Historian Reaction - Extra History's World War 1 - Part 1

welcome back everybody to another reaction video and today we're going to be taking a look at extra histories world war one and it's a multi-part series we're going to be taking a look at part one today now this is the first time that i've watched any of their videos so i'm excited to dive in uh this is something a lot of folks have suggested to me uh and as promised i said when we hit 10 000 subscribers which happened just in the past week that i would start doing some more giveaways and i'm ready to announce that if you didn't already see my post about that there's a link in the description below that will take you to where you can enter i have about 25 years of experience with family history research not only here in the united states but in multiple countries and that is something that can actually be quite expensive to hire professional genealogists and it's something i've been doing for a long time so i thought that i would offer my services as a way of saying thank you to all of you so if you enter using the link in the description below that'll take you over to where you can be a part of our drawing for that and in about a week i'm going to draw a name and i'm going to give you 10 hours of family history research i can do a ton in 10 hours with all the resources that are available online these days so i'm excited to be able to offer that and that's probably something we'll offer again down the road and all you have to do is use your youtube login to be able to enter just make sure you hit subscribe if you haven't already to this channel hit that like button if you want to see more things like this let's dive into extra history uh world war one [Music] human history is equal parts heroism tragedy and misunderstanding very rarely have we displayed all three to such a degree as in the first world war this war is called the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century because without it there is no stalin and no hitler no fascism or world war ii now that is absolutely 100 correct a lot of people think of world war ii as being the defining moment of the 20th century but i agree 100 with this uh world war one is the defining moment of the last several hundred years i would say because he's absolutely right without world war one there's no world war ii there's no cold war there's none of most of what happens in the 20th century after that without it we don't have a cold war that leads us to the very brink of annihilation nor do we see the middle east carved up by old men still bitter from four years of meaningless self-inflicted catastrophe without this war we probably don't have 911 or the turmoil in the middle east today this war ushered in the modern age born in a crucible of gunpowder and toxic smoke and the blood of 10 million men blood spilt in war from the fields of france to the waters off america from the russian frontier to the sands of the middle east from the chinese mainland to the deepest parts of the sea this war broke empires it shattered the past and forced us to give up our last ties to our medieval understanding yeah this is absolutely true as well take a look at a map of the world in 1914 and look at another map of the world in 1920 the entire planet was different but specifically europe and asia were very different yeah there are countries that didn't exist at the beginning of world war one that exists at the end of world war one some countries that had never existed before that time some that hadn't existed for a long time that came back into being like poland for example but yeah i mean this is such a a world-changing moment we can't even wrap our minds in the 21st century around how much the world changed in just a couple of years when the smoke cleared and a stunned world climbed out of its trenches we lived in a new age with new powers new ideas and new terrors it is the defining event of the 20th century it is the great war but it's not the war itself that we're here to talk about today hopefully over the course of this show a bit at a time we'll slowly story by story cover the sprawling events of this turning point in history but today today we are focused on the events that led to this war for if the war itself is the seminal catastrophe of the 20th century then the weeks before the war are its seminal tragedy yeah again i have to agree 100 with that and i'm sure they'll cover this but you want to study in uh moments that'll have you leaving no don't do that you know uh comments in your mind like where you know you ever watch something happen and unfold and you feel like you're in slow motion saying no that's what july 1914 was the time in between franz ferdinand's assassination at the end of june and the beginning of the war at the end of july beginning of august is such a study in going in the wrong direction and making all the wrong choices uh choices that lead to the deaths of millions of people uh it's such an event that could have so easily been avoided and just a few people had the power to make that happen uh it's gonna be interesting to see how they cover this in these next few episodes we'll focus on the very human very personal stories that led europe to consume itself to ignite itself in one suicidal blaze from which it still hasn't recovered because it is a tragedy of the highest order yeah it's like a play a greek epic a story so grand we would think it must be fiction if the scars of the war couldn't still be seen on the fields of france it's shakespeare living out before us so that picture he showed just incidentally i believe that's from the psalm that's from one of the minds that was exploded at the beginning of the attack uh at the battle of the somme begins with the death of a prince and his lady and ends in mass slaughter the likes of which the world has never seen so let's set the stage for a hundred years europe has been at peace there have been wars sure but they were minor wars war is on the periphery wars without many of the great powers involved not since napoleon did the great states of europe vi and bloody battle for after the ravages of the napoleonic wars the statesmen of europe had come together to try to stop such a catastrophe from ever happening again they created a system called the concert of europe so that whenever war seemed perilously close the nations of europe would come together in a congress so this is kind of the precursor to the league of nations after world war one and then the united nations after world war ii this first grand attempt at uh having a balance of power that would prevent wars from happening of course it didn't prevent wars because what ends up happening is you have the rise of germany uh toward the middle and end uh germany and austria-hungary um becoming these powers but specifically germany the unification of germany after the franco-prussian war uh that starts the world on this road to world war one because that's