July 1914: Countdown to War

The definitive account of the month after Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, revealing how reckless statesmen directly led to World War I. 

“Almost impossible to put down ... A punchy and riveting narrative.” —New York Review of Books 

When a Serbian-backed assassin gunned down Archduke Franz Ferdinand in late June 1914, no one could have imagined the shocking bloodshed that would soon follow. Indeed, as acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin reveals in July 1914, World War I might have been avoided entirely had it not been for the actions of a small group of statesmen in the month after the assassination. Whether they plotted for war or rode the whirlwind nearly blind—from Austrian Foreign Minster Leopold von Berchtold and German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov and French President Raymond Poincaré—each sought to capitalize on the fallout from Ferdinand’s murder, unwittingly leading Europe toward the greatest cataclysm it had ever seen. A revolutionary account of the genesis of World War I, July 1914 draws on troves of new evidence to show how a single month—and a handful of men—changed the course of the twentieth century. 

Sean McMeekin is a professor of history at Bard College. The award-winning author of several books, including To Overthrow the World, Stalin’s War, The Russian Revolution, and The Ottoman Endgame, McMeekin lives in Clermont, New York.