28 June

On June 28th 1919 the Peace was signed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, five years to the day after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo triggered Europe's precipitous descent into war. Before long it had become the first conflict to be fought on a global scale. By its end in 1918 four empires had collapsed and their minority populations, which had never before existed as independent entities, were encouraged to seek self-determination and nationhood. Following on from Haus's monumental 32-volume series on the signatories of the Versailles treaty, The Makers of the Modern World, "June 28th" looks in greater depth at the smaller nations that are often ignored in general histories, and in doing so seeks to understand the conflict from a global perspective for the first time, asking not only how each of the signatories came to join the conflict but also giving an overview of the long-term consequences of their having done so. Revealing their objectives and studying the characters of their leaders of these smaller nations that were drawn into the conflagration on both sides, these twenty-five essays reveal their aims and ambitions and grant the reader an intimate perspective of the process of their declaring war and the peacemaking that followed; an intimacy that is seldom achieved by studies that concentrate on the Big Four nations or on the affairs of Europe alone.