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Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924
The gripping story of the years that ended the Great War and launched Europe and America onto the roller coaster of the twentieth century, Crucible is filled with all-too-human tales of exuberant dreams, dark fears, and the absurdities of chance
In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style.
Lenin and Hitler, Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rosa Luxemburg and Mustafa Kemal - these are some of the protagonists in this dramatic panorama of a world in turmoil. Revolutions and civil wars erupt across Europe. A red scare hits America. Women win the vote. Marching tunes are syncopated into jazz. The real becomes surreal.
Encompassing both tragedy and humor, the celebrated author of 1913 brings immediacy and intimacy to this moment of deep historical transformation that moulded the world we would come to inherit.
In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style.
Lenin and Hitler, Josephine Baker and Ernest Hemingway, Rosa Luxemburg and Mustafa Kemal - these are some of the protagonists in this dramatic panorama of a world in turmoil. Revolutions and civil wars erupt across Europe. A red scare hits America. Women win the vote. Marching tunes are syncopated into jazz. The real becomes surreal.
Encompassing both tragedy and humor, the celebrated author of 1913 brings immediacy and intimacy to this moment of deep historical transformation that moulded the world we would come to inherit.
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First published October 15, 2019
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Charles Emmerson
4 books29 followersAuthor and senior research fellow at Chatham House.
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
November 21, 2019
One of the best history books I've read recently - very engaging style and an interesting structure following the main events of the period through the activities of quite a few characters of which some of the most notable are the principled non-tipper (starting in New York 1917), the impatient revolutionary (starting in Zurich 1917), the Georgian bank-robber (just released from Siberia and going back to Petrograd 1917) and the mangy field-runner (starting in the trenches of the western front), but with many, many others and it obviously ends in 1924 with the (un)heroic death and the start of the public afterlife of the impatient revolutionary, the beginning of the domination of the bank-robber and the marginalization of the non-tipper (which as we know ended with an ice-pick to the head in Mexico) and the release of the mangy field-runner from an ultimately short (just under a year out of a 5 year sentence) but productive stay in prison where he wrote his soon to be very successful book about his struggle...
Definitely would be interested to a sequel (or more) as outside of the above, we also meet (and here noting only the surviving characters by 1924 as there were also notable characters like Rosa Luxemburg and Woodrow Wilson that passed away like the impatient revolutionary within our period) Hemingway, Freud, Einstein, Mussolini, the Kaiser, Mustafa Kemal, Andre Breton, William du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Eamon de Valera, Clare Sheridan, Nadya Ulyanova, Josephine Baker so a reconstruction of their and others that come to the fore activities in the next 15 years say would make for great reading too.
Highly recommended
Definitely would be interested to a sequel (or more) as outside of the above, we also meet (and here noting only the surviving characters by 1924 as there were also notable characters like Rosa Luxemburg and Woodrow Wilson that passed away like the impatient revolutionary within our period) Hemingway, Freud, Einstein, Mussolini, the Kaiser, Mustafa Kemal, Andre Breton, William du Bois, Marcus Garvey, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Eamon de Valera, Clare Sheridan, Nadya Ulyanova, Josephine Baker so a reconstruction of their and others that come to the fore activities in the next 15 years say would make for great reading too.
Highly recommended
December 1, 2020
One of the most notable features of the First World War in historiography is just how much everyone—even trained, respected, astonishingly intelligent historians—gets unforgivably wrong, their view clouded by the sheer scale and importance of that world-ending event. Histories pre-First World War—the history of anything and everything after Napoleon, if not the American War of Independence—are reliably foreshortened (in the words of Paul Schroeder) into a story of "how we got to 1914". Histories of the Franco-Prussian War that don't interpret it in terms of Prussian militarism, arms racing, geopolitical balance and ultimately as a precursor of the First World War, for example, are extraordinarily thin on the ground. That all of their efforts would be reduced to a story about how the First World War started would doubtless come as a surprise to the millions of individuals pursuing their own goals in 1871.
Histories of the post-First World War world are similarly warped by the historiographical weight of the Wars: I don't know that I have ever encountered any discussion of the Treaty of Versailles that was not directly or indirectly aimed at demonstrating that the events of 1939-1945 were or were not the fault of the people who dictated peace terms in 1919.
Magnificent in scope and impressive in its success weaving disparate stories into a coherent narrative history, Crucible is an important addition to the literature about the First World War and the Long Nineteenth Century precisely because it rejects that historiographical myopia (reminiscent of Francis Spufford's incisive and breathtaking Red Plenty ) and unpacks the nominally post-war period on its own terms.
Emerson demonstrates that the Great War didn't so much end in 1918 as break up from its major fronts into a bewildering array of localised conflicts, several of the nation-level belligerents —Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany et cetera—begging a reprieve while they turned their attention to quelling subnational parties to the global conflict. I think Emerson could go further: an accurate history of the War should acknowledge that it cannot be said to have "ended" in any meaningful sense before the final peace between the final great power belligerents was signed in 1923, but even his conservative vision of post-war history is illuminating.
Traditional histories of the First World War (or the Long Nineteenth Century) that conclude with Armistice in 1918 or even the Versailles Conference in 1919 are incomplete, led astray by a narrowminded focus on formal political units and historical lies-to-children like treaties and armistices still clinging on from the historical methodologies of an earlier age. Crucible is an admirable, readable effort to revise that unhelpful view and plug the historiographical gap.
Histories of the post-First World War world are similarly warped by the historiographical weight of the Wars: I don't know that I have ever encountered any discussion of the Treaty of Versailles that was not directly or indirectly aimed at demonstrating that the events of 1939-1945 were or were not the fault of the people who dictated peace terms in 1919.
