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284 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1936
And when, in 1918, America's President Wilson announced that he wanted a just peace in which each nation would determine its own fate, many of their troops gave up....Then, having understood from President Wilson that there was to be a peace treaty, and that negotiations were to be held in the ancient royal palaces of Versailles, St Germain and the Trianon, Austria, Hungary and Germany sent envoys to Paris, only to discover that they were excluded from these negotiations....So this was how President Wilson kept his promises. (What you have just read is what I believed to be true when I wrote this account, but read my explanation in the final chapter of this book.)Gombrich first wrote this book in Germany in 1935. The edition I read was the English edition revised and prepared by Gombrich sometime between 1990 and 2005. He could easily have simply revised the first paragraph but he kept it the way it was first written, both preserving and admitting his mistake. Written primarily for schoolchildren, I think these two passages teach kids the most important lesson about history and about life: Check your facts and if you got it wrong, revise your beliefs and don't be afraid to admit it. In this day and age of truthiness, I think this one lesson is worth Glenn Beck’s weight in gold.
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The role played by America's President Wilson was not at all what I had imagined. I described a situation in which Wilson made promises to the Germans and Austrians which he failed to keep. I firmly believed that what I remembered had to be right -- after all, it was part of my own experience -- and when I wrote about it later I just wrote down what everyone believed. But I should have checked my facts, as all historians must be especially careful to do. To cut a long story short, President Wilson did indeed make a peace offer early in 1918, but because Germany and Austria and their allies were still hoping to win the war, they ignored it. Only when the war had dragged on for ten more months, and they had been defeated with very heavy losses, were they prepared to accept the President's proposal. But by then it was too late.