New York Times Current History; the European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915: April-September, 1915

In the spring of 1915, the world watched as a German U-boat fired a single torpedo into the British liner RMS Lusitania, killing 1,198 people including 128 Americans. This volume gathers the New York Times' contemporaneous reporting on the disaster, capturing the raw shock, the furious diplomatic exchanges, and the fragile tension between President Wilson's measured warnings and Germany's defiant justification of unrestricted submarine warfare. The documents compiled here are urgent and unflinching: State Department correspondence, eyewitness accounts from survivors, German defense arguments, British protests, and American newspaper editorials all wrestling with questions that would ultimately pull the United States into war. You are reading history as it was being made, before the outcome was known, before the propaganda calcified. For history enthusiasts, World War I scholars, and anyone seeking to understand how the Lusitania became the flashpoint that transformed a European conflict into a global one. This is primary source journalism at its most immediate and consequential.