Magnificent in scope and impressive in its success weaving disparate stories into a coherent narrative history, Crucible is an important addition to the literature about the First World War and the Long Nineteenth Century precisely because it rejects that historiographical myopia (reminiscent of Francis Spufford's incisive and breathtaking Red Plenty ) and unpacks the nominally post-war period on its own terms.
Emerson demonstrates that the Great War didn't so much end in 1918 as break up from its major fronts into a bewildering array of localised conflicts, several of the nation-level belligerents —Britain, France, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany et cetera—begging a reprieve while they turned their attention to quelling subnational parties to the global conflict. I think Emerson could go further: an accurate history of the War should acknowledge that it cannot be said to have "ended" in any meaningful sense before the final peace between the final great power belligerents was signed in 1923, but even his conservative vision of post-war history is illuminating.
Traditional histories of the First World War (or the Long Nineteenth Century) that conclude with Armistice in 1918 or even the Versailles Conference in 1919 are incomplete, led astray by a narrowminded focus on formal political units and historical lies-to-children like treaties and armistices still clinging on from the historical methodologies of an earlier age. Crucible is an admirable, readable effort to revise that unhelpful view and plug the historiographical gap.
April 12, 2020
One of the best history books I’ve ever read. I really enjoyed his approach and style.
Something pretty cool: I finished the book reading his acknowledgments, which he penned on Easter 2019 (I’m finishing it on Easter 2020).
Something pretty cool: I finished the book reading his acknowledgments, which he penned on Easter 2019 (I’m finishing it on Easter 2020).
February 27, 2020
I love the ambition of this book, a narrative history to show that the First World War didn't just end, it more split off into dangling smaller upheavals that continued, alongside each other, for years. All Europe must still have felt at war, only everywhere was now fighting their own, smaller wars: revolution and civil war in Russia; war between Turkey and Greece for Anatolia; first a war for independence and then a civil war in Ireland; unsuccessful attempts at communist revolution in Germany and Hungary; the fall of democracy in Italy.
Emmerson organises his history as a rapid-fire series of what are essentially journal entries, most no more than two to three paragraphs in length, jumping back and forth between all his different storylines. It's particularly to his credit that he doesn't limit himself to geopolitics, but also follows cultural and scientific figures that illustrate how people were having to deal with a world that had fallen apart not just politically, but also in how we perceived it: Sigmund Freud deconstructing the human mind through psychoanalysis; Andre Breton, coming to terms with the First World War by introducing absurdity into art through Dada and surrealism; Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity told people that even the physical universe itself is not a definite, concrete thing, but rather something shaped by our perceptions. The nascent American civil rights movement of the 1920s is also covered, with the rivalry between Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois (always referred to as "William DuBois", for some reason; I've never heard his name given that way), and the beginning of the career of Josephine Baker.
(It's somewhat odd, in the early sections, to read of Einstein and Freud patriotically hoping for a Central Powers victory, but then again, of course they hoped Germany and Austria would win the war. Why wouldn't they? That's a real strength of Emmerson's approach: placing everything in the context that it had at the time, rather than being subject to our later notions--in this instance, for me, expecting Einstein and Freud to be somehow above the politics of the day.)
The book's great failing is probably inevitable: it's too shallow. There is so much to cover that nothing can be explained or given significance. The great German offensive of spring 1918, that came so close to victory that Lloyd George actually said, "We are going to lose this war," is over and done with in a few paragraphs; at no point do we feel like the Germans are teetering on the edge of victory. The Paris Peace Conference, in which the most powerful men on the planet--President of the United States, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Premier of France--redrew the map of the whole world, is over and done with in a few pages; there's no sense of the hopefulness with which the world looked to Versailles, of the great disputes between Wilson and Lloyd George and Clemenceau, of the army of Americans, Britons and Frenchmen who produced hundreds of thousands of pages of reports trying to solve insoluble problems. The Russian Civil War lasts a lot longer, but there's still no detail, no sense either of the Reds snatching victory from defeat or of the Whites as a lost cause desperately hanging on; it's all that one side attacked from the north, while another launched an offensive in the south.
Emmerson has a peculiar aversion to telling us who the hell it is that he's talking about. This is most apparent in the book's opening hundred or so pages, where each new entry introduces a new major character, but where again and again he talks about the person for some time before telling us his name--first with Lenin, then with Freud, then with Trotsky. (Freud doesn't get named at all in his first entry; we have to wait till his second for that.) But it also recurs throughout the book: in the early 1920s, for instance, even after Ernest Hemingway has popped up a dozen times already, as a high school student in Chicago or a wounded ambulance driver on the Italian Front or a budding newspaper journalist, we're still given a section about "two American tourists", a young man and his wife, who turn up at an Austrian inn while on a hiking tour of the Alps, and not until they've been described in detail are we told that they're Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley.
A bit related to that is Emmerson's predilection for nicknames. When Leon Trotsky first appears in early 1917, living in exile in New York, the first thing we're told about him is that he refuses to tip at the diner he frequents, because it violates his political principles. This is a neat little titbit that illuminates Trotsky both personally and politically; what it is not is the man's defining characteristic, of which we must be reminded every single time he reappears throughout the first half of the book. By 1918 Trotsky is Bolshevik Russia's commissar of foreign affairs, the second most powerful man in the Revolution, and the lead Russian negotiator at the Brest-Litovsk peace conference which will soon lead to Russia signing a separate peace with Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire and dropping out of the war. And yet even at this point Emmerson is still more likely to refer to him as "the principled non-tipper" than he is by name. Similarly Lenin remains "the impatient revolutionary" throughout the book, and Hitler "the mangy field runner". During the Russo-Polish War of 1920, when the Red Army under Mikhail Tukhachevsky breaks against the defences of Warsaw, Emmerson mentions in passing that as a younger man Tukhachevsky went by the nickname Mischa; and from that point on, "Mischa" becomes the only name Emmerson will call him. (Tukhachevsky had already become yet another figure who had been mentioned by description--as a surprisingly young, formerly aristocratic Red general--in previous entries before we were finally given his name.)
