The Causes of World War 1

There’s an argument to be made that every technology advance in communication – from cave paintings to fake AI movie trailers – is at its root an attempt to tell stories. Our first night-fires created the earliest audiences for spoken stories. In time, the development of rhyme, s ...  Show more

During the Holocaust, Josef Mengele discarded every medical ethic to perform horrific human experiments at Auschwitz, including non-consensual vivisections, limb transplants, and agonizing surgeries conducted without anesthesia. Japan had its own program that is less known but eq ...  Show more

100 Years ago today Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated by a Serbian radical in Sarajevo. How did this event result in a war that would consume not just Europe but the World? In this episode we will talk about the situation in Europe in 1914 and the nations that would take ...  Show more

When you think of the First World War, what springs to mind? Is it trench warfare? The myth that troops would be home by Christmas? Or perhaps the idea that the whole thing began because of the assassination of an Austro-Hungarian archduke? In this episode, we’re going beyond the ...  Show more

Prof Christopher Clark unpicks the complex sequence of events that led to the First World War. In the first programme, he travels to Sarajevo to tell the story of extraordinary chances that led to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. 

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was one of the most important men in the world. But he was a lonely man, not helped by the fact that, in spite of custom and tradition, he had chosen for wife Sophie, an aristocrat who nonetheless was not noble eno ...  Show more