"Companion catalog to the Missouri History Museum exhibit WWI: St. Louis and the Great War. Featuring more than 250 photographs and archival documents from the collections of the Missouri Historical Society and Soldiers Memorial Military Museum--most of which have never been published--this book details how the war touched the city and how its citizens rose to the challenge"--

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Drawing on exhaustive research, this intimate account details how World War I reduced Europe’s mightiest empires to rubble, killed twenty million people, and cracked the foundations of our modern world “Thundering, magnificent . . . [A World Undone] is a book of true greatness that prompts moments of sheer joy and pleasure. . . . It will earn generations of admirers.”—The Washington Times On a summer day in 1914, a nineteen-year-old Serbian nationalist gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. While the world slumbered, monumental forces were shaken. In less than a month, a combination of ambition, deceit, fear, jealousy, missed opportunities, and miscalculation sent Austro-Hungarian troops marching into Serbia, German troops streaming toward Paris, and a vast Russian army into war, with England as its ally. As crowds cheered their armies on, no one could guess what lay ahead in the First World War: four long years of slaughter, physical and moral exhaustion, and the near collapse of a civilization that until 1914 had dominated the globe. Praise for A World Undone “Meyer’s sketches of the British Cabinet, the Russian Empire, the aging Austro-Hungarian Empire . . . are lifelike and plausible. His account of the tragic folly of Gallipoli is masterful. . . . [A World Undone] has an instructive value that can scarcely be measured”—Los Angeles Times “An original and very readable account of one of the most significant and often misunderstood events of the last century.”—Steve Gillon, resident historian, The History Channel

In the battles to determine the destiny of the United States in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, St. Louis, then at the hinge between North, South, and West, was ideally placed to bring these sections together. At least, this was the hope of a coterie of influential St. Louisans. But their visions of re-orienting the nation's politics with Westerners at the top and St. Louis as a cultural, commercial, and national capital crashed as the country was tom apart by convulsions over slavery, emancipation, and Manifest Destiny. While standard accounts frame the coming of the Civil War as strictly a conflict between the North and the South who were competing to expand their way of life, Arenson shifts the focus to the distinctive culture and politics of the American West, recovering the region’s importance for understanding the Civil War and examining the vision of western advocates themselves, and the importance of their distinct agenda for shaping the political, economic, and cultural future of the nation.

St Louis played a key role as a strategic staging ground for the Union Army in the American Civil War. This is a portrait of a war-torn city, encompassing a wide range of events such as the murder of publisher Elijah Lovejoy, the infamous Dred Scott saga, battles in the city, and more.

This volume presents carefully selected, and annotated, articles about major-leaguers serving at home and overseas in the U.S. armed forces during World War I. Some continued to play ball in the military. Others fought the Germans in the trenches, in the air and at sea. Several lost their lives in combat or to disease. A few became heroes. From future Hall of Famers to journeymen and unknowns, each did his duty.

A searing portrait of the racial dynamics that lie inescapably at the heart of our nation, told through the turbulent history of the city of St. Louis. From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in this searing book, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past. St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures. A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States.

A comparative study of the cultural impact of the Great War on British and German societies. Taking medievalism as a mode of public commemorations as its focus, this book unravels the British and German search for historical continuity and meaning in the shadow of an unprecedented human catastrophe.