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Six Causes of World War I

  The First World War began in the summer of 1914, shortly after the assassination of Austria’s Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, and lasted more than four years, ending in 1918. The Great War left more than 20 million soldiers dead and 21 million more wounded, which can be attributed to trench warfare and the number of countries involved in the war. For aspiring historians, understanding the causes of World War I are equally as important as understanding the conflict’s devastating effects. Though the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the direct precipitating event leading to the declaration of war, there were many other factors that also played a role in leading up to World War I (WWI). European Expansionism In the 1900s, several European nations had empires across the globe, where they had control over vast swaths of lands. Prior to World War I, the British and French Empires were the world’s most powerful, colonizing regions like India, modern-day Vietnam and West a...
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Cholera in Victorian London

  In 1831 a terrifying new epidemic arrived in London, bringing with it fear and panic⁠—and a sense of urgency about the city's sanitation problems. In the 1700s, Great Britain began transforming into an industrialised nation. By the 1800s, London was the largest city in the world as a result of the social changes brought about by industrialisation, such as mass migration from the countryside to the town.  But London was a city overwhelmed by the waste products of its ever-growing population, the majority of whom lived in the squalor of overcrowded slums. Human waste piled up in courtyards and overflowed from basement cesspits into the gutters and waterways. Wellcome Collection (CC BY) Image source for Illustration of London slum with subtitle 'A court for King Cholera' In such conditions diseases were inevitable. Outbreaks of diseases such as typhoid and scarlet fever were common, but the arrival of cholera led to new investigation into sanitation a...
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How did the Nazi party rise to power in Germany in 1933? And what were Hitler’s motivations?

     Richard J Evans, a leading historian on Nazi Germany, explains why Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party were able to cement control over Germany in 1933… Q: What were Hitler’s motivations? And is it true that he was a history buff? A: Adolf Hitler wasn’t really a history buff. He didn’t care very much about history, because his vision was a racist one in which the essential character of races, such as the Germans or Aryans or the Jews or the Slavs, were essentially unchanging over time. He drew his ideas from a variety of sources: from a version of Social Darwinism that saw society and international relations as a sort of struggle of races for the survival of the fittest; from Arthur de Gobineau, a French theorist who invented the pseudoscientific idea of race theory; from Russian émigrés from the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, who brought with them the idea that Bolshevism and communism were creations of the Jewish race; from a certain amount of what’s calle...
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Now We Can See (Book Review)

Arthur der Weduwen | Published in History Today Volume 71 Issue 4 April 2021 ‘The Prayer of Voltaire’, French, 18th century © Bridgeman Images.   In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus defied the Gods and brought fire to mankind. He saved man from darkness, but paid for it cruelly: fastened to a rock, every day an eagle would consume his liver, which would regrow overnight. Millennia later, he would become, in the 18th century, a symbol of a radical new movement of scholarship, belief and philosophy. French and German writers described this intellectual illumination as an age of lumières or Aufklärung ; in the late 19th century, the English language canonised it as the ‘Enlightenment’. Despit...
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Could the Soviet Union Have Survived?

We ask four historians whether the demise of one of the 20th century’s superpowers was as inevitable as it now seems. Soviet poster dedicated to the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution and IV Congress of the Communist International, 1922. Wiki Commons. ‘No one has suggested a convincing alternative scenario’ Rodric Braithwaite,  British Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1988-91) and author of  Armageddon and Paranoia: the Nuclear Confrontation  (Profile, 2017). People still argue about the fall of the Roman Empire. They are not going to agree quickly on why the Soviet Union collapsed when it did. Some think it could have lasted for many years, others that the collapse was unforeseeable. Andrei Sakharov, the Soviet dissident scientist, foresaw it decades before it happened. Victory in war took the Soviet armies to the centre of Europe, where they stayed. The Soviet Union’s seductive ideology had already given it influence across the world. But after Stalin’s death in...
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The Lessons of Shell Shock

The global crisis wrought by the First World War prompted the birth of free mental health care. Photograph of the matron and staff of the Lady Chichester Hospital, Hove, 1921. East Sussex Record Office. Free mental health care began 100 years ago, after the First World War, when a handful of doctors and voluntary workers established clinics and hospitals that drew on the ‘talking therapies’ used to treat shell-shocked soldiers. One of the first outpatient psychotherapy units in Britain was the Tavistock Clinic, which opened on 27 September 1920 at 51 Tavistock Square in the Bloomsbury area of London. ‘My dream has come true’, said its founder, the Scottish neurologist Hugh Crichton-Miller. He and six other doctors worked  pro bono  to treat early signs of mental illness, referred to then as functional mental disorders. Crichton-Miller wanted ‘to bring modern treatments for such conditions within reach of those who cannot afford specialists’ fees’. Students, clerks and housewiv...
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