1919: The Year Our World Began

by William K. Klingaman

When the First World War ended, the leaders of the great nations gathered in Paris to create a new and improved world from the postwar chaos. President Woodrow Wilson brought great dreams of setting up a powerful League of Nations. But in 1919, many things happened to destroy the idealism born in the moment of victory. There was civil war in Russia, the founding of the Nazi and fascist movements, the Indian struggle for independence against the British.

In the U.S., we had the Great Red Scare, violent race riots, and the Black Sox scandal in the World Series. In this fascinating work, Klingaman traces the political, diplomatic, social, cultural, and psychological changes that combined to make 1919, in essence, the first year of the twentieth century.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

689 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1987

Reviews

[Michael Coats · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great collection of accounts about the crucial year in world history. The Versailles Peace Conference takes center stage, while many other details, including the baseball season which will culminate with the Black Sox scandal, social trends of great and minor import (Prohibition and Votes for Women, as well as new fashion trends), Herbert Hoover's observations on the humanitarian crisis the world faced in the former Autro-Hungarian Empire, and revolutionary fervor in Germany, Russia, Ireland, India, and elsewhere, are interspersed throughout the book, giving us a feel of what life was like in 1919.

[John Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author could not have picked a better title. World War One is over and entire world is a mess, Millions are dead or disabled for life, towns and cities destroyed and if that weren't enough the end of the war began the Great Influenza that killed millions more.
The Allies: Britain, France and USA, winners, begin to come up with the treaty to end the war. Meeting in France at the Versailles Place where France surrendered to Germany in 1871 (the irony was not lost to the German's)
The negations, go on for months and months, tying up the leaders, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and Clemenceau both the French and Brits want severe punishment. Wilson comes up with the Fourteen Points to build a better world so he claimed. Not everyone agrees.
Filled with a cast of the entire world's population hanging in the balance with poverty, revolutions, labor disputes and countries ignored, it was amazing anything could get done.
Big names fill the landscape, Adolf Hitler, Mussolini, Trotsky and Stalin. In America name pf sports and movies stars also color in the grey spots.
This is a long book which can sometimes boggle the mind. Make no mistake it's worth the read and is Highly Recommended

[anonymousreader]

to-read

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 5 out of 5]

William K. Klingaman's 1919: The Year Our World Began is one of those omnibus "histories of a single year," a common form of pop history that often wearies the reader in its conflation of the momentous and trivial. Klingaman, fortunately, chooses a year that merits this approach: 1919, the year after the end of World War I which left the Old Order shattered, and a new one bloodily struggling to emerge. Klingaman's book takes a strictly chronological approach, taking the reader through a detailed journey of the time that leaves scarcely a stone unturned. Klingaman is quite effective showing Germany's brutal postwar era; racked by political turmoil after the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy, its people starving from the Allied blockade, with the country's statesmen struggling to cobble together a workable state while under pressure from the Allies to accept the onerous terms of Versailles. More broadly, he explores the general wave of anarchy unleashed by war's end: the new states in Eastern and Central Europe that immediately began squabbling over territory; abortive communist revolutions in Bavaria and Hungary; the Middle East, riven between the nationalism of various native peoples, the colonial ambitions of Britain and France and a renascent Turkey under Kemal Ataturk; India and Ireland, where longstanding colonial grievances erupted into mass protest and violence; and of course the Russian Revolution, which had long since descended into a bloody, multi-sided civil war, mass murder and widespread starvation. Klingaman expertly dovetails between these topics, while also exploring the Paris Peace Conference, Woodrow Wilson's battling for the League of Nations while also repressing dissenters at home; sewn into the narrative are brief cultural asides on everything from the emerging postwar literature to the Black Sox scandal that provide color, rather than distracting from the broader narratives. Such a book is overwhelming, but never reduces its topic to a series of colorful anecdotes; Klingaman's book, rather, is a highly readable, encyclopedic chronicle of a time when anything seemed possible, and just about everything did happen - except, of course, the creation of a stable peace.

[Joel Bresler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone in the world should read this book.

[Grindy Stone · Rating 2 out of 5]

Author never makes the case that 1919 is "the year our world began" - there are probably two or three other years between 1919 and 1987 (year the book was published) that were bigger watersheds.

The only stories worth telling are the Paris peace conference and what was going on in Russia, but every time the narrative gets going on those the author jumps to Babe Ruth's contract negotiations or some guy who jumped from one airplane to another.

[David Hobbs · Rating 2 out of 5]

The book has some good narratives. But 1919, as a subject, is purely arbitrary. It was written that way as a novelty. It probably weakened the book, but a decent read.