In 1894, Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, was tried for espionage, convicted and imprisoned on Devil’s Island. Assassinations were common-as was everyday violence against Jewish people and other oppressed ethnic minorities. Strikes, which at times grew violent, abounded across Europe-whether at the oil fields of Baku, the farms of Hungary, or the factories of Italy. Some might even say that pre-war Europe a battlefield before World War I started. People’s lives were affected by changing family structures, by paradigm shifts in science, disruption of traditional gender roles, achievement of the vote by working men, and ongoing economic advances, and the result was disorientation, dislocation, deep resentments, and widespread fear-which, of course, is not too dissimilar from how an array of changes are affecting people today. And those changes, which were experienced by tens of thousands if not millions of people, caused tensions across a broad swath of Europe. That set of causes, launched from above by political leaders, eventually led to war.īut more recently, historians have started to lay out a more complex road to war: namely, a road that passed through social and cultural change at the turn of the century. Hi I’m John Green and this is Crash Course European History, and things are indeed on course to crash, because World War I is coming.ĭecades ago, when I studied European history in high school, I learned there were precise causes of the war: the alliance system, arms build-up, secret treaties, nationalism, and imperialism. Want to find Crash Course elsewhere on the internet? Pedroza, Matthew Curls, Indika Siriwardena, Avi Yashchin, Timothy J Kwist, Brian Thomas Gossett, Haixiang N/A Liu, Jonathan Zbikowski, Siobhan Sabino, Jennifer Killen, Nathan Catchings, Brandon Westmoreland, dorsey, Kenneth F Penttinen, Trevin Beattie, Erika & Alexa Saur, Justin Zingsheim, Jessica Wode, Tom Trval, Jason Saslow, Nathan Taylor, Khaled El Shalakany, SR Foxley, Sam Ferguson, Yasenia Cruz, Eric Koslow, Caleb Weeks, Tim Curwick, David Noe, Shawn Arnold, William McGraw, Andrei Krishkevich, Rachel Bright, Jirat, Ian Dundore
Thanks to the following patrons for their generous monthly contributions that help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever:Įric Prestemon, Sam Buck, Mark Brouwer, Efrain R. London Bloomsbury, 2020.Ĭrash Course is on Patreon! You can support us directly by signing up at Europe in the Contemporary World Since 1900. Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures. Today we'll get into just a few of those causes, including the complex system of alliances in Europe, the myriad military conflicts that played out in the years and decades leading up to the war, and the event that many point to as the beginning: the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As befits a true global war, the reality is that there isn't a single cause. Much has been written about what exactly caused World War I.