In today's lecture we looked at the final causes of the Great War, including the reactions to the new ideas of relativity, the Alliance System and the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The main focus of the lecture, however, was THE BIG PICTURE of the war's impact on the mind, map and political structure of Europe between the two world wars. At the conclusion of the lecture we began looking at the course of the war (THE LITTLE PICTURE), but we got no further than the early months of the war, culminating in the first Battle of the Marne (1914). By the end of today's lecture, however, the listener will be in a position, when hearing of significant wartime events, to anticipate their impact on the interwar period (1919-1939).
Vodcast of Lecture 18, "The Lamps Extinguished"