Origins Of World War Research Articles

World War I and the Origins of Blood Transfusion for the Trauma Patient.

The use of blood transfusion to treat hemorrhagic shock is a relatively new treatment with its origins in World War I. Due to the severity and nature of injuries seen, World War I provided the stimulus to propel medicine forward and accept whole blood transfusion for the trauma patient.

The Origins of World War II

The Origins of World War II

Canada’s nuclear future brightens

Although the Canadian and US nuclear industries have shared origins in World War II, their paths soon diverged.

Out of Ashes: A New History of Europe in the Twentieth Century, by Konrad Jarausch

Reviewed by: Gary Bruce, University of WaterlooAs most travellers to Europe quickly realize, it is hard to sort out one's feelings about the continent. One can, for example, attend Berlin's Philharmonie, home to one of the world's greatest symphony orchestras. Before listening to the music inside, an interested tourist might be drawn to the small exhibition on the grounds of this German cultural icon. Here, she would learn that during the Nazi era, the euthanasia program, which killed more than 200,000 individuals with disabilities (including 5000 children), was housed at the same location: Tiergartenstrasse-4, or T-4 as the program came to be called. To be clear, the Berlin symphony today performs not down the street from the former T-4 headquarters, nor around the corner; it occupies the very same physical space.It is to this frustrating dual legacy that Konrad Jarausch turns in his sweeping synthesis of Europe in the twentieth century. How was it possible that Europe's worst traits materialized in an era when the health, education, and prosperity of most Europeans had improved dramatically? Jarausch frames his answer within the concept of modernity. Although there are many different understandings of the term modernism, most scholars would agree with Jarausch that the European modern age is characterized by large bureaucracies, factory production, nation-states, an almost slavish devotion to science and technology, and an urbanized population. For Jarausch, the challenge that Europe faced in the twentieth century, and continues to face, is how to harness the benign aspects of modernity while keeping its destructive forces in check.Although Out of Ashes is a history of Europe in its entirety, the emphasis is on the main powers of northern Europe. Countries such as Spain, Italy, Poland, and Yugoslavia appear in the narrative on occasion, but England, France, Germany, and Russia/Soviet Union receive sustained attention. The latter merit a place of prominence by virtue of their substantial economic and military power, but incorporating some of the most interesting aspects of recent transnational history, including the ability of smaller powers to influence larger ones, would have added more current texture to the traditional approach.Jarausch moves quickly from the opening section on European thirst for colonies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to discuss the path to the First World War. Eager to break free from the tired school question on the origins of World War I, Jarausch focuses on the reasons for the breakdown of peace instead of the causes of war. After all, given the long periods of peace and increasing international ties that had characterized the previous century, there was every reason to believe that Europeans would avoid war. Jarausch pins responsibility for the first of Europe's deadly wars in the twentieth century on the leaders of Europe's major powers who, in their narrow-minded self-interest, made catastrophic decisions that unravelled the European diplomatic order. Spreading the blame equally, with perhaps a touch more finger pointing at Russia for escalating a local crisis to a continental war, Jarausch echoes the view of most European historians that no single country was to blame. …

Lieven, Dominic Towards the Flame: Empire, War, and the End of Tsarist Russia (review)

