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Review Essay
The author would like to thank Paul Lawrence for reading early drafts of this article, and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and positive comments. Many thanks are due as well to the editor, Andrew Port, for his careful editing of the text, and for commissioning the review article in the first place.
Historians of the Great War found themselves in high demand in 2014. The looming anniversary naturally prompted publishers to commission titles that were designed to make a splash, cause debate, and spark public interest. The market was consequently flooded with publications that attempted to explain why war had broken out in 1914. Few could have predicted, however, the full extent of public and media interest in World War I. Nor could one have expected that the question of the origins of the war, in particular, would once again be paramount and the subject of widespread, heated debate.
General and academic interest in the war peaked well before the actual centenary of its outbreak (the date of which differed, of course, depending on which country was commemorating it). Commemoration, as well as the way historians wrote about the war and the way their audiences received this new work differed, too, depending on the national context. In countries whose past has continued to be affected disproportionately by the events of 1914-1918, or where the war has featured largely in national memory (such as Germany and Serbia, for example), the nature of the debate showed clearly that World War I is not yet "history."
The many publications reflected political, military, social, economic, and cultural approaches to studying the conduct and experience of World War I, and included new attempts to explain its origins. Among them were general, often voluminous, accounts of the war that adopted an international perspective or addressed the conflict's global reach.1Others, by contrast, focused on only one country's experience.2There were accounts that foregrounded the personal experience of soldiers or civilians.3Others, in turn, offered new interpretations of the role played by important individuals.4Finally, there were several impressive multi-authored attempts at capturing all of this new research in large edited collections.5Within...