Geoffrey Wawro

History has always fascinated me, for it marks and foreshadows the never-ending follies and triumphs of man. As a military historian, I was trained to think in terms of governments, armies, fleets, and sweeping change, but, as a practitioner, up to my elbows in the dust of archives, I glimpsed something new. History is made by individuals, not masses and movements. Read my books on the German Wars of Unification or World War I, and you'll see how distracted, dilettantish or simply inept human beings fumbled away great opportunities, and let "forces of history," that might otherwise have been reversed or contained, sweep over them. I've always augmented research on these wars with visits to the battlefields, in places like the Czech Republic, France, Poland, Ukraine, Serbia, Syria, Israel, Lebanon or Egypt. Only there, on the proverbial "captain's hill," can the historian finally put all of the pieces together, and see how victory or defeat was achieved. My latest book is Sons of Freedom: The Forgotten American Soldiers Who Defeated Germany in World War I. It is a riveting book that shows just how crucial the A.E.F. was to Allied victory in 1918. Without the U.S. intervention and hard fighting, the British and French would have been unable to win the war, and would probably have lost it -- as the book demonstrates. My book A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire is a deep dive into the shambles of the Habsburg Empire in its waning years and its truly abysmal performance in the Great War. My two books on Bismarck's wars, The Austro-Prussian War and the Franco-Prussian War, are fascinating reexaminations of the two most consequential wars in nineteenth century Europe. They are deftly written and based on a wealth of archival research, distinguishing them from other histories based on less reliable and revealing published sources. Warfare and Society in Europe 1792-1914 was required reading in West Point's History of the Military Art course for several years. The U.S. Military Academy chose it, over many competitors, because of the taut and interesting way in which it presents the interplay of politics, society, diplomacy, technology, and military decision-making in the action-packed years between the French Revolution and World War I. Read it to see why it was the choice of the Army's service academy before they transitioned to an online curriculum. My book on the Middle East -- Quicksand -- is a highly readable history of the Middle East from the Balfour Declaration to the Bush Doctrine. Sourced in British and American archives -- using much previously classified material -- it does something new: it explains how the U.S. emerged in the years between Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama as the dominant power in the Middle East, but with such burdensome, debilitating liabilities. It explains how and why we crafted alliances that don't even benefit us, and a regional dominance that erodes us. History is eye-opening. It's the enemy of sentiment, and the shovel that digs up the truth. Follow me on: geoffreywawro.com