How World War I Started: Crash Course World History 209

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History and today we're going to talk about World War I.

We actually have two videos about World War 1. Today we're going to talk about how World War I happened.

Next week we're going to talk about why. World War I is a really big deal.

Especially to those of us who are really interested in like, industrialization and nation-states and modernity.

So usually we don't talk that much about wars, but we're going to make an exception.

Mr. Green, Mr. Green, "Exception?" Cue the Mongol-tage.

[Mongol-tage]

Yeah, no me from the past. We don't roll the Mongol-tage every time we use the word exception, we roll it when we're talking about how the Mongols are an exception to a lot of our assumptions about civilizations.

[Mongol-tage]

Stan, Stan- No, there are no Mongols today, we are talking about World War I.

[Theme music]

So I'm filming this in 2014, which means that the Great War started 100 years ago and the World War I Centenary is just so hot right now, I can't miss out on it.

So most historians agree that the event that started World War I was the assassination of Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, but beyond that, there's not a lot of agreement.

Others say the war really started after Franz Ferdinand bit it. Like when Germany declared war or when Russia mobilized.

So looking at why a war or any historical event happened means looking for a cause and effect relationship

that implicitly assumes that if one particular event in a chain of events had gone differently, the historical outcome would also be different.

This is why we have alternate history novels. Right, like what would have happened in the American Civil War if the South had won the Battle at Gettysburg?

What would have happened if the Nazis had repulsed the D-day invasion?