Other, minor figures never get named at all. The first entry introducing Freud, at Franz Joseph's funeral in Vienna at the beginning of 1917, says that the camera crew at the funeral is directed by a Hungarian who will one day make a name for himself in Hollywood. I'm assuming this is Sir Alexander Korda, but I'd rather know than assume.
My only other criticism is that there's definitely more than a whiff of great man theory about Emmerson's approach to history. In 1917, with the First World War raging and revolution getting underway in Russia, Woodrow Wilson, Kaiser Wilhelm and Vladimir Lenin are of course all major characters, and remain so throughout the first half of the book. But as they drop off the world stage--as Wilson leaves office, the Kaiser abdicates and Lenin's health fails--we don't leave them in order to follow their successors. We stay with them in irrelevance: through Wilson's and Lenin's multiple strokes and steep declines, and the Kaiser's life in exile on a Dutch manor, all three men get checked in with regularly. Warren Harding, or the new German leadership, or the growing rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky get mentioned only incidentally, and far less often.
Emmerson organises his history as a rapid-fire series of what are essentially journal entries, most no more than two to three paragraphs in length, jumping back and forth between all his different storylines. It's particularly to his credit that he doesn't limit himself to geopolitics, but also follows cultural and scientific figures that illustrate how people were having to deal with a world that had fallen apart not just politically, but also in how we perceived it: Sigmund Freud deconstructing the human mind through psychoanalysis; Andre Breton, coming to terms with the First World War by introducing absurdity into art through Dada and surrealism; Albert Einstein, whose theory of relativity told people that even the physical universe itself is not a definite, concrete thing, but rather something shaped by our perceptions. The nascent American civil rights movement of the 1920s is also covered, with the rivalry between Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois (always referred to as "William DuBois", for some reason; I've never heard his name given that way), and the beginning of the career of Josephine Baker.
(It's somewhat odd, in the early sections, to read of Einstein and Freud patriotically hoping for a Central Powers victory, but then again, of course they hoped Germany and Austria would win the war. Why wouldn't they? That's a real strength of Emmerson's approach: placing everything in the context that it had at the time, rather than being subject to our later notions--in this instance, for me, expecting Einstein and Freud to be somehow above the politics of the day.)
The book's great failing is probably inevitable: it's too shallow. There is so much to cover that nothing can be explained or given significance. The great German offensive of spring 1918, that came so close to victory that Lloyd George actually said, "We are going to lose this war," is over and done with in a few paragraphs; at no point do we feel like the Germans are teetering on the edge of victory. The Paris Peace Conference, in which the most powerful men on the planet--President of the United States, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Premier of France--redrew the map of the whole world, is over and done with in a few pages; there's no sense of the hopefulness with which the world looked to Versailles, of the great disputes between Wilson and Lloyd George and Clemenceau, of the army of Americans, Britons and Frenchmen who produced hundreds of thousands of pages of reports trying to solve insoluble problems. The Russian Civil War lasts a lot longer, but there's still no detail, no sense either of the Reds snatching victory from defeat or of the Whites as a lost cause desperately hanging on; it's all that one side attacked from the north, while another launched an offensive in the south.
Emmerson has a peculiar aversion to telling us who the hell it is that he's talking about. This is most apparent in the book's opening hundred or so pages, where each new entry introduces a new major character, but where again and again he talks about the person for some time before telling us his name--first with Lenin, then with Freud, then with Trotsky. (Freud doesn't get named at all in his first entry; we have to wait till his second for that.) But it also recurs throughout the book: in the early 1920s, for instance, even after Ernest Hemingway has popped up a dozen times already, as a high school student in Chicago or a wounded ambulance driver on the Italian Front or a budding newspaper journalist, we're still given a section about "two American tourists", a young man and his wife, who turn up at an Austrian inn while on a hiking tour of the Alps, and not until they've been described in detail are we told that they're Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley.
A bit related to that is Emmerson's predilection for nicknames. When Leon Trotsky first appears in early 1917, living in exile in New York, the first thing we're told about him is that he refuses to tip at the diner he frequents, because it violates his political principles. This is a neat little titbit that illuminates Trotsky both personally and politically; what it is not is the man's defining characteristic, of which we must be reminded every single time he reappears throughout the first half of the book. By 1918 Trotsky is Bolshevik Russia's commissar of foreign affairs, the second most powerful man in the Revolution, and the lead Russian negotiator at the Brest-Litovsk peace conference which will soon lead to Russia signing a separate peace with Germany, Austria and the Ottoman Empire and dropping out of the war. And yet even at this point Emmerson is still more likely to refer to him as "the principled non-tipper" than he is by name. Similarly Lenin remains "the impatient revolutionary" throughout the book, and Hitler "the mangy field runner". During the Russo-Polish War of 1920, when the Red Army under Mikhail Tukhachevsky breaks against the defences of Warsaw, Emmerson mentions in passing that as a younger man Tukhachevsky went by the nickname Mischa; and from that point on, "Mischa" becomes the only name Emmerson will call him. (Tukhachevsky had already become yet another figure who had been mentioned by description--as a surprisingly young, formerly aristocratic Red general--in previous entries before we were finally given his name.)
