunnel.

The men that made that steam drill,
Thought it was mighty fine;
John Henry sunk a fourteen-foot hole,
And the steam drill only made nine.

Feeling that he had nailed down the historical event, Nelson then had to tie a real-life John Henry to the event. By chance he had scanned an old post card of the State Penitentiary at Richmond, Virginia, and made it his computer's screen wallpaper. As he read through one version of the song, he made a lucky mental connection. On the screen was a large white building among darker brick structures, flanked by a railroad track; in the book before him were the lines,

They took John Henry to the white house,
And buried him in the san'.
And every locomotive come roarin' by,
Says there lays that steel drivin' man.
Says there lays that steel drivin' man.

Nelson asked himself the obvious question. Was there a John Henry at that prison who was bound over to work on the Lewis Tunnel? Persistent pestering of library staff at the University of Virgina finally paid off when a sympathetic librarian bent the rules to let him open the boxes filled with unsorted, coal dust-covered records, wherein he found a ledger showing a John William Henry sentenced in 1866 to a ten-year term for robbery. The name and age matched up with one John William Henry's census and trial records. Then a chance conversation with a historian at the Museum of the Confederacy uncovered an archaeological find near the Virginia penitentiary of the skeletons of 300 African Americans in unmarked and roughly concealed graves. This finding correlated with a report in the Penitentiary records which raised questions about the high number of deaths, particularly from "consumption," among inmates hired out to the railroad in 1872.

When further investigation suggested that some of the convicts in the work gang might have been dying slowly or suddenly from silicosis, a lung disease with symptoms similar to tuberculosis acquired in the unventilated tunnels, the pieces of the puzzle seemed to fit together snugly. Was prisoner John Henry the fabled steel driving man who competed with that steam drill, died suddenly of silicosis exacerbated by exertion, and was buried in the sand by the tracks at the Virginia Penitentiary's white house?

Well, maybe. Nelson has opened up a slightly larger window into that past, scavenging facts and photos from many sources, and revealing, if not the definitive historical John Henry, certainly new information about post-bellum African American life in the mid-Atlantic states. Instead of a symbol of man railing against the machine that threatens his livelihood and pride, as the heroic John Henry was often interpreted in the twentieth century, he can perhaps be seen instead as a victim of anti-Reconstructionism, an abused worker who amazingly may yet have taken pride in his work. Both interpretations are just that, a synthesis which different mindsets from different viewpoints can lay upon the facts as we know them.

Still, Nelson's account is a fascinating detective story which gives young people a different view of history and the work of doing history. Looking at an actual photo, into the eyes of a young black man who may indeed have been the John Henry who inspired the famous folk song, gives the reader a bit of a thrill, that "aha!" feeling that may fuel future scholars to carry on the job of doing history--for the past which seems to need to be known and for the future which needs to know it. As the author concludes,

History had tried to silence many black men, some in prisons, some in graves, some in jobs no one ever recorded. But those men did speak in a song that now we all sing. They spoke, and because of the postcard, and the buried bodies, and the big ledger, and the engineering reports, we all can listen. The trackliners were telling the world.

This old hammer
Killed John Henry,
Killed my brother,
Can't kill me.

The Winter Soldiers: Remember Valley Forge by Thomas B. Allen

"I think the game is pretty near up.

I am now convinced, beyond a doubt that unless some great and capital change suddenly takes place . . . this Army must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these things. Starve, dissolve, or disperse in order to obtain subsistence in the best manner they can.... "

The words of General George Washington in December of 1776 were frank, devoid of the spin required of the modern military. Despite all that has been written and spoken about life in the winter quarters of Valley Forge, it seems that for those on the ground it was worse than most Americans realize. Not only were there near starvation, bloody bare footprints in the snow, and snow and sleet falling on a barely clad group of untrained civilian-soldiers, but the Continental Army went unsupported by perhaps the majority of their fellow citizens, many of whom were engaged in selling foodstuffs, horses, and munitions to the British forces living in relative luxury and wooing the teenaged beauties of the newly captured capital of Philadelphia.

How Washington, with his shrewd grasp of the role of battlefield terrain, managed to pull his weakened army together to prevail at the Battle of Trenton becomes a suspenseful narrative in Thomas Allen's Remember Valley Forge: Patriots, Tories, and Redcoats Tell Their Stories (Remember Series). Master of field position though he was, Washington faced other foes besides the Redcoats and their powerful Tory supporters--primarily the calendar and its corollary, the weather. Enlistments for most of his forces were for only six months, and most of these were set to run out on January 1, 1777, and with their state militias shrinking before their eyes, officers had only to resign their commissions to be legally free to return to their homes as well.

Despite his apparent despair, however, Washington somehow rallied his own will, and with the victory at Trenton and the retaking of Philadelpha, support from his own Congress and countrymen slowly rallied as well. Initially bound to a strong code of honor, Washington eventually gave in to reality and posted harsh penalties for deserters and thieves among the ranks and issued orders for his starving foragers to confiscate horses, wagons, food, and clothing and rustle livestock as needed from the civilian populations. Washington also successfully pursued his "secret war" through a network of spies and double agents that rival KGB/CIA legends, although he was outmaneuvered by one of the former Tory Philadelphia beauties, Peggy Shippen, who managed to marry General Benedict Arnold and "turn" him to become perhaps the most notorious turncoat spy of the war.

Proud but not jealous of his primacy, Washington chose to share leadership with European sympathizers such as Baron Frederic Wilhelm von Steuben, whose close-order drilling transformed the army, and the Marquis de Lafayette, among others, who took command in key skirmishes as the Continental Army drove the British back toward New York. With the American victories at Monmouth and Springfield, New Jersey, the British made the fatal decision to split their forces and attempt to defeat Washington by attacking from the south as well as from the north, a strategy which ultimately cost them the defeat at Yorktown, where Cornwallis' army was cut off from English naval support by French victories at sea. Although the peace was several years in coming, the revolutionary army had virtually secured the liberty they sought.

With all the caveats of history around the early leadership of Washington, author Allen makes the case that, militarily at least, he was the man for the job. It was Captain "Light Horse" Harry Lee, veteran of Valley Forge, who penned the words which have always defined General George Washington for history: "First in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." Ironically, of course, Light Horse Harry Lee went on to father Robert E. Lee, General of the Army of the Confederacy. But that, as we say, is a story for another day--and the matter of many another book.

The latest in National Geographic's Remember series, Remember Valley Forge: Patriots, Tories, and Redcoats Tell Their Stories (Remember Series). displays the scholarly supportive materials associated with its publisher--abundant photographs and prints of period paintings, an extensive timeline of both the Revolutionary War and the Valley Forge encampment, maps, "Selected Sources," "Quote Sources," "Selected Postscripts," and an index.