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 752 “hurrah!” But tomorrow will be holding red flags’ (p. 148). Nevertheless, the rightists soldiered on with a wide variety of civic projects, including charitable undertakings, anti-alcoholism campaigns and outreach among university students. Student activists insisted on keeping separate politics and learning (Gilbert mistranslates this term as ‘science’). Interestingly, many rightist organizations supported a fairly ‘inclusive role for women’ (p. 179). The right gradually declined during these years, according to Gilbert, because of factionalism, ideological disputes and the deeply unpopular Beilis Affair. The author’s wonder at ‘the inability of moderate and extreme rightists to work together’ (p. 216) is hard to understand; one found the same inability among Russian leftists. In fact, if one replaced the Beilis Affair with the Azef Affair, then the Russian left declined for the same reasons as the Russian right. Exploring such commonalities would have increased the study’s analytical power. The book includes a helpful glossary of rightist individuals and organizations and a detailed map of the Pale of Settlement. Unfortunately, the editors let slip many typos; clarity of expression could have been much improved. Uniformly lowercase section titles — e.g. ‘Revolutionary odessa’ — are sometimes jarring. A few references do not seem to corroborate assertions advanced in the text. Gilbert is generally fair and objective, but occasionally displays a partisan attitude, for example, evincing surprise that rightist organizations should engage in charity. There are significant errors of fact or conceptualization: the Kadets did not see themselves as ‘tsarists’ (p. 6), the Holy Brotherhood was not shut ‘down soon after its formation’ (p. 25), and there could be no such thing as ‘a right-wing civil society’ (p. 155) since civil society is the aggregate of all civic activism. Despite these concerns, the book greatly increases our knowledge of the Russian right. Department of History Jonathan Daly University of Illinois at Chicago Lieven, Dominic. Towards the Flame: Empire, War, and the End of Tsarist Russia. Allen Lane, London, 2015. xv + 429 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Index. £25.00. Every thirty years, Dominic Lieven writes a field-defining book on the origins of World War One. In 1983, he penned a thin volume entitled Russia and the Origins of the First World War, which argued that Russia took an aggressive stance and escalated the July Crisis primarily because ‘capitulation to open Austro-German coercion would have dealt a tremendous blow to Russia’s prestige and thus to her ability to defend her interests and retain her clients REVIEWS 753 and allies in the Near East’ (p. 147). Lieven still holds this position today, but the book that supports his claim is now much richer, thanks to a wealth of archival evidence and a career spent thinking about the Russian Empire, Russian statesmen, and the aristocratic milieu from which they sprang. Readers should be aware that, titles notwithstanding (the title in the US is The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I and Revolution), this book focuses largely on the period before 1914. There is one brief chapter on World War One and one concise chapter on the July Crisis; together they account for roughly fifty pages of a 370-page book. Time-pressed readers should not, however, skip directly to these chapters, for the real strength of the book lies in the picture it paints of the Russian foreign policy establishment between 1905 and 1914. This is a study of a small but important group. In Russia, fewer than 200 men were eligible for diplomatic posts, and Lieven’s goal is to understand their mindset and their decisions. What were the cultural predispositions associated with their social class? What books and briefing papers shaped their view of the world beyond their windows? What events drove their understanding of the motives and tactics of their allies and enemies? Lieven has answers to all of these questions. His archival research is essential, though not because he found any ‘smoking guns’. There are no hidden transcripts of the meetings between Russian Tsar and French President in July 1914 and no blueprint for world domination craftily followed. Instead, the archival documents allow him to demonstrate the range of policies debated...

Guilt or Responsibility? The Hundred-Year Debate on the Origins of World War I

Historians of the Great War found themselves in high demand in 2014. The looming anniversary naturally prompted publishers to commission titles that were designed to make a splash, cause debate, and spark public interest. The market was consequently flooded with publications that attempted to explain why war had broken out in 1914. Few could have predicted, however, the full extent of public and media interest in World War I. Nor could one have expected that the question of the origins of the war, in particular, would once again be paramount and the subject of widespread, heated debate.

McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Origins of the First World War (review)

