|aParis 1919 :|bsix months that changed the world /|cMargaret MacMillan ; foreword by Richard Holbrooke.
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|aSix months that changed the world
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|a6 months that changed the world
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|aNew York :|bRandom House Trade Paperbacks,|c2003.
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|axxxi, 570 p. :|bmaps, ill. ;|c24 cm.
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|aOriginally published: Peacemakers. London : J. Murray, 2001.
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|aIncludes bibliographical references (p. 497-512) and index.
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|aBetween January and July 1919, after "the war to end all wars," men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the characters who fill the pages of this book. David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War.
National BestsellerNew York Times Editors’ Choice Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize Winner of the Duff Cooper PrizeSilver Medalist for the Arthur Ross Book Award of the Council on Foreign RelationsFinalist for the Robert F. Kennedy Book AwardFor six months in 1919, after the end of“the war to end all wars,” the Big Three—President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David Lloyd George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau—met in Paris to shape a lasting peace. In this landmark work of narrative history, Margaret MacMillan gives a dramatic and intimate view of those fateful days, which saw new political entities—Iraq, Yugoslavia, and Palestine, among them—born out of the ruins of bankrupt empires, and the borders of the modern world redrawn.
Margaret MacMillan received her Ph.D. from Oxford University and is provost of Trinity College and professor of history at the University of Toronto. Her previous books include Women of the Raj and Canada and NATO. Published as Peacemakers in England, Paris 1919 was a bestseller chosen by Roy Jenkins as his favorite book of the year. It won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize, and the Duff Cooper Prize and was a finalist for the Westminster Medal in Military Literature. MacMillan, the great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George, lives in Toronto.From the Hardcover edition.