Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

When you think of the First World War, what springs to mind? Is it trench warfare, the myth that troops would be home by Christmas, or perhaps the

idea that the whole thing began because of the assassination of an Austro-Hungarian Archduke?

Well, in this episode, Rachel Dining is joined by historian Alex Churchill, the co-author of a new book

Ring of Fire, to consider new perspectives on the

conflict, highlighting the voices of ordinary people caught up in the war, as well as examining

how it unfolded across the globe. Alex is also the presenter of a new History Extra Academy series,

World War II, Myths and Misconceptions. That's out now and available to watch on the

History Extra app. Check out the link in the episode description of this podcast to download the app now.

Or visit history extra.com forward slash academy for more information.

You've just published a new book, Ring of Fire, a new global history of the outbreak of the First World War.

And we should mention your co-author, Nikolai Abelst, a historian based in Copenhagen.

Shout out to Nikolai, who can't be with us today.

But my opening question to you, Alex, is with so much literature and histories of the First World War out there,

is it possible to write something completely new about this area of history more than 110 years

later? So this was why we started looking at doing it in the first place, because another

book came out, and it wasn't that we were like, oh, this is a terrible book. But what we did say was, oh my God, this is the same format that we've seen for a hundred years. It says it's going to tell us all this new stuff about the war, but can it really? And then Nikolai and I started talking about how would you do it so that it's new and different and what would you do and we've decided two

things really we decided first of all there was lots of room still to write a big sweeping new account

of the war from the bottom up so when we talk about top down history we're talking about

describing it from the perspective of politicians, people like, so you'll see

names like Churchill and you'll see generals and you'll see kings and you'll see all of the people

making the decisions at the top end. But what there isn't so much of is bottom up, which is just

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