Noted historian to give lecture at Austin Peay State University on First World War

Clarksville, TN – On the same day that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated, leading to outbreak of the First World War, the British and German navies encountered each other in a port city on the Baltic Sea.

In a few months, the two countries would participate in a bloody war with each other, but that evening, they had other intentions.

“The British and German navies were not planning how to sink one another; they were instead getting riotously drunk together at Fleet Week ceremonies in Kiel,” Dr. Michael Neiberg wrote in a recent essay on the website, “War on the Rocks.”

Neiberg, professor of history at the U.S. Army War College, is a noted expert on World War I, and with this year marking the centennial of the start of that conflict, he has spent much of his time explaining that the infamous war “occurred not as tensions were rising between the great powers, but as they were, in fact, falling.”

At 2:30pm on Thursday, November 13th, Neiberg will visit Austin Peay State University’s Morgan University Center, Room 307, to deliver his lecture, “Why What You Know About 1914 is Wrong and Why it Matters Today.” The event, which is sponsored by the APSU Department of History and Philosophy, is free and open to the public.

While on campus, he will visit with a graduate seminar class studying World War I. Neiberg is considered one of the foremost experts in this field. He previously taught at the U.S. Air Force Academy and the University of Southern Mississippi, and he is the author of the book “Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I.”

For more information on the lecture, contact Dr. Gregory Zieren, APSU professor of history, at ziereng@apsu.edu.