Exactly a hundred years ago, in November 1918, people around the world took to the streets in a frenzied celebration—World War I had finally ended.
Known then as the Great War, World War I began in July 1914 and had been longer and deadlier than anyone had predicted. At the outbreak, the optimistic British had predicted that the war would be “over by Christmas.”
Instead, the war lasted over four years and claimed 16 million lives—not counting the victims of ethnic genocides and Spanish flu outbreaks, which had both been exacerbated by the conflict. The end of the exhausting, deadly war couldn't have been more welcome.
The conflict began amid complicated inter-European political tussles, which came to a head in June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated in Bosnia.
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