REVIEWS 569 McMeekin, Sean. The Russian Origins of the First World War. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA and London, 2013. xii + 324 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $18.95: £14.95 (paperback). Sean McMeekin, an American-trained historian who teaches in Turkey, has a lot of scores to settle with several dead statesmen as well as several living and dead historians on the origins of World War One. His primary concern — one might say obsession — is with war guilt and who is responsible for the outbreak of the Great War. He is impatient with recent efforts to argue for a ‘no-guilt war’ or an accidental war. Nor does he have much sympathy for Fritz Fischer and his acolytes, who placed the blame for the outbreak of war on Germany’s war aims and its ‘grab for power’, though McMeekin himself made a very persuasive case for German war guilt and the Kaiser’s fantasies of raising a German jihad against the Entente in an earlier book, The BerlinBaghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898–1918 (London, 2010). For McMeekin the clearly guilty party was Russia. The overriding motivation of Russian diplomats and generals was the conquest of Constantinople and the partition of the Ottoman Empire. The leading villain in the drama is Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov, whose ‘own deeply dishonest memoirs’ (p. 238) are one of the primary sources of the fundamental misunderstanding of the beginnings of the war, a history the author seeks to rescue from ‘the deep freeze’ (p. 1). This enthusiastic revisionism is based only partly on the recent availability of Russianarchives;McMeekinreports,‘thereisnowmoreformerlysecretmaterial available on Russia’s war aims in 1914 than on those of any other power’ (p. 2). The problem, however, is only partly in the gap in the documentary record (and there is evidence that even the surviving Russian archives were purged to conceal embarrassing diplomatic exchanges). The more serious problem is a historical amnesia for which McMeekin holds Winston Churchill largely responsible, who, out of misplaced pity for the Russian people after the Bolshevik atrocities, forgot how Russia was a signatory to what has long been known as the Sykes-Picot agreement to divide up the post-war Ottoman world. Our author insists we ought to properly call it the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov agreement. But for the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 and the new government’s repudiation of British and French debts and their murder of the tsar and his family, Russia would have been a full-fledged partner in the final settlement of the accursed Eastern Question. Even Norman Stone’s classic, The Eastern Front 1914–1918 (New York, 1975), comes under scrutiny for adopting the AustroHungarian and German perspectives of the archives he relied on. McMeekin acknowledges Luigi Albertini’s equally classic three-volume study (New York, 1952–57) and C. Jay Smith Jr.’s 1956 book as predecessors, but correctly argues SEER, 93, 3, JULY 2015 570 that those studies, though based on Russian archival materials available at the time in the West and in published sources, were largely ignored by the broader community of historians of World War One. It’s not clear how helpful this frame of war guilt is to understanding the origins of the war, especially as McMeekin’s prosecutorial gaze is also fixed on the French, who are portrayed, through a sharply drawn portrait of a cynical French Ambassador Maurice Paleologue, as ‘colluding’ with the Russians to conceal from the British a plan to partition the Ottoman empire after the war. The British, by contrast, are portrayed as clueless and naive, sometimes obtuse — this includes a roster of Sir Edward Grey, Sir George Buchanan and Herbert Horatio Asquith. McMeekin even describes the British as ‘ventriloquists’ for Russia’s position on issues, further evidence of Sazonov’s remarkable skills as the diplomat of a power that had imperial ambitions beyond its means and needed to resort to these schemes. He also partially absolves the British for their responsibility because British diplomats, after all, operating in liberal democratic conditions, had more constraints on their freedom than did a Sazonov who negotiated on behalf of...

What can International Relations Theory learn from the origins of World War I?

World War I is a foundational or critical case for theories of international relations that address the causes of war. They include balance of power, deterrence, power transition theory, and rationalist models of decision making. Recent historical work on the underlying and immediate causes of World War I raises serious problems for all these approaches. Among other things, they highlight the importance of context, how it is understood by leaders, their motives and assumptions, and their tendency to exaggerate the constraints acting on them, the freedom of other actors, and their ability to predict events and control risks.

Symbolic and cultural approaches to the origins of World War I: Introduction

This forum offers a symbolic and cultural approach for understanding the outbreak of World War I that stresses the interactional and symbolic-cultural aspects of German decision makers’ brinkmanship during the July crisis of 1914. Contrary to excessive structuralist accounts, the contributions focus on what actors ‘do’ and ‘feel’ during a crisis. In the German–Austrian case, symbolic interactions during the July crisis were strongly marked by challenges to the ‘face’ of decision makers. The second theme of the Forum is to question the purely ‘material’ nature of those structures traditionally referred to as permissive for World War I. Structures, in fact, are symbolic, too. Like theories on status discrepancy, the Forum stresses the impact of ‘responsibility gaps’. However, the contributors also point to the emotional aspects and internal legitimacy problems caused precisely by those status lags.

