He is the author of From Revolutionaries to Citizens: Antimilitarism in France, 1870-1914 and the co-editor of Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1914.
Miller-Melamed applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Misfire: The Sarajevo Assassination and the Winding Road to World War I, and reported the following:
On page 99 of my book Misfire: The Sarajevo Assassination and the Winding Road to World War I, readers are introduced to the Bosnian student movement that would later become known as Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna). Examining this group’s origins and ideas is crucial to understanding the milieu out of which the Sarajevo assassination conspiracy against the heir to the throne of the Habsburg Monarchy emerged. Yet Young Bosnia was not an organized, hierarchical group with a singular ideological goal and a unified strategy to achieve it. Rather, as I write on page 99, the ideological influences on the Young Bosnians were broad, including: “the French revolutionary tradition (and liberal ideas of 1789), Futurism (direct action), socialism, nationalism, and most markedly by 1914, Yugoslavism” (the unification of South Slavs). This is consistent with a larger point that I emphasize in the book—“Young Bosnia” did not plan the Sarajevo assassination as an organization, but rather independently acting Bosnians youths whose general outlook was consistent with the anti-imperialist ideas of Young Bosnia did.Learn more about Misfire at the Oxford University Press website.
In this sense, readers who only explore page 99 will get a close-up look at the ideas of the frustrated Bosnian youths whose protest against Austro-Hungarian rule culminated in the Sarajevo assassination. However, this page will by no means provide readers with an overall understanding of the book’s argument concerning either the origins and execution of the political murder or the multiple ways in which the assassination has been mythologized, including how it became synonymous with world war. Moreover, the book also examines the broader European context in which the Sarajevo conspiracy took root, and this is absent from page 99.
Misfire is both broadly and narrowly conceived. On the one hand, the book provides a general overview of the pre-WWI Europe from political, cultural, and social perspectives. Yet in looking at the array of forces that brought about the war (alliances, militarism, European imperial competition, cultural shifts, etc.), it focuses in on the tensions in the Balkans, particularly with the Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina and the rise of an independent Serbian state that viewed Bosnians as its rightful irredenta. In this sense, the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908, along with the Balkan wars of 1912/1913 are given more thorough treatments in my work than other studies of the Sarajevo assassination. Additionally, the July (diplomatic) Crisis that followed the political murder is examined more closely than usual for works that the treat the Sarajevo assassination as a “trigger” or “spark” for World War I, when in fact it merely triggered a diplomatic crisis that could have been resolved without recourse to war. In thus de-mythologizing the Sarajevo assassination, my book contextualizes it in ways that combine general studies of the origins of WWI with specific works on the Sarajevo assassination. I greatly look forward to comments, critiques, and other reactions to Misfire, which readers may address to me directly at pmiller@mcdaniel.edu.
--Marshal Zeringue
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