Histories covering one year or a few years have always been popular and a spate of them have appeared recently; it is also increasingly fashionable to focus on social history in an attempt to re-create the feel of a particular time. 1919 is an exceptionally good combination of both of these trends. In a month-by-month depiction that reads like a novel, Klingaman traces the progress (or lack thereof) of the Peace Conference, interweaving this with detailed reports on the tumultuous conditions in postwar Europe and America. The last remnants of the world's innocence vanished as its leaders squabbled in Paris while hunger, disease, and labor unrest raged.