William W. Cooper: Innovator, Fighter, and Scholar

W illiam Wager Cooper was born on July 23, 1914 in Birmingham, Alabama, where his father was a bookkeeper and later a distributor for Anheuser-Busch. Bill’s family moved to Chicago when he was three years old. His father owned a chain of gasoline stations, but lost them during the Great Depression. With his father in ill health and no family revenue, Bill left high school after his sophomore year to work at whatever jobs he could find. These included spotting pins in bowling alleys, caddying at golf courses, and even professional boxing, where his record was 58 wins, 3 losses, and 2 draws. While hitchhiking to the golf course one day, Bill met Eric L. Kohler, a principal with Arthur Andersen & Co., who became his life-long mentor. Kohler loaned him money to enroll as a non-degree student at The University of Chicago. Bill liked the academic atmosphere and took the college entrance examinations, intending to become a physical chemist. During his studies, Kohler asked him to review the mathematics used in a patent infringement suit. After Cooper found errors in the mathematics used by the plaintiff’s engineers, Andersen hired him part time during the school year and full time in the summer. This awakened Cooper’s interest in accounting, and he switched his major to economics. While at Chicago, Bill became good friends with a political science student, Herbert A. Simon. Cooper graduated Phi Beta Kappa with his A.B. in 1938.

Sinan Kuneralp (ed.), Ottoman Diplomatic Documents on the Origins of World War One: The Final Stage of the Cretan Question, 1899-1913 / Ottoman Diplomatic Documents on “the Eastern Question”: The Cretan Uprising, 1866-1869

No abstract

1914 in world historical perspective: The ‘uneven’ and ‘combined’ origins of World War I

The causes of World War I remain a topic of enormous intellectual interest. Yet, despite the immensity of the literature, historiographical and IR debates remain mired within unhelpful methodological dichotomies revolving around whether a ‘primacy of foreign policy’ versus ‘primacy of domestic politics’ or systemic versus unit-level approach best account for the war’s origins. Given that this historiography is the most prolific body of literature for any war within the modern age, it reveals a much deeper problem with the social sciences: how to coherently integrate ‘external’ and ‘internal’ relations into a synthesized theory of inter-state conflict and war. Drawing on and contributing to the theory of uneven and combined development, this article challenges standard interpretations of the war by distinctively uniting geopolitical and sociological modes of explanation into a single framework. In doing so, the article highlights how the necessarily variegated character of interactive socio-historical development explains the inter-state rivalries leading to war. Contextualizing the sources of conflict within the broad developmental tendencies of the Long 19th Century (1789–1914) and their particular articulation during the immediate pre-war juncture, the article seeks to provide significant contributions to recent debates in IR and historical sociology, as well as those concerning the relationship between history and IR theory.

Does Chain-Ganging Cause the Outbreak of War?1

Realists have argued that fears over the defection or defeat of an ally can draw states into wars against their broader interests (“chain-ganging”). However, the logic underpinning chain-ganging theory is flawed, and the paradigmatic case—World War I—is not an instance of chain-ganging causing the outbreak of war. The paper draws on recent literatures on alliance restraint and the origins of World War I to provide the first extensive critique of chain-ganging theory, examines the impact on chain-ganging of a number of factors including power and interests, and suggests policy implications for an emerging multipolar system.

