A Sampling from My New Book, >Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education<: A Compact History of World War I

I once had some faith that public school systems such as the Minneapolis Public Schools taught students something.  For those students who eventually acquire a solid knowledge base from teachers in Advanced Placement courses, and increasingly in the field of mathematics, some truth may still be claimed for that supposition.  But other students learn so little in their 13 years of K-12 education that I got tired of having to stop and deliver mini-courses for every realm of knowledge as I conducted my already wide-raging instruction in math and reading across the liberal arts curriculum. 


So in the knowledge that most of what my students learn, they learn from me, I am now five chapters into a book that will include a solid knowledge base in economics, psychology, political science, world religions, world history, American history, African American history, literature, English composition, fine arts (visual and musical), biology, chemistry, and physics. 

All of my students will read Fundamentals of an Excellent Liberal Arts Education on their own and with me.  As a supporter of the principle, but ardent critic of, the Minneapolis Public Schools and other central school districts, I will continue to witness their receiving meals and extracurricular activities in their public schools of official attendance, while knowing that most of their knowledge and skill sets will come from me.


I have now written, and my students are already receiving instruction in, five chapters, those concerning the following academic areas:  economics, psychology, political science, world religions, and world history.  I intend to complete writing the book by October 2015 for the full curricular presentation to my students;  the work will soon thereafter be offered to the general public, most likely by an imprint of the company that has published my other books.




Following is a sampling from the world history chapter---  the section on World War I.  As you read, consider the multiplicity of events and themes that a person would have to know from just this one episode in humankind's past to grasp the origins and meaning of a great multitude of happenings reported in the news media on this very day:




World War I 


Nationalism and imperialism were on a crash course of global dimensions.


The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had for centuries competed for territory in Eastern Europe, but in the course of the 19th century the Ottomans became less and less a factor. The Ottoman Empire lost its control of territory in Serbia and Hungary early in the 19th century, and after the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) had little power on the European continent. The Austro-Hungarian Empire sought to include Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro; the empire’s leaders were able to annex Bosnia in 1908, but the Serbians had fought hard to throw off Ottoman attempts at re-conquest and proved formidable; neither did they like Austro-Hungary’s control of Bosnia, because a large population of Serbians lived in Bosnia.


A young Serbian, Gavrilo Princip, showed his contempt for Austro-Hungarian policy by assassinating the empire’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he was riding a motorized vehicle through the streets of Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.


This was the precipitating event of World War I, setting into motion the latest alliances (Triple Alliance: Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy; and Triple Entente: France, Russia, Great Britain) formed in an era of global competition and suspicion. On 28 July 1914, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia when the leaders of the latter refused annexation. Russia mobilized against Austro-Hungary, Germany declared war on Russia (1 August 1914) and then on France (3 August 1914), motivating Great Britain to declare war on Germany (4 August 1914).


In wartime, the Italians refrained from abiding by their alliance with the Germans and Austro-Hungarians, but the latter participants were eventually joined by the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria as the Central Powers, while France, Great Britain, and Russia were known as the Allied Powers or Allies; with Russia’s inaction from 1917 forward, the United States would effectively replace that country in affiliation with the Allies upon entry into the war as of 1917.


War is regrettable and stupid. World War I was enormously regrettable and abominably stupid.


The British and French halted a German advance just 45 miles outside of Paris. By late autumn 1914, the French and German opponents had dug a system of trenches stretching from the North Sea almost to Switzerland, forming the Western Front of the war. Trenches moved by inches if they moved at all, day after day. Soldiers died from multiple epidemics, including “trench foot” (with damp and infected flesh rotting away). When soldiers did manage to break out of the trenches, they often became entangled in barbed wire and took deadly fire from recently invented machine guns. Germans were the first to use poison gas (chlorine) in battle at Ypres in April 1915. From February into December 2015, fighting at the highly strategic fortress city of Verdun cost 700,000 casualties, and a battle along the Somme cost 300,000 lives.


