World War I and the Beginning of Modern Warfare with Robert Cowley

Join Robert Cowley, the founding editor of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History and author of The Killing Season, recently published by Random House. His talk, based on his book, will discuss the First World War and how it forever changed the nature of warfare.

By the end of 1914, the stalemate of trench warfare would freeze the line from the North Sea to the Swiss border, the 470 miles of the famous Western Front. Cowley maintains that it is time we look beyond that stalemate; it was the efforts by both sides to overcome it that would alter the ways in which we wage war – and the sudden importance of matters that had never before seemed important. The story he will tell is one of new weapons, technologies, and tactics, the revival of old ones long discarded, the struggle to control natural resources, communications, intelligence, and transportation systems. It was in every sense, a Military Revolution.

Robert Cowley, a longtime resident of Newport, is a military historian, who writes on topics in American and European military history ranging from the Civil War through World War II. He has held several senior positions in book and magazine publishing and is the founding editor of the award-winning MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History; Cowley has also written extensively and edited three collections of essays in counterfactual history known as “What If?” As part of his research he has traveled the entire length of the Western Front.