Using Human Factors Engineering to Improve Patient Safety: Problem Solving on the Front Line, Second Edition, 2010

Author: John Gosbee, MD, MS, and Laura Lin Gosbee, MASc, Publisher: The Joint Commission, ISBN: 978-1-59940-411-0, Publication date: September 2010, Pages: 176, Price: $85Like the first edition, the second edition of this book provides an excellent introduction to human factors engineering (HFE) with a variety of useful teaching resources and informative case studies. The second edition contains a different set and range of case studies from authors representing hospitals and patient safety organizations. It focuses more on the hospital setting than some of the other books in this area, probably due, in part, to John Gosbee's background as an MD.Audience: This book is suitable for a wide variety of readers. Certainly it is useful for healthcare providers and clinical practitioners, who would benefit from the background and introductory materials, especially the advice on choosing human factors (HF) consultants or HF staff. They would also benefit from the case studies, especially those from hospital settings such as Johns Hopkins and Baylor. Management in clinical settings would learn about the benefits of HF in their operations and might be motivated to hire some HF engineers to improve their patient-safety profile, something that's occurring at more hospitals.Clinical engineers and biomeds would be better consumers of medical devices and systems from a usability and use-safety perspective after reading this book. HF engineers already in healthcare or thinking about a career change into the medical field would benefit from seeing how their skills could be applied to solving the challenging problems of medical accidents and adverse patient events. Legislators would also see opportunities for the place of HF in healthcare legislation. Students would see HF in healthcare as a potentially fulfilling and interesting career choice. HF instructors would also find useful teaching tips in this book. In short, this book would appeal to different types of readers at many levels.Features: The Gosbee book has many useful features. It is well organized with the first section covering the basics and methods of HFE, and the second section containing practical case studies. The introductory chapters give a brief overview of HFE, including Theory and General Principles, Methods and Tools, Lessons Learned Teaching HFE, and Finding and Using HFE Expertise. The first section also includes an outline of a three-day workshop, with suggested class exercises, to teach HFE to hospital staff. Other features: checklists for teaching HFE, tips in hiring HF engineers, and a very helpful appendix on HFE. The book cites resources—including other books, journals, professional societies, and healthcare organizations—relevant to HFE.Assessment: The book is straightforward and written well for all levels of readers. I have a minor problem with the chapter on Finding and Using HFE Expertise. The authors are too narrow in their description of what constitutes a good HF engineer. Having worked at Bell Labs, where HFE was first introduced in industry after its origins in World War II, I saw that many companies recruited HF engineers from the ranks of rigorously trained behavioral scientists specializing in such fields as cognitive psychology and experimental psychology. Successful HF engineers from these backgrounds had a solid grounding in research methods along with a desire to work on applied problems of design and evaluation. Many of the most successful HF engineers did not come from pure HFE academic backgrounds, as suggested in the book.I was also confused by one case study of an insulin pen display potentially being read upside down. The photo of the pen appears to be edited incorrectly, but the learning point is still made. But these are very minor problems in a well-written, edited, and organized book—one that would be a worthwhile addition to anyone's general HFE library and, in particular, for someone in the healthcare discipline.

The Illusion of Anarchy: Chaos, Complexity and the Origins of World War One

In physics, biology and meteorology, scientists have come to understand that the natural systems they study can be extremely sensitive to small events. The so-called ‘butterfly effect’ is testament to such seemingly insignificant events having significant implications for the wider system. Such knowledge has led to an interest in the natural sciences in both chaotic and complex systems and, in turn, has led to social scientists searching for parallels in the systems they examine. However, within the field of international relations theory, there has been little attempt to move towards such new understandings and away from a fundamental belief in anarchy as the defining feature of international politics. This paper offers a critique of this almost-discipline wide stance, drawing on inter-disciplinary approach and suggesting that in the example of the origins of World War One there exists evidence for an international system that is something other than anarchical.

The Perfect Machine: Lorenz Böhler's Rationalized Fracture Treatment in World War I

This essay examines Lorenz Böhler's modernist system of rationalized fracture care as a particular case of medical rationalization and standardization. Böhler's locally created culture of standardized practices is analyzed in the context of its concrete work environment but also situated in relation to aspects of its wider cultural environment. It will be described as part of a more general trend of body-based rationalization efforts in industry and health care, in which the machine metaphor was used to characterize both the body and the work process. The project's origins in World War I will be discussed, as well as its subsequent migration to a civilian setting and its resonance with postwar Viennese modernism, to which it contributed. The essay aims at contributing to a historically informed discussion of medical rationalization and standardization as a heterogeneous, value-laden, and historically contingent phenomenon.

