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This is the story of two men and the two decisions that transformed world history in a single tumultuous year, 1917: Wilsons entry into World War I and Lenins Bolshevik Revolution.In April 1917, Woodrow Wilson, champion of American democracy but also segregation, advocate for free trade and a new world order based on freedom and justice, thrust the United States into World War I in order to make the "world safe for democracy" - only to see his dreams for a liberal international system dissolve into chaos, bloodshed, and betrayal. That October, Vladimir Lenin, Communist revolutionary and advocate for class war and "dictatorship of the proletariat", would overthrow Russias earlier democratic revolution that had toppled the all-power czar, all in the name of liberating humanity - and instead would set up the most repressive totalitarian regime in history, the Soviet Union. In this incisive, fast-paced history, New York Times best-selling author Arthur Herman brilliantly reveals how Lenin and Wilson rewrote the rules of modern geopolitics. Through the end of World War I, countries marched into war only to increase or protect their national interests. After World War I, countries began going to war over ideas. Together, Lenin and Wilson unleashed the disruptive ideologies that would sweep the world, from nationalism and globalism to Communism and terrorism, and that continue to shape our world today. Our New World Disorder is the legacy left by Wilson and Lenin and their visions of the perfectibility of man. One hundred years later, we still sit on the powder keg they first set the detonator to through war and revolution.



About the Author

Arthur Herman

Arthur Herman is the bestselling author of Freedom's Forge, How the Scots Invented the Modern World, The Idea of Decline in Western History, To Rule the Waves, and Gandhi & Churchill, which was a 2009 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Dr. Herman taught the Western Heritage Program at the Smithsonian's Campus on the Mall, and he has been a professor of history at Georgetown University, The Catholic University of America, George Mason University, and The University of the South at Sewanee.



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