Other, minor figures never get named at all. The first entry introducing Freud, at Franz Joseph's funeral in Vienna at the beginning of 1917, says that the camera crew at the funeral is directed by a Hungarian who will one day make a name for himself in Hollywood. I'm assuming this is Sir Alexander Korda, but I'd rather know than assume.
My only other criticism is that there's definitely more than a whiff of great man theory about Emmerson's approach to history. In 1917, with the First World War raging and revolution getting underway in Russia, Woodrow Wilson, Kaiser Wilhelm and Vladimir Lenin are of course all major characters, and remain so throughout the first half of the book. But as they drop off the world stage--as Wilson leaves office, the Kaiser abdicates and Lenin's health fails--we don't leave them in order to follow their successors. We stay with them in irrelevance: through Wilson's and Lenin's multiple strokes and steep declines, and the Kaiser's life in exile on a Dutch manor, all three men get checked in with regularly. Warren Harding, or the new German leadership, or the growing rivalry between Stalin and Trotsky get mentioned only incidentally, and far less often.
January 4, 2020
Great book.
The best way to describe it is this is a "Great Men (generic, mann not mensch) of History" based book, but told in vignettes like a "People's History" book. And, it covers so much.
First, the dates make sense. The March Revolution in Russia, paired with German resumption of submarine warfare bringing America in, of course mean 1917 for the start.
The end date? Lenin dies in 1924, Hitler goes to prison, the German hyperinflation and French occupation of the Ruhr end, and new loan agreements from America do end the war and birth a new world — for five years until the Depression hits.
I learned a lot about several "great men" in this book.
First, I've thought Jung with his New Ageism was loonier than Freud. OTOH, I now read that Freud believed in numerology and had a general superstitious streak. Plus, he tried to combine Lamarckianism with Freudianism into some weird early version of evolutionary psychology.
Second, the whole 1920-24 Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin denouement, skipping from vignette to vignette, plays out so well. I knew that Lenin was at work at least partially writing Stalin out of the Party before his first major stroke. I also knew that Stalin was tightening his hold on the Politburo, especially at levels a rung or two below the top. But, Emmerson explains just how much many of the people at the top ideologically loathed the New Economic Policy. Even more, he shows how Trotsky, by long absences from Moscow and a general insouciance of sorts, undercut himself as much as Stalin undercut him. This element of the book was worth the price alone.
Third, I noted Freud above. Emmerson loops in many others. British suffragists visiting Lenin. Einstein invited on world tours to talk relativity (and raise money for Zionism). Clare Sheridan, Churchill's cousin and would-be, and generally actual, sculptor to the new world leaders. Andre Breton and Surrealism. Tristan Tzara and Dadaism. Young Hemingway. Guillaume Apollinaire.
And, more leaders and ex-leaders. Kaiser Wilhelm brooding, self-deluding and chopping wood in Dutch exile. The Irish civil war and Valera's work to set up Michael Collins as a patsy, though it didn't work. The early post-war days of Hitler, referred to repeatedly as "the mangy field-runner," with notes about how he could honestly start with the German Workers Party because, beyond anti-semitism, his initial animus was toward capitalism, not communism, above anything else.
That's more than enough. This is a great book.
The best way to describe it is this is a "Great Men (generic, mann not mensch) of History" based book, but told in vignettes like a "People's History" book. And, it covers so much.
First, the dates make sense. The March Revolution in Russia, paired with German resumption of submarine warfare bringing America in, of course mean 1917 for the start.
The end date? Lenin dies in 1924, Hitler goes to prison, the German hyperinflation and French occupation of the Ruhr end, and new loan agreements from America do end the war and birth a new world — for five years until the Depression hits.
I learned a lot about several "great men" in this book.
First, I've thought Jung with his New Ageism was loonier than Freud. OTOH, I now read that Freud believed in numerology and had a general superstitious streak. Plus, he tried to combine Lamarckianism with Freudianism into some weird early version of evolutionary psychology.
Second, the whole 1920-24 Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin denouement, skipping from vignette to vignette, plays out so well. I knew that Lenin was at work at least partially writing Stalin out of the Party before his first major stroke. I also knew that Stalin was tightening his hold on the Politburo, especially at levels a rung or two below the top. But, Emmerson explains just how much many of the people at the top ideologically loathed the New Economic Policy. Even more, he shows how Trotsky, by long absences from Moscow and a general insouciance of sorts, undercut himself as much as Stalin undercut him. This element of the book was worth the price alone.
Third, I noted Freud above. Emmerson loops in many others. British suffragists visiting Lenin. Einstein invited on world tours to talk relativity (and raise money for Zionism). Clare Sheridan, Churchill's cousin and would-be, and generally actual, sculptor to the new world leaders. Andre Breton and Surrealism. Tristan Tzara and Dadaism. Young Hemingway. Guillaume Apollinaire.
And, more leaders and ex-leaders. Kaiser Wilhelm brooding, self-deluding and chopping wood in Dutch exile. The Irish civil war and Valera's work to set up Michael Collins as a patsy, though it didn't work. The early post-war days of Hitler, referred to repeatedly as "the mangy field-runner," with notes about how he could honestly start with the German Workers Party because, beyond anti-semitism, his initial animus was toward capitalism, not communism, above anything else.
That's more than enough. This is a great book.
October 11, 2022
4/5
Rather good but unusual for a history book. The chapters go year by year and are divided by season (Autumn 1917, Summer 1919) etc. Each year gets 80-100 pages apart from 1924 which is a short (15 page in the paperback) epilogue giving the situation for each person the book focuses on in that year. The style of the book is almost present tense and chronological so like 'Moscow - Lenin arrives and starts preaching his belief in peace and bread' then 'The Western Front - The French army begins to mutiny over poor leadership and bad conditions'. The book is also heavily focused on famous individuals, some political (Lenin, Hitler, Woodrow Wilson etc), others cultural or scientific (Hemmingway, Einstein, Freud etc). This approach does the advantage of showing their story over the course of several years, such as how Hitler changed from army runner to failed putsch leader or Lenin going from political exile to Russian leader to being side lined by Stalin due to poor health. It also has the advantage of showing the political change over the course of several years and how much had changed. There is some stuff on American racial politics at the time, including famous lynchings or race riots, but it is more focused on disputes within the various American black movements (basically how much Marcus Garvey and Du Bois despised each other). Good amount of sources and select bibliography, a lot of endnotes as well but a bit hard to read (probably to save space since there is a lot of them).
There are some downsides to the book. The style means there isn't much analysis like in a traditional history book. It is heavily focused on North America and Europe, plus Turkey (through the eyes of Mustpaha Kemal/Ataturk) and a little bit of Palestine (but the book is already 600 pages of main text plus 150 pages of notes and bibliography so fair enough). Depending on your interests some people or topics might not interest you and be very boring, I ended up basically skipping anything on Freud or the Dada artistic movement. Personally I vastly preferred the political side of things. I also found the book at times to be sort of vague on specific dates of events or names of people (For example the anti-treaty IRA assassinated a British general during the Irish nationalists peace negotiations with the UK government, but the book just refers to him as a British general instead of giving an actual name, it was Henry Wilson btw)
Rather good but unusual for a history book. The chapters go year by year and are divided by season (Autumn 1917, Summer 1919) etc. Each year gets 80-100 pages apart from 1924 which is a short (15 page in the paperback) epilogue giving the situation for each person the book focuses on in that year. The style of the book is almost present tense and chronological so like 'Moscow - Lenin arrives and starts preaching his belief in peace and bread' then 'The Western Front - The French army begins to mutiny over poor leadership and bad conditions'. The book is also heavily focused on famous individuals, some political (Lenin, Hitler, Woodrow Wilson etc), others cultural or scientific (Hemmingway, Einstein, Freud etc). This approach does the advantage of showing their story over the course of several years, such as how Hitler changed from army runner to failed putsch leader or Lenin going from political exile to Russian leader to being side lined by Stalin due to poor health. It also has the advantage of showing the political change over the course of several years and how much had changed. There is some stuff on American racial politics at the time, including famous lynchings or race riots, but it is more focused on disputes within the various American black movements (basically how much Marcus Garvey and Du Bois despised each other). Good amount of sources and select bibliography, a lot of endnotes as well but a bit hard to read (probably to save space since there is a lot of them).
There are some downsides to the book. The style means there isn't much analysis like in a traditional history book. It is heavily focused on North America and Europe, plus Turkey (through the eyes of Mustpaha Kemal/Ataturk) and a little bit of Palestine (but the book is already 600 pages of main text plus 150 pages of notes and bibliography so fair enough). Depending on your interests some people or topics might not interest you and be very boring, I ended up basically skipping anything on Freud or the Dada artistic movement. Personally I vastly preferred the political side of things. I also found the book at times to be sort of vague on specific dates of events or names of people (For example the anti-treaty IRA assassinated a British general during the Irish nationalists peace negotiations with the UK government, but the book just refers to him as a British general instead of giving an actual name, it was Henry Wilson btw)
July 6, 2020
Too clever. The book moves along with one or two inch snips, datelines Vienna, Berlin, DC etc. Names get dropped — Picasso, Hemingway, Mussolini, on early stages before their fame. No apparent narrative — and 600 pages.
October 12, 2019
If the end of WW1 was just the beginning of the twentieth century's "Fifty Year War", what changes did it make to Europe and the world that led to the continuation beginning again in 1937. At the end of the war, it was decided by the victorious allies at Versailles, to divide up four of the major empires that existed before the war.
Germany lost all their colonies and was split in half with the loss of the Polish Corridor. Russia was forced to give up the Baltic States, area for the new Polish Republic, Austria-Hungary was split into its' constituent parts, as was the Ottoman Empire. Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, Japan was given the mandate over Germany's Pacific Island colonies; Czechoslavokia, Yugoslavia and Poland grew out of Germany and A-H, while Italy was able to grow north to the Brenner pass. England was happy with parts of Africa and the Middle East as was France. The US acquired only the plaudits for helping to win the war and the freeing of many people.
But none of this happened in a bubble, there was diplomacy, revolution, wars, and negotiations that were needed to solidify what was decided at the Peace Conference at Versailles. Who and how this all happened is what Crucible is all about. It is a finely written account of the people and personalities that would create the situations that then led to the last part of the Fifty Years War.
Zeb Kantrowitz zebsblog@blogspot.com
Germany lost all their colonies and was split in half with the loss of the Polish Corridor. Russia was forced to give up the Baltic States, area for the new Polish Republic, Austria-Hungary was split into its' constituent parts, as was the Ottoman Empire. Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France, Japan was given the mandate over Germany's Pacific Island colonies; Czechoslavokia, Yugoslavia and Poland grew out of Germany and A-H, while Italy was able to grow north to the Brenner pass. England was happy with parts of Africa and the Middle East as was France. The US acquired only the plaudits for helping to win the war and the freeing of many people.
But none of this happened in a bubble, there was diplomacy, revolution, wars, and negotiations that were needed to solidify what was decided at the Peace Conference at Versailles. Who and how this all happened is what Crucible is all about. It is a finely written account of the people and personalities that would create the situations that then led to the last part of the Fifty Years War.
