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T his study of the First and Second World Wars represents part of the constantly ongoing efforts of historians to understand and interpret the most destructive wars in human history. The re-examination of the origins of these conflicts and of the wars themselves stems from prior revisions of the perceptions of both and suggests that historians in the long run will need to examine and understand them as an interconnected whole, though not necessarily in terms of current conceptualizations of the world wars as another Thirty Years’ War. The major difficulty with the traditional dating of the two wars—the first from 1914 to 1918 and the second between 1939 and 1945—is the Eurocentric nature of this periodization. Prior to the 1990s, historians of the First World War neglected the global and imperial nature of that conflict, with its origins in the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the consequences of that process in North Africa and in the Balkans. Their Eurocentric perspective prompted them to concentrate on Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary as the locus of the origins of the conflict, often demonizing the German Kaiser as the major precipitant of the war, as western cartoonists had done during the war. American historians tended to confine themselves to the wartime experience of the United States and its critical contribution to the Entente war effort, but without regard for or attention to the rest of the war. This Eurocentric approach extended to treatments of the course of the First World War as well. The British and Germans have received the bulk of the attention of Western historians writing in English, with the French, Russian , Austro-Hungarian, Italian, and American combatants receiving a lot less CHAPTER 5 The Impact of the Two World Wars in a Century of Violence _ John H. Morrow Jr. 162 • CHAPTER 5 attention beyond the works of the national historians of each power. American historians have concentrated on the military exploits of the American Expeditionary Forces, but this leaves the continental powers at a disadvantage because of language deficiencies, and often occasions the denigration of their roles in the war. Naval studies of the war concentrate on its sole major naval battle, between the British and German fleets at Jutland in 1916, and on the struggle between the German submarine force and the Entente and American navies waged in the north Atlantic during the war. Finally, in most accounts, the First World War ends with the armistice of November 11, 1918, and then the Paris Peace Conference , in particular the Versailles Treaty with Germany, in June 1919. The earlier studies of the origins of the First World War have also influenced approaches to the more extensive and costlier Second. If one could get away with demonizing the Kaiser, then Adolf Hitler rendered the task of assigning major responsibility for starting the war in 1939 ridiculously easy. Or did he? The study of the origins of the later conflict has occasioned at least one fascinating volte-face. In 1961, the celebrated British historian A.J.P. Taylor published The Origins of the Second World War.1 Taylor shifted the responsibility for the outbreak of the war from Adolf Hitler, whom Taylor termed a “typical German statesman,” to the leaders of Great Britain and France, who, he argued, after wretchedly appeasing their German counterpart in 1938, had declared war on Hitler in 1939. In this view, Hitler was merely a supreme opportunist , who presumed that the cowardly Anglo-French western statesmen had practically encouraged him to dismember Czechoslovakia in 1938 and would surely not fight over the lesser military prize of Poland. Historians often still feel obligated to discuss Origins, perhaps because of the influence, or notoriety, of the interpretation. The book undoubtedly left many a reader who lacked the necessary historical background and capacity for critical assessment convinced that Britain and France were the culprits who had done Hitler wrong. Yet anyone aware of previous German history, as the notoriously anti-German Taylor certainly was, knew that Hitler was not a “typical” German statesman. In fact, the word “typical” seldom appears in reference to Hitler in the still proliferating multitude of biographies of der Führer. His limitless aims of world conquest differentiated him from the greatest of his German predecessors, Otto von Bismarck, who upon creation of the north German empire spent his remaining two decades as chancellor seeking to preserve the peace in Europe. And if Hitler’s goal of conquest...

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