Leonhard sets out not simply to write a history of events, but to help his reader understand the greater meaning of the war for the participants (who included virtually everyone in the world to one extent or another) and to us in the twenty-first century. Rather, the two centuries are intertwined in the history of the conflict.” But as he shows in his first two chapters describing nineteenth-century legacies and the immediate antecedents to August 1914, and later in chapters entitled “Outcomes,” “Memories,” and “Burdens,” the war “cannot be explained solely with reference to the nineteenth century, with the latter reduced to a mere prehistory nor can the war be reduced to its twentieth-century consequences, unfolding as a result of the global upheaval of 1914-1918. He begins by asking the question: What was the First World War? Briefly he responds, as have so many others since 1918, that it was the demarcation between the twentieth century and all that had come before. The book is so massive because Leonhard has set himself a massive task.
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