Zeb Kantrowitz zebsblog@blogspot.com
January 8, 2024
A really interesting history of the "long end" to the Great War, WWI. 1917-1924 is a fascinating time of chaos, despair and innovation. The book goes through the lives of several very important and influential people (Einstein, Freud, Mussolini, Hitler, Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin, Marcus Garvey, W.E.B. DuBois, Hemingway, Andre Breton etc.) and in telling short vignettes about their experiences to tell the history. I had my doubts this would work, but it rally was great. Recommend to all the history nerds.
October 8, 2020
Crucible: The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924 by Charles Emmerson is an extensive history about the close of World War I and its early aftermath. Emmerson is a Senior Research Fellow at Chatham House working on resource security, foreign policy, and global geopolitics. He is the author of The Future History of the Arctic and 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. He was formerly a writer for the Financial Times and continues to publish regularly on international affairs.
The First World War changed the entire world dynamic. Empire waned as the British Empire began to lose control in India, leaving thousands dead. Physics changed when a German-born scientist received the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect (not relativity). Sigmund Freud changed the field of psychology with psychoanalysis. A Russian exile living in Zurich would make an almost unbelievable train trip back to Russia and lead a revolution. He would work with Leon Trotsky and meet with a Georgian bank robber who would become the General Secretary of the Communist Party and create a different revolution. The US and Woodrow Wilson would rise and quickly fall from prominence in European matters. The US had its own problems at home, including violent racism. Democracy spread in some countries and retracted in others. In defeated Germany, the army fought communists in riots, and a young Austrian immigrant and WWI veteran began his to power. In Italy, another war veteran would lead 30,000 Blackshirts to the March on Rome. With the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, a young leader would become the namesake of his country. The map of Europe was redrawn moving borders and creating and destroying countries. In the Middle East, England and France divided the land and spread their influence. It was not the same world as it was in 1914.
In most basic histories, readers are led to believe that the Treaty of Versailles was the cause of the unsuccessful peace in Europe. In reality, it was much more than that. It was the start of a different era in many aspects -- Industrialization, mechanization, nationalism, science, and worker's rights. Even in art, modernism rose in literature and art. To many, this was as great of a shock as the political upheavals.
Emmerson explores the complexities of the tail end of WWI and the beginning of the Interwar years. Dividing the book's chapters by year, the reader will see a timeline that switches between countries and people in a coherent manner. This division is practical because it shows the flow of history on the whole instead of individual nations. This is the beginning of the interconnectedness of all countries rather than just the influence of regional powers. It was the beginning of a new world, new ideas, modern science, and unfortunately the beginning of a darker side of the future. A well done, extensive history, of a significant but little-studied period.
The First World War changed the entire world dynamic. Empire waned as the British Empire began to lose control in India, leaving thousands dead. Physics changed when a German-born scientist received the Nobel Prize for the photoelectric effect (not relativity). Sigmund Freud changed the field of psychology with psychoanalysis. A Russian exile living in Zurich would make an almost unbelievable train trip back to Russia and lead a revolution. He would work with Leon Trotsky and meet with a Georgian bank robber who would become the General Secretary of the Communist Party and create a different revolution. The US and Woodrow Wilson would rise and quickly fall from prominence in European matters. The US had its own problems at home, including violent racism. Democracy spread in some countries and retracted in others. In defeated Germany, the army fought communists in riots, and a young Austrian immigrant and WWI veteran began his to power. In Italy, another war veteran would lead 30,000 Blackshirts to the March on Rome. With the crumbling of the Ottoman Empire, a young leader would become the namesake of his country. The map of Europe was redrawn moving borders and creating and destroying countries. In the Middle East, England and France divided the land and spread their influence. It was not the same world as it was in 1914.
In most basic histories, readers are led to believe that the Treaty of Versailles was the cause of the unsuccessful peace in Europe. In reality, it was much more than that. It was the start of a different era in many aspects -- Industrialization, mechanization, nationalism, science, and worker's rights. Even in art, modernism rose in literature and art. To many, this was as great of a shock as the political upheavals.
Emmerson explores the complexities of the tail end of WWI and the beginning of the Interwar years. Dividing the book's chapters by year, the reader will see a timeline that switches between countries and people in a coherent manner. This division is practical because it shows the flow of history on the whole instead of individual nations. This is the beginning of the interconnectedness of all countries rather than just the influence of regional powers. It was the beginning of a new world, new ideas, modern science, and unfortunately the beginning of a darker side of the future. A well done, extensive history, of a significant but little-studied period.
February 4, 2020
Wars frequently do not end neatly and World War I was no exception. The status quo ante was not restored. The turmoil of war unleashed new forces, ended long established dynasties and open pathways for new leaders who would shape the post-war world. Crucible consists of a series of entries in the nature of news items that follow the people who, though not always recognized at the time would play roles in the new world to follow.
Some of the personalities are politicians. The failing grip of the Vladimir Lenin (the impatient revolutionary), the rise of Josef Stalin (the Georgian bank-robber), and the wary Leon Trotsky (the principled non-tipper) were remaking the landscape of Russia. Gabriele D’Annunzio and Benito Mussolini contested for leadership in Italy while Ismael Enver Pasha and Mustafa Kemal advanced their visions for a new Turkey. While the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm II cut trees and dreamed of a return to the throne and former Emperor Charles plotted to be restored as King of Hungary, Adolf Hitler was laying the groundwork for his career. In the United States, black activist Marcus Garvey promoted black empowerment and his own personal advancement through shady business schemes, while William Du Bois struggled for leadership of Black Americans and dancer Josephine Baker made a name for herself as an entertainer to both blacks and whites. Physicist Albert Einstein and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud faced resistance to their theories based on scientific principles enhanced by increasing anti-Semitism. Ernest Hemmingway was finding buyers for his writings and early loves of his life.