when the the this fragile balance that began in 1815 began to come undone conference and instead come to a settlement that all parties would abide by but europe has changed since those weary of the napoleonic conflicts first came together to create the great concert the first and most major change was the formation of germany at the time our story begins it's important to remember germany as a nation was only 40 years old it's a young nation a strong one a nation looking to claim its own but to say that germany was a strong nation is to undersell the magnitude of its creation i mean to say that the birth of germany was something perhaps unique in the history of the world for overnight with the signing of a few papers the middle of europe was transformed from a thousand tiny squabbling states to the greatest land power the world had ever known yep in one night suddenly the most powerful nations of europe russia france austria-hungary and england were not the most powerful nations in europe any longer overnight in the very heart of europe had been created a nation with more manpower natural resources and economic strength than any other nation in the world except perhaps for great britain and so think about th how this rocked the european world think about uh how suddenly you go from there being a pretty balanced uh you know sharing of power to all of a sudden you have this major major threat that's right in the middle of all of it um yeah they had to know right away that this was not going in a good direction moreover this creation was cemented in the defeat of france which at the time was considered the strongest land power in europe and at the time of our story that defeat and its memory still run deep and now look at the world from the perspective of that powerful new german nation here they are arguably the most powerful country in the world and yet they see themselves being denied all the rights of a great world power britain and france held territories across the globe even the netherlands a nation which the might of the new germany could wipe off the face of the earth in a week had colonies from asia all the way to africa but germany for all of their strength had been denied those possessions simply because their nation was young imagine what this does to the balance of power imagine what this does to the geopolitical scene think what would happen today if say the entire eu declared themselves a single nation with a single economy a single military and a single foreign policy imagine if they said that they wanted greater access to middle eastern oil and russia and the united states said no we were here first imagine now if representatives from russia and the united states smiled and told this young nation that they'd be happy to continue to sell them oil at an inflated price though this was the position germany found itself in and you can already start to get the glimpses of what would happen after world war one into world war ii here's a great power a new great power feeling slighted feeling neglected uh and then the end of world war one happens and once again they're given the short end of the stick by all these other world powers and you can you can sense the generations of resentment that welled up and allowed for national socialism to take hold in the 1920s and 30s how was the concert of europe a system built around a balance of power and compromise to last in these circumstances and yet for 40 years it did and this brings us to the second major change since the napoleonic wars the men the 70 years after those wars was a time of giants men who towered over the world stage time and again here europe rolled well on the dice of history and came up with leaders who were capable of navigating an increasingly complex and increasingly modern geopolitical world in the 1800s russians saw men like alexander ii who understood that russia needed to modernize to survive he began dismantling serfdom reformed judicial practices encouraged universities and pursued peace understanding that russia was in no position to fight the major european powers like all the men here this guy was not all chuckles and sunshine alexander ii brutally suppressed revolutionaries and separatists in the territories russia controlled still he was effective without question yeah so i mean there's a lot of reforms happening in russia but you also still have a lot of resentment by the people toward their monarchy and that's why you have assassinations and assassination attempts and all of that i mean even in the 1870s as germany is rising to power there's already the undercurrent that's beginning in russia that would lead to the overthrow of the tsar by 1900 we have in russia nicholas ii a deeply reactionary deeply conservative man who history records as being of middling intellect with neither the training nor the inclination to properly rule true his reign is a catalog of embarrassing mismanagement this is the man who fell under the sway of the mystic rasputin this is a man who couldn't even coordinate his own coronation a man who let 1300 people die in a human stampede on the day he was crowned because yeah this is absolutely true nicholas the second was a disaster almost from the beginning and and a lot of it comes back to what they said he just wasn't prepared for being the czar uh and never really got the training and the equipping that he needed to do it effectively and and always seemed kind of out of touch which with what was happening in his country now remember too and i'm sure they'll talk about this that all of these great powers they're related to each other the royal family of austria the habsburgs uh the hohenzollerns in germany uh the romanovs in uh russia and of course the uh uh the house of uh was at the time what's called the house of saxa coburg and gota later changed to windsor uh in the uk these are all family members in fact uh king george v of uh the uk and czar nicholas ii who were first cousins could have been twins i mean they looked just like each other and there's actually pictures of them having swapped uniforms and they would like mess with people in that way but the same thing was true with the relationships wilhelm ii of germany is actually queen victoria's eldest grandson i mean so there's all of these layers of complexity to all of this i kid you not there was not enough beer and pretzels and this is the man who held a ball that day anyway because hey while at a few hundred deaths spoiled your day and this is the man who will in the end hold the fate of the world in his hands and by this point in austria we have as emperor an 84 year old man two years away from his death and battered by the weight of the life he's led his he's been the emperor of russia or of austria since before the american civil war i think i want to say like 1848 was when he became the emperor i could be wrong about that date but i think it was something like that foreign minister bertolt is neither a bad man