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, after the sound of gunfire was silenced on Armistice Day, the deaths continued to mount. Revolutions spawned in Russia and Germany, arbitrary redrawing of national borders set the stage for decades of conflict, harsh reparation demands inspired the rise of Nazi Germany and the onset of World War I

. The first World War continues to kill to this day - just this past March, two Belgian construction workers were killed when they encountered an unexploded shell buried for a century. Bomb disposal units in France and Belgium dispose of tons of discovered shells every year.

the remnants remain -- scarred landscapes, thousands of memorials, artifacts preserved in museums, photographs, and the stories passed down through the years -- stories of such tremendous loss

In “Dreadnought,” the reader is reminded that the author is a biographer at heart: His portraits of the young Winston Churchill; of the intense, eccentric Adm. Sir John “Jacky” Fisher; and of Germany’s ambitious Adm. Alfred von Tirpitz make for a riveting narrative.

The two great fleets had vastly different origins. The German fleet was the creation of an unstable monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who chose to compete for naval supremacy with the Royal Navy.

At sea as on land, World War I confounded the planners on both sides. The Germans anticipated a sea blockade, but thought that an enemy blockade close to their own coast would be vulnerable to sorties by their own warships.

Thousands of miles from the battlefields of Europe, the armies of Britain and France clashed with imperial German forces in Africa’s deserts, cities and bush during World War I.

The 1914-18 war brought an end to German colonial rule in Africa, saw up to 2 million Africans sacrifice their lives for Europe and brought much social upheaval as cities grew to supply the war effort, hardening racial divisions.

“The First World War had a considerable impact on African colonies because European powers requisitioned their labor and their resources,” said historian Bill Nasson of the University of Cape Town.

The Irish president has paid tribute to Irish soldiers who fought in World War One.

"But we honour them all now, even if at a distance, and we do not ask, nor would it be appropriate to interrogate, their reasons for enlisting.

Historians have estimated that more than 200,000 Irish-born soldiers served in the British Army and Navy from 1914 to 1918.

England, France, and Russia blamed Germany and Austria-Hungary, while the latter blamed the former.

A century later, the guns have long been silenced, but the war over the war continues. To an extent that seems amazing for a modern conflict, there is still no consensus over who was responsible for World War I,

influencing US foreign policy in different ways with each generation.

On April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson went before a joint session of Congress to request a declaration of war against Germany.

Wilson cited Germany’s violation of its pledge to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare in the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean, as well as its attempts to entice Mexico into an alliance against the United States, as his reasons for declaring war.

While Wilson weighed his options regarding the submarine issue, he also had to address the question of Germany’s attempts to cement a secret alliance with Mexico. On January 19, 1917, British naval intelligence intercepted and decrypted a telegram sent by German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmermann to the German Ambassador in Mexico City. The “Zimmermann Telegram” promised the Mexican Government that Germany would help Mexico recover the territory it had ceded to the United States following the Mexican-American War. In return for this assistance, Germany asked for Mexican support in the war.

As much as the U.S. wanted to stay neutral during World War I, it proved impossible. This meant the U.S. had to raise the forces and money to wage war. Find out how Americans played their part in WWI in this lesson.

April 6th, 1917

Britain, propaganda, the sinking of ships by German U-boats, and a German attempt in the Zimmermann Note to get Mexico to declare war on the U.S. pushed the U.S. to getting involved.

After the triumphs of Trump and Brexit, right-leaning parties see paths to political power

Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election in part by promising to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., of political elites and to “Make America Great Again,”

A black World War I soldier was finally recognized for his military service over the weekend, decades after he was buried in an unmarked grave in Indiana.

I felt like he deserved one, and his memory needs to be kept alive and honored for his service and sacrifice.”

The armed forces weren't desegregated until 1948, meaning Inman likely served under French command, according to the chapter's research. Black soldiers were not allowed to directly engage in combat at the time.

Did we have anything you could call propaganda?

I regret that I must answer in the negative. Everything that actually was done in this field was so inadequate and wrong from the very start that it certainly did no good and sometimes did actual harm.

it was the freedom and independence of our nation, the security of our future food supply, and - our national honor; a thing which, despite all contrary opinions prevailing today, nevertheless exists, or rather should exist, since peoples without honor have sooner or later lost their freedom and independence, which in turn is only the result of a higher justice, since generations of rabble without honor deserve no freedom. Any man who wants to be a cowardly slave can have no honor) or honor itself would soon fall into general contempt.

In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers

Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”

By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”

Historians of all political persuasions and none have been working for decades to discredit what might crudely be described as the ‘Blackadder’ view of the First World War. Views among this group are by no means uniform, and there are some sharp divisions over interpretations. My politics happen to lie on the Left.

For Britain, the war was one of national survival, fought in defence of its vital interests against an aggressive, militarist, anti-democratic, near-autocracy. The tired stereotype of the British army as ‘lions led by donkeys’ has long been thoroughly discredited.

At a minimum I would like to see general recognition that the ‘sleepwalkers’ interpretation of the origins of the First World War, crudely stated that the great powers stumbled into a war that no one wanted, remains a minority view among scholars. On the contrary, there is a great deal of evidence that Austria-Hungary and Germany bear the burden of the responsibility for unleashing the war. Moreover, it needs to be understood the vast majority of the British people supported the war, not as an imperialist venture but because they believed that Germany posed a direct threat to their country, their well-being and their families; and many historians argue that they were absolutely right to do so.

This was a time when the seed was planted for the Arab world “to define itself less by what it aspires to become than what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms.”

Clarity was hard to find, and so, after such wanton loss of life, were victors. But heroes were needed, and here was a shoo-in.

Mr. Anderson’s thoughtful, big-picture version only enriches the story it tells. “Lawrence in Arabia” emphasizes the Gordian difficulties facing any strategist