Chapter+25+(The+Beginning+of+the+Twentieth+Century+Crisis,+War+and+Revolution)

//Note: This is taken straight from the Study Guide//

The twentieth century really began not in 1900 but with the outbreak of World War I in 1914. The Great War, as it was called until a second world war broke out in 1939, ended the military alliances and styles of the life left over from the century past and ushered in the new world of a truly new century.

In the summer of 1914, Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austrie- Hungary was assassinated in the Bosniancapital of Sarajevo, and within six weeks the major nations of Europe were at war with each other in accordance with their myriad treaties, many of them until that time kept secret. For over a quarter of a century the growth of nationalistic competition had combined with an equally dangerous growth in military weaponry all across the continent to make Europe a powder keg waiting to burst into flame. The assassination was but the spark that brought ignition.

Since Germany had no trouble defeating Russian armies, it became evident quite early in the conflict that the war would be won and lost on the western front, between Germany and the Allies, Britain and France. Yet the war dragged on for four long years, much of it fought from trenches, as morale dropped lower and lower. Unrest spread through both camps and at home, where the belligerents had to keep their civilian populations in line with unusual harsh measures. Only in Russia did the government lose control; and there the tsar and his family murdered, ushering in a new regime. Out of the chaos that followed the March Revolution, Lenin's Bolshevik Party finally emerged triumphant. Russia was then a Communist state for over seventy years.

When the war eventually ended, the two losers experienced the revolutions that had threatened them during the war; and both Germany and Austria became republics. The victors met in Paris to make the peace and themselves could not agree on whether to establish a new and just world order or punish the Germans. Eventually they created an order that virtually assured that there would be another world war in the future.