New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol. 2, No. 5, August, 1915

VariousProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 3.4
Word count
694K words
Chapters
70

Tags

Other World HistoryMilitary Rise of Great PowersMilitary StrategyDocumentary NarrativePopular NarrativeWorld OrderSocial Observation

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915Author: Various,Language: English, Class: D501: History: General and Eastern Hemisphere: World War I (1914-1918), Release Date: Aug 30, 2007

Editor's review

This is a volume in The New York Times Current History series on the First World War, published in August 1915. It gathers wartime reports, official statements, dispatches from the front and commentary as they appeared at the time, arranged by topic and covering the Western Front, the Eastern Front, naval blockade, diplomacy, and the war's effects on social life. Its value lies not in hindsight but in showing the language the public actually read while the war was ongoing: propaganda tone, incomplete information, expectations and anxieties about victory and defeat all remain in the text. For students of First World War history, press history or wartime public opinion, it is a tangible primary source for the feel of the period; for general history lovers, a supplementary reader on the 1915 campaigns and international reactions. As a public-domain ebook it is easy to search by keyword and compare with other sources. Read it with a critical eye for historical sources, distinguishing report, commentary and official statement.

Who it's for

A good fit for

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Reading tips

  1. Get a rough picture of the 1915 campaigns and main fronts first, so you can place each report.
  2. Note the date and source of each piece as you read, distinguishing front dispatches, official statements and commentary.
  3. Read different reports of the same event side by side, noting differences in wording and gaps in information.
  4. Read alongside a modern general history of the war to correct the biases of wartime reporting.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

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FAQ

Is this a complete history of the First World War? No. It is one volume of The New York Times Current History series published in August 1915, gathering reports, statements and commentary of the time. It is a compilation of wartime press sources, not a history written afterwards; use it as a supplement, not a systematic introduction.
Are the reports in the book objective? Wartime papers inevitably carry national perspective and propaganda, and information was limited by censorship and communications. Treat each piece as a source from a particular time and outlet, attending to its rhetoric and slant rather than taking it as neutral fact.
Is the original periodical English hard to read? Early twentieth-century journalistic English is fairly formal, with many names, places and military terms. Readers at university English level can manage with maps and a glossary; beginners might read a modern overview first, then return to the relevant chapters.
How can I use this book for history writing or coursework? Use it as a source for quotations and analysis of public opinion: excerpt reports by theme, cite the issue and date, compare with other sources or later research, and discuss how wartime information was organised and circulated. When quoting, distinguish factual statements from commentary.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Various Author

Various is not a real person but a collective attribution used in book cataloging and databases for works with multiple authors, commonly applied to anthologies, compilations, or publications with too many contributors to list individually. On this Chinese book site, this attribution covers as many as 3,387 titles, spanning encyclopedic entries, historical documents, and trial records. Representative works include several volumes of the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the record of the trial of the major war criminals before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Available public information is limited: nationality, birth and death dates, and common categories are not clearly recorded, making it difficult to summarize a unified writing style or personal biography. Readers should understand it as a cataloging convention rather than a single author.