How It's Used

“I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I do know how the Fourth will...with sticks and stones.”

—Albert Einstein (1879-1955), physicist.

“‘The Great War,’ used interchangeably with ‘the First World War’ (so named in 1918 by a sardonic English journalist, who knew it would not be the last such conflict), engendered in Britain a sense of loss that endures to this day; it remains the great divide in Britons’ sense of their history.”

—Benjamin Schwarz, “Was the Great War Necessary?:  A young historian argues iconoclastically that Britain’s entry into the First World War, in 1914, was ‘the greatest error of modern history,’ born of neurotic fears projected onto Germany,” a review of Niall Ferguson’s The Pity of War, in The Atlantic Monthly, May, 1999, p. 118.

"Harry Patch, the last British survivor of the fighting in the trenches on the Western Front where hundreds of thousands of soldiers from Britain and its colonies were killed in World War I, died Saturday at the age of 111, according to staff members at the nursing home in western England where he lived his last years."

—John F. Burns, "Harry Patch, the Last of Britain’s Army Veterans of World War I, Is Dead at 111," The New York Times, July 26, 2009.

"The math is clear: More consumers mean more demand, which means more supplies are needed. But what about the politics? There the forecasts are murkier, feeding a new scenario for international  tension—a competition, even a clash, between China and the United States over 'scarce' oil resources. This scenario even comes with a well-known historical model—the rivalry between Britain and 'rising' Germany that ended in the disaster of World War I."

—Daniel Yergin, “Still the One: Oil’s very future is now being seriously questioned, debated, and challenged. The author of an acclaimed history explains why, just as we need more oil than ever, it is changing faster than we can keep up with,” Foreign Policy, September/October 2009, p. 92.

Also Known As (AKA)

The First World War, The Great War, The War to End All Wars, World War One, WWI

Links

Related on eAlmanac
World War II
The Triple Alliance
The Triple Entente
The Western Front
The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month

Beyond eAlmanac
Wikipedia portal on World War I
The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century from PBS

Product Links
The First World War by John Keegan
The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman
The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell