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One of the weirder and more catastrophic side effects of the First World War was what happened to Imperial Russia. We’re about to see not just one but two Russian Revolutions, and then several years of civil war within Russia, that is going to leave the whole country in shambles for many years to come, and is going to set up some of animosity that will lead to World War II, the Chinese Communist revolution, the Cold War, the Space Race, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. But before we get to all that, things are going to get really bad in Russia itself.

And before I get to what I have to say about the Russian Revolution, I need to say that there’s really no way that you can cover something as complex as the Russian Revolution in one 20 minute podcast, so I’ve broken this up into two revolutions, and two episodes.

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One of the unique aspects of World War I was simply the huge scale of the battles, with numbers of soldiers, sailors, and even airmen that the world had not seen in a long time. Some of the Roman battles back in the day involved over 100,000 men on each side. Way back in episode 8, on the Persian Wars, I mentioned that the Persian army under King Xerxes might have had as many as a million men. But World War I dwarfed even this. There were more than 5 million men on each side over the course of the war, and that was only on the western front, not counting the several million more involved on the eastern front and in other parts of the world.

We’re going to look at several of these big battles today, including the bloodiest one of the war, the Battle of the Somme, which is going to feature the single bloodiest day of the war, and is one of the deadliest battles in human history. In fact, if it wasn’t for a couple of battles between Germany and the Soviet Union in World War II, the Battle of the Somme would be the deadliest, bloodiest battle in all of human history.

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World War I was a very different war than all the other wars fought before it. There main reason for this was that military technology had advanced incredibly quickly in the previous 50 years, as had manufacturing technology and capability. Because of the advances of the industrial revolution, factories could now turn out rifles and cannons by the thousands, and bullets and shells by the hundreds of thousands. And the weapons themselves could fire farther and more rapidly, and more accurately than ever before.

Even though the technology of warfare had advanced dramatically, the strategy and tactics had not. We talked a bit about this in the episodes on the American civil war, but World War I took it to a whole new level. The real upshot of the changes in technology meant that an army that was well dug-in to a defensive position had a huge advantage over an army that was trying to attack them. Men in defensive positions were relatively safe, but men advancing over open fields to attack the defensive positions were incredibly vulnerable to artillery, machine guns, and even just plain rifle fire.

The military leaders of WWI knew this, but they didn’t really take it to heart until pretty late in the war. So we’re about to go into about 4 straight years of brutal trench warfare on the western front.

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Last episode, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian empire, all of Europe began to mobilize their armies, and move them to the borders of the countries around them.

If you are the leader of a country, and your neighbor begins to mobilize an army right at your borders, what do you do? Well, of course you let them in and put them up in nice hotels in your big cities, and give them all free benefits and eventually the right to vote, right? Yes, of course you do. No, when your neighbor sends an army to your borders, you put your army at the border as well, to protect your citizens and your country. And that’s what was happening all over Europe. And when two armies, who are trained to fight, are facing off against each other, it’s pretty likely that they are going to fight. That’s what they are there for.

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You know, we had an assassination last episode, too, didn’t we? Well, this one is going to cause a lot more difficulty for the world, especially for Europe. Things are about to get really crazy. The first 45 years of the 1900’s were just an amazing, crazy time to be alive. Someone born in 1900 would have been alive for two world wars, the Great Depression, the invention of nuclear weapons, the cold war, and if they had lived to be 70 years old, they would have seen the first moon landing. What an amazing time to be alive. If you survived.

But before we can get to all that, we have to talk about a couple of other things first, including the tensions that are about to cause several huge wars. We need to talk about the crazy web of alliances that crisscrossed Europe that are going to lead to the first world war. But even before that, we have to talk about one of the most important inventions in all of human history. No, I’m not talking about the invention of podcasting, not yet anyway. I’m talking about - the Wright Brothers, human flight, and the invention of the airplane.

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Well, welcome to the 20th Century! I’m sure a fair number of those of you who are listening to this were born in the 20th Century, as I was, and the rest of you were born in the 21st century. I know I’ve usually tried to refer to the centuries by their actual numbers, like the ‘1900’s,’ but now that we are entering the century that we’ve all lived in, I think it also makes sense to use the common designations that we often hear in the media today. So right now, we are in the 21st century, but many of us also have lived in the 20th century.

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And here we are! Episode 100!!! It’s only taken us 100 episodes to cover the first 12,000 or so years of human history. I have a tentative plan to get us all the way to, well, today. It’s going to take about 40 or so more episodes.

Since this is our 100th episode, I thought I’d make this a sort of special episode, and instead of covering new ground, we could take a quick look back at everything that has happened so far. Well, not really everything, but kind of the big highlights. And maybe a quick peek at what we’re going to cover from here.

Wow, episode 99. I like the symmetry of having episode 99 be a summary of the world in 1899. Last episode, we looked at the changes in technology, science, and worldview that occurred in the 1800’s, and like I said, there was an enormous amount of change from 1800 to 1899. This episode, I want to summarize all the big stuff that happened in the 1800’s, and give us a kind of starting point for the world as it goes into the 20th century. Or, as I prefer to call it, the 1900’s. I want to sort of set the stage for all the things that are about to happen in the early 1900’s.

But first, let’s do some summarizing of what happened in the 1800’s. I’m going to go kind of regionally, by continent, starting with North America.

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