A riveting tour through the ages to the moments where the future course of civilization hung in the balance, as two top military historians make the case for the twenty most crucial battles of all time-a must read for armchair generals and all lovers of history. Despite the prevalence of war and conflict throughout history, only a small fraction of these clashes have truly transformed the world. While major wars often leave echoes that resound for centuries, they typically still remain within a predictable pattern of events. But sometimes a war is fought that not only profoundly impacts its own age but also definitively shifts the course of human history. These wars stand at crossroads of historical epochs, where nothing afterward is as it was before. And many of these wars, which have been crucial to the development of the modern world, possessed a common element: at some point during the conflict there was a crisis point, one pivotal battle, or a few moments within a battle, where the future decisively turned.