Pamphlets and Short Books Published by Macmillan in 1914

After war broke out in Europe in August 1914, many words were written about the conflict in books, magazines, and newspapers.

Other outlets for reporting and commentary were pamphlets and short books.  The Macmillan publishing company was active in this field, as shown by five publications that were listed in the back pages of a regular war book that was published by Macmillan (The World War: How It Looks to the Nations Involved and What It Means to Us (1914), by Elbert Francis Baldwin).

The World War: How It Looks to the Nations Involved and What It Means to Us (1914), by Elbert Francis Baldwin

Elbert Francis Baldwin, an American journalist, used a detailed snapshot technique to describe the first three months of World War I in The World War: How It Looks to the Nations Involved and What It Means to Us. Baldwin (1857-1927) wrote for the weekly magazine The Outlook.

Baldwin was traveling in Europe when the war broke out, and his analyses were written from his experiences traveling across Europe to return home to the United States.

With the Allies (1914), by Richard Harding Davis

The adventures of war correspondents often become a part of the story of the war that they were covering.  With the Allies by Richard Harding Davis (1864-1916) includes an account of how he was arrested in August 1914 by the German army in Belgium on suspicion of being a spy.

The Great War: The First Phase (From the Assassination of the Archduke to the Fall of Antwerp) (1914), by Frank H. Simonds

A war is made up of many battles, and in 1914, World War I historians eventually had to move from analyzing the reasons for the war to describing its battles.

In The Great War: The First Phase (From the Assassination of the Archduke to the Fall of Antwerp), Frank H. Simonds (1878-1936) went into much more detail about the early battles of World War I than the authors of the books that were earlier reviewed for this blog.

The War in Europe (1914), by Albert Bushnell Hart

When the historian Albert Bushnell Hart finished writing the preface to The War in Europe: Its Causes and Results on October 17, 1914, he felt that he had fairly analyzed the war in Europe that had been raging for about two and one half months.

The results of Hart's efforts was a well-organized book that tried to isolate the most important details of the war and show how they related to each other.

The True Story of The Great European War (1914), by C.M. Stevens

The rapid pace of the events that marked the outbreak of World War I posed a large challenge to book publishers. They had to publish marketable accounts of the war with the knowledge that the books were probably out of date as soon as they went on sale.

An example of this problem was the publication of The True Story of The Great European War, by C.M. (Charles McClellan) Stevens. Stevens had previously written books about the Dreyfus affair in France, the world's fair in Chicago, and ancient empires.

The Nations of Europe: The Causes and Issues of the Great War (1914), by Charles Morris

One Hundred Years of Conflict Between the Nations of Europe: The Causes and Issues of the Great War was written by the 81-year-old author Charles Morris (1833-1922), who had a long career as a writer of history textbooks, popular history books, and dime novels.

The War and America (1914), by Hugo Münsterberg

The War and America was written during the first few weeks of the war, in the form of a diary.  An advertisement for the book in The New York Times on September 20, 2014 called it "The first authoritative work on the great European war."

The author was a German-born psychologist who lived in the United States.  Münsterberg was a prolific writer of books about psychology and sociology, in both German and English.  He also was a professor at Harvard when he wrote The War and America.