Each reader can pick the story line that most appeals to him or her and whets the appetite for more. My favorite is the wrenching struggle for independence that the Irish fought against the Empire and amongst themselves as recorded in the entries about Michael Collins who was at the heart of the movement that secured Irish Independence before being killed in an ambush during a Civil War against, among others, his one-time ally, Eamon deValera. What is often thought of as a simple case of Irish versus British is shown as an international and intramural blood contest over the definitions of independence, the achievable and the available means that fueled the flames of personal rivalries, split the Ireland’s leaders and rent its land asunder.
Although not too difficult to follow I found the style of jumping from one incident to another to be unusual. Life does is not lived in organized compartments but evolves as a series of seemingly unrelated incidents. Author Charles Emmerson has demonstrated a skill of picking tales from 1917-1924 and weaving them into a narrative that presents an old world dying while the new is being born. This tome is long but in short enough segments to absorbed by the patient but knowledgeable reader.
Some of the personalities are politicians. The failing grip of the Vladimir Lenin (the impatient revolutionary), the rise of Josef Stalin (the Georgian bank-robber), and the wary Leon Trotsky (the principled non-tipper) were remaking the landscape of Russia. Gabriele D’Annunzio and Benito Mussolini contested for leadership in Italy while Ismael Enver Pasha and Mustafa Kemal advanced their visions for a new Turkey. While the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm II cut trees and dreamed of a return to the throne and former Emperor Charles plotted to be restored as King of Hungary, Adolf Hitler was laying the groundwork for his career. In the United States, black activist Marcus Garvey promoted black empowerment and his own personal advancement through shady business schemes, while William Du Bois struggled for leadership of Black Americans and dancer Josephine Baker made a name for herself as an entertainer to both blacks and whites. Physicist Albert Einstein and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud faced resistance to their theories based on scientific principles enhanced by increasing anti-Semitism. Ernest Hemmingway was finding buyers for his writings and early loves of his life.
Each reader can pick the story line that most appeals to him or her and whets the appetite for more. My favorite is the wrenching struggle for independence that the Irish fought against the Empire and amongst themselves as recorded in the entries about Michael Collins who was at the heart of the movement that secured Irish Independence before being killed in an ambush during a Civil War against, among others, his one-time ally, Eamon deValera. What is often thought of as a simple case of Irish versus British is shown as an international and intramural blood contest over the definitions of independence, the achievable and the available means that fueled the flames of personal rivalries, split the Ireland’s leaders and rent its land asunder.
Although not too difficult to follow I found the style of jumping from one incident to another to be unusual. Life does is not lived in organized compartments but evolves as a series of seemingly unrelated incidents. Author Charles Emmerson has demonstrated a skill of picking tales from 1917-1924 and weaving them into a narrative that presents an old world dying while the new is being born. This tome is long but in short enough segments to absorbed by the patient but knowledgeable reader.
February 10, 2020
Entertaining, if slight. It's fun to have so many choice nuggets of information -- many of them in the form of gossipy details on the personal quirks of a cast of famous historical personages -- thrown at you in rapid fashion. Not much insight to be gleaned though.
January 7, 2020
Enjoyed it very much. I learned a lot. Unusual style which worked wonderfully.
March 16, 2020
More history books should be written like this. The vignettes convey a sense of what this extraordinary time period would have felt like.
October 11, 2021
Remarkable book, vividly and brilliantly presented, with powerful lessons for our present historical moment. Bravo.
May 21, 2024
Crucible is a rather ambitious book, covering as it does the most formative years, 1917-1924, of the twentieth century. Where the book fails is in the fact that Emmerson skews left in his interpretation of the events of these years. He whitewashes or glosses over the atrocities of the Bolsheviks and the Turks. A few examples of this are the fact that he skips right over the execution of Tsar Nicholas and his family, and, of course the slaughtering of millions of Russians. There is no mention of the Armenian Genocide by the Turks at all. Instead figures such as Stalin, Mussolini and Mustafa Kemal are portrayed as heroes.
This book is yet another example of whitewashing or, even, rewriting history. When leftist revolutions create totalitarian states, they're labeled "right-wing" even though their politics haven't changed. To label Fascists or National Socialists as "right-wing" is to not understand what it means to be "right" or conservative. In fact, this is how history is being rewritten. Socialists are leftists, even if the states they create are ruled over by a single party, such as the Communist party or the Nazi party and the authoritarian regimes they create.
This book is yet another example of whitewashing or, even, rewriting history. When leftist revolutions create totalitarian states, they're labeled "right-wing" even though their politics haven't changed. To label Fascists or National Socialists as "right-wing" is to not understand what it means to be "right" or conservative. In fact, this is how history is being rewritten. Socialists are leftists, even if the states they create are ruled over by a single party, such as the Communist party or the Nazi party and the authoritarian regimes they create.
April 19, 2022
It's okay.
A lot of information, but I didn't care for the format it was written in. Each chapter covers a season of a particular year, which is fine, but then it is broken down into constant switching scenes back-and-forth. I get the book is trying to follow the timeline, but maybe there could have been a better way?
I also didn't care for the opinionated descriptions of certain individuals used over and over instead of their name. It's as if the author went out of their way to disassociate with the "mangy field runner" and "Georgian bank robber" as if to say, "I have to put these two people in, but I will cast shade every time." Towards the end though the "bank robber" moniker is forgotten for some reason. Seemed childish.
