15: World War I

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After its ending, World War I was called "The Great War" and "The War to End All Wars." While the last term was, sadly, wrong, World War I was the world's first mechanized, "impersonal" war in which machines proved to be much stronger than human beings. It devastated enormous swaths of territory, and left the economies of the Western World either crippled or teetering. To make matters worse, the war utterly failed to resolve the issues that had caused it. What started as a culmination of nationalist rivalries, fears, and hatreds ended up turning people towards the messianic, violent rhetoric of fascism and Nazism.

Thumbnail: The first page of the edition of the Domenica del Corriere, an Italian paper, with a drawing of Achille Beltrame depicting Gavrilo Princip killing Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo. (Public Domain; via Wikipedia)