publication of the highly successful The Guns of August. Each chapter deals with a different country, theme, and time (although all relate to the approximately 25 years preceding World War I). The first and last chapters are about British government in 1895 and 1910, respectively; one chapter is dedicated to the Dreyfus Affair in France; and another is nominally about the Wilhelmine politics of late 19th-century Germany, but is really about German music and culture in that period. Other chapters cover the United States (particularly the efforts of Thomas Reed, Speaker of the House, to overcome the tyranny of the absent quorum), the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 and the activities of the Socialist International and trade unions.

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