nor stupid man but he is a weak and vacillating man at a time when european politics are all about strength and germany germany during the 20 years following its creation had unquestionably one of the greatest diplomats the world has ever seen otto von bismarck this is a man of great ability and great appetites a man known to smoke three cigars at once and down a bottle of champagne at breakfast a man who probably deserves an entire episode just to himself but for our purposes he is the man who held the concert of europe together under the incredible strain of the creation of the new german state his life's work was to ensure that france and russia never allied so that germany would never be surrounded this was his nightmare his greatest fear and in this like in many things he turned out to be right he famously said that the great european conflagration would come from some damn fool thing in the balkans and he warned kaiser wilhelm ii that within 20 years his bellicose policies would destroy the kaiser reich yeah you got to give otto von bismarck all kinds of credit for that and some fool in the balkans is exactly who lit the lit the match he was correct almost to the day but he was fired by kaiser wilhelm ii who has too much historical baggage to get an accurate view of yup suffice it to say that the kaiser often ends up with a reputation for feeling inadequate having been born with a withered arm and grown up hounded by his mother he came to believe that he had to prove he was masculine and so set out to break with bismarck's policies and show that he was his own man by abandoning the german alliance with russia and moving germany towards a much more expansionist stance he was known for being brash and impulsive with little tact crumbling the carefully balanced alliances that had for so long kept the concert of europe in place now to all this we have to add one last piece to the stage fear the fear of the dying empires the fear of those once a great nations that now so clearly saw the shadow of death approaching them from behind and fear is a powerful powerful influencer when you operate from a position of fear you can act in a desperate way and you can make really rash and really destructive decisions but you can kind of see a theme here right you see these monarchs of these european powers not listening to great advice that was being given to them particularly wilhelm ii and nicholas ii just uh oh just it's a disaster waiting to happen the ottoman empire the austro-hungarian empire and the russian empire the ottoman empire was long known as the sick man of europe its decline had been long and slow with the surrounding nations taking bites out of its carcass as it slowly died yeah and this is a perfect example of a succession of ever worsening leadership in the ottoman empire and that's what's happening here from their height back in the 15 1600s uh to the point where they start losing war to wars to these little balkan states at the beginning of the 1900s the austro-hungarian empire looked at the fate of the ottomans and saw shadows of what was to come they feared they'd be like the ottomans dismantled taken apart piece by piece until they were too weak to fight back they had once been the most powerful state in europe but they ruled over many nations and many peoples and over the 19th century those peoples had asserted themselves crying out for their own nations crying out to be free to as people decide their own fate and so through the 19th century the austro-hungarian empire saw its territory chipped away as the other great nations of the concert of europe ruled in their conferences that those people had a right to be free and with each loss those peoples that the austro-hungarian empire still maintained control of agitated for their own freedom to a greater and greater extent causing unrest that rocked the empire to its very core so it's there's jealousy there's why them but not us that kind of thing uh resentment yeah the austria-hungarian empire is just it's amazing that they held this fragile thing together as long as they did with all the different people groups that are involved if you look at a map of what was once part of that you can kind of get a sense of you know wow how they ever held it together is amazing and lastly we have the russians the russian tsars ruled the largest country in the world but like the ottomans their military economy and infrastructure were woefully behind the times and in 1905 when the russians lost a war with the japanese the first time a european power had lost a war to an asian one in modern history their weakness became eminently clear to the world this loss caused a revolution that forced the tsar to accept a parliament and a constitutional monarchy but it wasn't in the nature of alexander ii to accept a parliament and he rebelled against these constraints leaving his country precariously perched on the verge of revolution so with a new superpower in the midst of europe fear driving crumbling empires to irrational and desperate decisions and a group of leaders simply not equal to their forbearers at the task of guiding the ships of state the players are all in place the stage is set and the curtain begins to rise on the war to end all wars join us next time for an improbable assassination the death of a prince and a sandwich which changed history i gotta say that's uh in the short amount of time that they had to tell that story that's one of the best analysis analyses of what led to world war one that i've ever seen that was really really well done and i'm excited to see what they have to say about the war itself i highly encourage you to check out uh their videos the channel is called extra credits and they have different areas they have extra science extra history and their extra history stuff i can tell right away is going to be really well thought out and really well done and they've got a ton of videos i was looking over everything that they've got there's a lot there i'll put a link in the description to this specific video so you can check it out uh subscribe hit like on their original content but let me know your thoughts about what was covered in this particular part and we're definitely going to continue talking about this uh world war one is an area of history that i'm just gobbling up all the information i can about right now trying to learn as much as i can with the idea that i'm going to eventually travel to europe and visit these historic battlefields but let me know your thoughts use the comment section below make sure you enter the contest we'll see you again soon with more reaction videos thanks for watching

Channel: Vlogging Through History

Views: 151,687

Keywords: extra credits, extra history, extra credits history, world war 1, extra credits reaction, extra history reaction, reaction video, the concert of europe

Id: vlJ6HFUBpTY

Length: 18min 56sec (1136 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021