World War I was devastating for many reasons, including the unprecedented use of weapons like gas and machine guns, the exhausting and traumatizing nature of trench warfare, and the devastation that the war wreaked on the soldiers, citizens, and land that it touched.
The war is perceived as a particularly tragic conflict because of how it began. Many soldiers, civilians, and even world leaders came to believe that its origins were not honorable. Although the spark that started the war was the assassination of Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists, this event followed years of powerful countries grasping for even more power through militarism, alliances, imperialism, and nationalism. Many world leaders assumed that the war would be a brief and easy victory for themselves, and some historians speculate that leaders wanted to go to war simply to prove their might. The absurdity and dizzying complexity of how the war began has been highlighted in media including this video from Horrible Histories and this parody published in The Economist.
For this project, students created their own mini adaptations of the war’s origins, both to emphasize the triviality of the war’s beginning and the interlocking nature of alliances that drew so many nations into the conflict.
