In recognition of the 2006 opening of the National World War I Museum (Kansas City, MO), ten renowned scholars of the Great War gathered in a series of public dialogues to examine the legacy of the conflict that raged ninety years earlier. The resulting discussions are brought together in this compelling volume that assesses some of the most important historical debates about the war and offers important insights regarding the art of history, the uses of transnational analysis, and the obligation of the academy to engage in public dialogue.

Mirroring the form of the exchanges that took place in 2007 and 2008 following the opening of the museum, the book is organized into five sections: war origins, total war, the soldiers' war, peacemaking, and war and culture. Jay Winter's introduction reflects on the importance of generational perspective in forming World War I historiography (Winter also serves as moderator in four of the sections and is a discussant in the fifth). He terms the current cohort of scholars a “transnational generation” (p. 6), taking “multiple levels of historical experience as a given, levels which are both above and below the national level” (p. 7). Subjects that lend themselves well to such study include mutiny, commemoration, peacemaking, and the experience of empire. Winter thus concludes that the Great War is ripe for transnational analysis.

The structure of the book makes for engaging reading. The most authoritative scholars of the war are assembled here, yet the dialogic genre makes for a tone that is reflective and relaxed. Winter notes that the symposia provided an occasion to show “the way history happens. It is and always has been a conversation among colleagues” (p. 36). The first of these conversations pairs Niall Ferguson and Paul Kennedy on the origins of the war. Both emphasize the importance of uncertainty in understanding the actions of those who made the decisions to go to war. Kennedy notes that war planners were insufficiently practiced in contingent thinking (pp. 39–40). Ferguson asserts that Britain's intervention in August 1914 was anything but certain (pp. 47–48). The discussion also reflects on the ways in which the genesis of World War I may be instructive for contemporaries with regard to the tendency of powerful nations to misread the intentions of their opponents (p. 56).

Military history is the topic of the second section. An unexpected thread of psychohistory informs the dialogue between Holger Afflerbach and Gary Sheffield, including observations about the role of willpower in German military culture (p. 82) and the lack of nerve among British civilian leadership (p. 65–66). On the question of civilian control of the military, Sheffield holds that British politicians largely did not seek such control (p. 64), while Afflerbach contends that German “politicians pushed the military forward” (p. 66). The scope of this section is primarily limited to Britain and Germany. Section three works at developing an analytical lens through which we might better understand the factors that made men go through battle. Len Smith describes a historiographical shift toward a view of soldiers as “figures of agency closely connected to the societies from which they came” (p. 96). John Horne introduces an analytical framework of acceptance/endurance/refusal, a trinity that he views as fruitful for exploring the soldier experience (p. 107).

In section four's discussion of peacemaking, John Milton Cooper and Margaret MacMillan demonstrate the ways in which biography and ideology commingled at Versailles. Woodrow Wilson's temperament and worldview receive significant attention. On the efficacy of the Paris treaties, the scholars concur that while the terms contained flawed elements, the peace must be seen as rooted in the context of the times. Both emphasize the importance of the 1920s; Cooper argues that “very soon . . . the victors lost the will to maintain it” (p. 131). Contemporary global affairs also infuse this section through Winter's observation that “Versailles is a lesson on the limits of American power” (p. 149).

The final section features Winter and Robert Wohl discussing the cultural legacy of the war. Their dialogue is in part a contemplation on the legacy of Paul Fussell's 1975 book, The Great War and Modern Memory. Wohl describes how the cultural history of warfare, which he defines as “the study of meanings that people give to their experience” (p. 164), emerged at the time of despair over the Vietnam War. Wohl and Winter talk about the challenges inherent in writing the cultural history of World War I, a tragedy that many believed had no meaning. Their discussion revolves around Fussellian topics of irony and modernity, as well as more recent histories of commemoration and its ties to families and communities.

This is a singular book in that it assembles the leading lights of World War I historiography in an attempt to “take stock of the current state of knowledge in the field” (p. 9). A foreword by Sir John Keenan and an epilogue by Hew Strachan add to the luster of contributors, though Strachan's piece stresses the history of the Great Powers and the military and stands at something of a disjuncture from the discussions of cultural history that pervade the volume. The book's greatest limitation is noted in the preface. Winter observes there that some important topics, including women's history, necessarily were omitted from the volume. While he states that “at least a dozen scholars' forums could have been organized” (p. xii), it is nonetheless striking that a book of this import is almost completely absent of consideration of gender history and female experience. This does not reflect the state of the field and profoundly limits the extent to which the contributors can deliberate on total war, peace, and the war's cultural legacy. That shortcoming noted, this volume still stands as a rich and significant book that summarizes important debates and suggests fertile avenues for research. It is also a successful exercise in linking history to contemporary experience and celebrating the conjunction of academic and public history.