The Origins of World War II, 3d ed, and: War Aims in the Second World War: The War Aims of the Major Belligerents, 1939-1945 (review)

The Origins of World War II, 3d ed, and: War Aims in the Second World War: The War Aims of the Major Belligerents, 1939-1945 (review)

THE ORIGINS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR

Anticipating total war: the German and American experiences, 1871–1914. By Manfred Boemeke, Roger Chickering, and Stig Förster. New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. ix+506. ISBN 0-521-62294-8. £55.00.German strategy and the path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayn and the development of attrition, 1870–1916. By Robert T. Foley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv+316. ISBN 0-521-84193-3. £45.00.Europe's last summer: who started the Great War in 1914? By David Fromkin. New York: Knopf, 2004. Pp. xiii+368. ISBN 0-375-41156-9. £26.95.The origins of World War I. Edited by Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiii+552. ISBN 0-521-81735-8. £35.00.Geheime Diplomatie und öffentliche Meinung: Die Parlamente in Frankreich, Deutschland und Grossbritanien und die erste Marokkokrise, 1904–1906. By Martin Mayer. Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002. Pp. 382. ISBN 3-7700-5242-0. £44.80.Helmuth von Moltke and the origins of the First World War. By Annika Mombauer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xvi+344. ISBN 0-521-79101-4. £48.00.The origins of the First World War: controversies and consensus. By Annika Mombauer. London: Pearson Education, 2002. Pp. ix+256. ISBN 0-582-41872-0. £15.99.Inventing the Schlieffen plan: German war planning, 1871–1914. By Terence Zuber. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi+340. ISBN 0-19-925016-2. £52.50.As Richard Hamilton and Holger Herwig remark in the introduction to their edited collection of essays on the origins of the First World War, thousands of books (and countless articles) have been written on the subject, a veritable flood that began with the outbreak of the conflict in 1914 and continues to this day. This enduring interest is understandable: the First World War was, in George Kennan’s still apt phrase, the ‘great seminal catastrophe’ of the twentieth century. Marking the end of the long nineteenth century and the beginning of the short twentieth century, the war amounted to an earthquake whose seismic shocks and after-shocks resonated decades afterwards both inside and outside of the belligerent countries. The Bolshevik Revolution, the growth of fascist and Nazi movements, the accelerated emergence of the United States as a leading great power, the economic depression of the 1930s – these and other developments all have their roots in the tempest of war during 1914–18. Given the momentous nature of the conflict, it is little wonder that scholars continue to investigate – and to argue about – its origins. At the same time, as Hamilton and Herwig suggest, the sheer number of existing studies places the onus on scholars themselves to justify their decision to add to this historiographical mountain. This being so, in assessing the need for a new work on the origins of the war, one might usefully ask whether it fulfills one of several functions.

The Illusion of Anarchy: Chaos, Complexity and the Origins of World War One

The Illusion of Anarchy: Chaos, Complexity and the Origins of World War One

:Inventing the Schlieffen Plan: German War Planning, 1871–1914.

Terence Zuber introduces significant new evidence where documentation has been chronically thin in the debate about military strategy and the origins of World War I. He concludes that the German general staff never adopted the scheme, which historians have habitually called the “Schlieffen Plan,” for a reckless war of aggression. Instead he reconstructs, in far greater detail than previous scholars, the real contingency plans for mobilization that the general staff revised from year to year between the end of the Franco‐Prussian War and 1914. The original texts remained secret until their destruction, along with the majority of the imperial military archives, in World War II. Zuber has deduced much of their substance by meticulously collating references from peripheral sources. Analyzing fragments from German military archives and from the protagonists' voluminous official and private publications in the interwar years, he retraces exercises conducted before 1914 and recriminations exchanged after defeat. Although most of these highly technical accounts of case studies, war games, staff rides, and operations are at best ambiguous about the actual war plans, Zuber's expertise as a former career officer in the U.S. Army is a particular asset in piecing together persuasive evidence from them.