This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

Cover -- Half Title -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- TABLE OF CONTENTS -- LIST OF TABLES -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER ONE. THE CATHOLIC AVANT-GARDE: 1890-1914 -- CHAPTER TWO. THE SPRINGS OF FAITH -- CHAPTER THREE. THE SPIRIT OF SILLON 1906-1910 -- CHAPTER FOUR. REASON AND FAITH -- CHAPTER FIVE. THE GROUPE-TALA 1912-1914: CATHOLICISM AS A VOCATION -- CHAPTER SIX. LEFT/RIGHT, MYSTIQUE/POLITIQUE -- Psichari and Maritain -- Péguy -- CHAPTER SEVEN. CONCLUSION -- Epilogue -- APPENDIX -- BIBLIOGRAPHY

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1968.

In The Lost History of 1914, Jack Beatty offers a highly original view of World War I, testing against fresh evidence the long-dominant assumption that it was inevitable. "Most books set in 1914 map the path leading to war," Beatty writes. "This one maps the multiple paths that led away from it." Chronicling largely forgotten events faced by each of the belligerent countries in the months before the war started in August, Beatty shows how any one of them-a possible military coup in Germany; an imminent civil war in Britain; the murder trial of the wife of the likely next premier of France, who sought détente with Germany-might have derailed the war or brought it to a different end. In Beatty's hands, these stories open into epiphanies of national character, and offer dramatic portraits of the year's major actors-Kaiser Wilhelm, Tsar Nicholas II , Woodrow Wilson, along with forgotten or overlooked characters such as Pancho Villa, Rasputin, and Herbert Hoover. Europe's ruling classes, Beatty shows, were so haunted by fear of those below that they mistook democratization for revolution, and were tempted to "escape forward" into war to head it off. Beatty's powerful rendering of the combat between August 1914 and January 1915 which killed more than one million men, restores lost history, revealing how trench warfare, long depicted as death's victory, was actually a life-saving strategy. Beatty's deeply insightful book-as elegantly written as it is thought-provoking and probing-lights a lost world about to blow itself up in what George Kennan called "the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century." It also arms readers against narratives of historical inevitability in today's world.