Very little had changed in terms of alignments along the trenches, but so delighted were military decision-makers on both sides that they planned more of the same sorts of contests for the months ahead.


On the much longer Eastern Front, digging trenches was blessedly impractical, so that Germany and Russia fought more mobile battles that were bloody but not quite as strategically and tactically stupid. War on the eastern front, though, was also largely inconclusive, with a Russian victory at Tannenburg and the Massurian Lakes in August-September 1914; German victory in the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive of May 1915; and Russian recapturing of much lost ground in the Brusilov Offensive in June 1916. But by June 1917, Russians were swiftly traveling down the road to the Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution in Russia, and many of their units were refusing to fight. This allowed the Germans to refocus attention and commit more resources to the Western Front.


The war at sea involved mostly German and British fleets and was also generally indecisive, as in the Battle for Jutland (off Denmark, 31 May-1 June 1916). The British did destroy the German East Asia Squadron in December 1914, leading the Germans to resort to “unrestricted warfare” with submarine attacks. But the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania with United States citizens aboard in 1915 contributed to American entry into the war that year.


At great human cost, the maneuvering and machinations of World War I were changing the terms of life on earth forever. Deadly weapons portended a future in which war would be too horrific to contemplate if people just stopped to think--- which they generally would continue not to do. Nationalism was now a major force in the consciousness of people everywhere on the planet, a force which for all of its rational historical dialectic was dubious in its moral implications and potential for perversion (as would be the case with Nazi Germany). And as nationalism rose on the tide of human need for affiliation, old empires that were conglomerations of nationalities who were all asked to revere a common emperor found that their entreaties were falling on unsympathetic folk no longer willing to identify as imperial subjects.


There was considerable irony in the fact that the forces of a relatively new empire, that of Great Britain, took the lead in demolishing the morale of those superintending administration in the old empire of the Ottomans, with British soldiers entering Jerusalem in December 1917 to deliver a crushing defeat in Palestine that pushed the tottering Ottomans into terminal disequilibrium. The British were only thirty years away from having the foundations of their own empire destroyed by nationalists in India.


Then, in that very year of 1917, here came fresh troops from the United States, on the cusp of its own surge toward international prominence. Blessedly spared the worst of the trenches, four complete American divisions had arrived by 1918, contributing mightily to Allied victories along the Marne River in July, around Amiens in August, and at the last German fortifications running along the Hindenburg line in September and October. The German Kaiser, facing a potential revolution, signaled that the Germans comprehended their defeat:  His agents signed an armistice on 11 November 1918 that brought this astoundingly foolish  but historically huge event to an end.


At the Paris Peace Conference that convened on 18 January 1919, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and U. S. President Woodrow Wilson substantially relented to the desire of French Prime Minister George Clemenceau to inflict a punitive treaty on Germany. By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by the German representatives on 28 June 1919, Germany acknowledged guilt for waging the war, agreed to pay onerous reparations, and relented to the demand that the Kaiser be put on trial. The nation’s army was to be reduced to less than 100,000 troops and no tanks, its navy relegated to a token existence, and its aircraft grounded. Hugely aggravating to the Germans, territorial concessions and losses included Alsace-Lorraine (a long-disputed French-German border region) to France, the area of Schlesswig to Denmark, many square miles (kilometers) in Prussia and Silesia to Poland, and the Saarland region to an international force of occupation.   Representatives of Great Britain and France signed the treaty, but the two-thirds vote for ratification in the United States Senate could not be secured. Ironically, those Senators who refused to vote for ratification objected to the Treaty of Versailles not on the basis of overwrought punishment of Germany, but rather on the provision of a League of Nations. The idea for such an international convention originated in the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson, part of his plan to “make the world safe for democracy” and to recognize the nationalist aspirations of people formerly living under empires.


Most of the root causes of the second great global confrontation known as World War II (1939-1945) lay embedded in the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, especially in the way that the treaty provided an environment in which a particularly virulent form of nationalism could grow on the reduced territory of a defeated and chagrined German people to inflict a corporal and moral Holocaust on humankind.