This volume represents extensive research on Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe), one of the press lords who influenced British politics and policy during World War I. It deals with Northcliffe and the inseparable quality of his public and political career from his journalism.

Philip Waller explores the literary world in which the modern best-seller first emerged, with writers promoted as stars and celebrities, advertising both products and themselves.

This is the story of one of the most important American newspapermen of the twentieth century. Roy Howard rose to prominence at the height of newspapers’ power and became a leader in the evolution of print news starting in 1908—when E. W. Scripps appointed him head of the fledgling United Press at age 25—through his tenure as chairman of the Scripps-Howard empire until 1952. As Howard expanded and modernized the business, he landed some of the most important scoops between World War I and the Korean War. Ebullient, likeable, and outgoing, he headed one of only two coast-to-coast news concerns—Hearst being the other. An advisor to presidents and prime ministers, Howard witnessed the most significant events of the time. A 1930 front-page New York Times article named him one of the 59 men who “rule” America, with John D. Rockefeller topping the list. Time magazine put him on the cover. The Saturday Evening Post lionized him. Even his enemies gave him plenty of coverage: The New Yorker excoriated him in a four-part series, although the author admitted that Howard’s and Hearst’s were the only American newspaper publishers whose photographs the average newspaper reader would recognize. With exclusive, first-time access to thousands of previously unpublished documents in the privately held Howard family archives, author Patricia Beard opens a rich mine of stories from one of the most volatile periods in history as revealed by the head of a newspaper empire at a time when the press both made and broke the news.

During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly. Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson's mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France's president also concluded that the time was right. The Road Less Traveled describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed hopes for a better world. Theirs was a secret battle that is only now becoming fully understood, a story of civic courage, awful responsibility, and how some leaders rose to the occasion while others shrank from it or chased other ambitions. "Peace is on the floor waiting to be picked up!" pleaded the German ambassador to the United States. This book explains both the strategies and fumbles of people facing a great crossroads of history. The Road Less Traveled reveals one of the last great mysteries of the Great War: that it simply never should have lasted so long or cost so much.