Order 797113: Modern Patterns in World History

Primary Source: World War I Primary sources are sources that were produced during, and are thus nearest to, the historical event or period in question. Historians usually work with texts, including books, letters, newspapers, diaries and other documents. But primary sources may also include coins, paintings, photographs, maps, and monuments that were produced during the historical event or period. Primary sources are important because they provide first-hand accounts of how contemporaries lived and how those contemporaries understood and represented historical events. Historians use primary sources to reconstruct the past. But historians do not merely recount or re-present what is found in primary sources. Instead, they analyze and interpret primary sources within their appropriate contexts and synthesize them with other sources of information to produce a historical narrative or a "story" about the past.

Balkan Troubles

This image depicts the European powers, including Great Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary, represented by their leaders attempting to "keep a lid" on nationalism in the Balkan region, which threatened the stability of the Austro- Hungarian Empire and promised to upset the delicate balance of power in Europe. Indeed, as early as 1888, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had presciently remarked that if a war would ever consume all of Europe, it would result from "some damned foolish thing in the Balkans."

The Balkan Peninsula encompassed a region that included a myriad of different ethnic and cultural groups, including Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Christians, and Muslims. Long under the control of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, as it declined the different ethnic and cultural groups began to demand their own nation-states to be carved out of the remnants of the empire. Several of these ethnic and cultural groups also lived in the neighboring Austro-Hungarian Empire, and they, like their neighbors, demanded their own nation-states—in this case to be carved out of Austria-Hungary. The Austrians cracked down on nationalists in their own empire, but nationalism in the Balkan

region threatened to spill over into the rest of Europe. When a Serbian nationalist assassinated the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, Austria perceived it as an act of war. But as Austria and their German allies mobilized for war, it triggered a complicated system of alliances that plunged all of Europe into war.