Worth a read if you are unfamiliar with some of the the issues that took place after the Great War. It doesn't capture all the issues, but gets many of the top ones, and gives a decent amount of detail.
A lot of information, but I didn't care for the format it was written in. Each chapter covers a season of a particular year, which is fine, but then it is broken down into constant switching scenes back-and-forth. I get the book is trying to follow the timeline, but maybe there could have been a better way?
I also didn't care for the opinionated descriptions of certain individuals used over and over instead of their name. It's as if the author went out of their way to disassociate with the "mangy field runner" and "Georgian bank robber" as if to say, "I have to put these two people in, but I will cast shade every time." Towards the end though the "bank robber" moniker is forgotten for some reason. Seemed childish.
Worth a read if you are unfamiliar with some of the the issues that took place after the Great War. It doesn't capture all the issues, but gets many of the top ones, and gives a decent amount of detail.
September 2, 2022
At first I was disappointed because I wanted a more strategic history of 1917-24 because this period often gets short shrift in history. The more I read this would be impossible because there was so much going on in that time period. Instead the author focuses on several dozen key character and bounces back and forth with anecdotes. There characters were political figure, literary figures, and scientists. Some of them were characters on the way down, e.g, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Lenin.
Others were on their way up such as Hemingway and Hitler.
The one thing that bothered me is the author often used nicknames for characters and stayed with that. Hitler was the mangy fieldrunner, Lenin was the impatient revolutionary, and Trotsky was the revolutionary who didn't believe in tipping. Except for that the book was excellent and the approach via anecdote gives us guidance on things that most histories would leave out.
Others were on their way up such as Hemingway and Hitler.
The one thing that bothered me is the author often used nicknames for characters and stayed with that. Hitler was the mangy fieldrunner, Lenin was the impatient revolutionary, and Trotsky was the revolutionary who didn't believe in tipping. Except for that the book was excellent and the approach via anecdote gives us guidance on things that most histories would leave out.
April 19, 2022
This is an interesting book at an anecdotal level, but there does not seem to be any thesis to it. It describes events in the lives of a number of characters, ranging from Lenin to Josephine Baker, to illustrate the changes coming over European (mostly) society in the period 1917-23.
I did find the juxtaposition of events from different places to be good at illustrating how things were unrolling, but at times it did not seem like there actually was a connection.
The book is quite readable and enjoyable; I do not regret reading it. I'm not sure I learned a whole lot from it.
I think that it would have been better if there had been a final summing-up in which the author spoke to the readers, to let us know what the author thought these years had actually produced in the crucible.
I did find the juxtaposition of events from different places to be good at illustrating how things were unrolling, but at times it did not seem like there actually was a connection.
The book is quite readable and enjoyable; I do not regret reading it. I'm not sure I learned a whole lot from it.
I think that it would have been better if there had been a final summing-up in which the author spoke to the readers, to let us know what the author thought these years had actually produced in the crucible.
July 4, 2023
A well-written and readable work.
Emmerson covers the rise of American power and America’s aloof position amidst the collapse of other European empires. The revolutions, the rise of fascism, and the activities of artists take up much of the book. He also covers the rise of various revolutionaries, some of whom later became more famous as dictators.
The narrative is vivid. However, Emmerson sometimes refers to various historical figures with strange nicknames, and even uses them repeatedly throughout the text. Sometimes he just uses their first names, which proves equally annoying. Emmerson even introduces some figures without naming them at all, and assumes you know who they are. The book is also told in the present tense, which may annoy some readers. At times, the book seems unfocused, telling the stories of bizarre figures that seem more prominent in the narrative than statesmen like Churchill. It can also be breezy (“Boy is he bored.”) Emmerson also assumes that the reader knows French.
An accessible and compelling work.
Emmerson covers the rise of American power and America’s aloof position amidst the collapse of other European empires. The revolutions, the rise of fascism, and the activities of artists take up much of the book. He also covers the rise of various revolutionaries, some of whom later became more famous as dictators.
The narrative is vivid. However, Emmerson sometimes refers to various historical figures with strange nicknames, and even uses them repeatedly throughout the text. Sometimes he just uses their first names, which proves equally annoying. Emmerson even introduces some figures without naming them at all, and assumes you know who they are. The book is also told in the present tense, which may annoy some readers. At times, the book seems unfocused, telling the stories of bizarre figures that seem more prominent in the narrative than statesmen like Churchill. It can also be breezy (“Boy is he bored.”) Emmerson also assumes that the reader knows French.
An accessible and compelling work.
February 29, 2020
As the title suggests a long book. I must admit to an ignorance to the comings and goings post WW1. Then again why would I as it is not a subject area I ever recall watching or reading about. A case of an unknown unknown. A healthy general understanding of European and American history is essential. Saying all this worth a read if you have any interest in the world and how it came to be.
July 3, 2020
Amazing detail about the unsettling and politically unstable period following the war. Actually too much detail for me in an audio book. I plan to get a copy of the printed text. I found the account fascinating and enlightening - AND with so many parallels to today.
November 23, 2020
took quite some time to read this "long end" but well worth the read for a snapshot look at what occurred all over the world from/with different characters ... SO MUCH was happening it's seems almost unbelievable, yet it WAS happening. our world was changing greatly.
December 31, 2024
A fair telling of the crucial events after the First World War and before the Great Depression.
December 31, 2024
Covers a 7 year period of history and took about that long to read😹. Very ingenuitive way of writing history - only referring to Stalin as the Georgian bank robber from now on👊
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