The Causes of World War 1

On the night of April 21, 1986, an estimated 30 million Americans sat in front of their televisions waiting for a moment that almost no one alive had ever seen: a live, prime-time excavation of a gangster's secret vault. Geraldo Rivera, recently fired from ABC News and hungry for ...  Show more

Part 2 of our exploration of how the U.S. dollar is older than the United States itself and has a level of power beyond the Federal Reserve and even beyond the U.S. government. We’re joined by guest Brendan Greeley, author of The Almighty Dollar: 500 Years of the World’s Most Pow ...  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