University of Tennessee professor Vejas Liulevicius delivers lectures for a course on the First World War, which was touched off by a terrorist act in Bosnia and quickly expanded far beyond the expectations of those involved. It became the first "total war", a conflict involving entire societies mobilized to wage unrestrained war, devoting all their wealth, industries, institutions, and the lives of their citizens to victory at any price. The cost was ghastly, and the world would never be the same, as the legacy of the Great War continues to reverberate even today.