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Showing posts with the label World War I

New Jersey Artillery Explosives Production in World War I

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Written by Andrea Dragon, Ph.D. Andrea investigates and writes about New Jersey's industrial history. Professor Dragon will be teaching a continuing education course on "New Jersey's Explosives History" at Rutgers - New Brunswick in the fall, 2024. For details, see the fall catalog at  olliru.rutgers.edu . The course is described on page 31.   1914:  World War I Breaks Out   Russia started to modernize its army in 1913, with substantial French financial and weapons support. The beginning of a five-year plan, one of the main goals was to expand artillery to catch up with Germany. But war broke out.    After the first four months of the war, all combatants realized they were in for a long war with deadly modern weapons. Every countryā€™s strategy of a quick victory through offensive warfare failed. Germany did not defeat France and England in the west, and the Russian offensive against Germany in the east ended in disaster. The result was four years of tre...

Bismarck and the Origins of World War I.

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    Otto von Bismarck   The recent excellent histories on the factors leading up to World War One donā€™t go back far enough in time.   The main contention of this essay is that the road to World War One begins with the long-run consequences of the policies and strategies of Otto von Bismarck and the way he created the First German Reich in 1871.   The heart of the Treaty of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) was the ā€œHoly Alliance,ā€ an agreement of the monarchs of Russia, Prussia (later Germany) and Austria (later Austria-Hungary) to stamp out any return to the revolutionary ideals of the French Revolution. The three monarchies cooperated until the Crimean War.   The Crimean War (1853-56) was triggered by Russian attempts to expand its influence around the Black Sea, force the Ottoman Empire to allow Russian warships through the Dardanelles and increase influence in the Balkans as the Ottoman Empire retreated. To keep Russia bottled u...

The Beginning of the Twentieth Century: The Path to World War I

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Kaiser Wilhelm INTRODUCTION Some historians believe that the twentieth century began with World War I.  But how did World War I begin? The horrors of Europeā€™s twentieth century were born of this catastrophe; it was, as the American historian Fritz Stern put it, "the first calamity of the twentieth century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang." The consequences lasted at least until 1991, the breakup of the Soviet Union, which may mark the end of the twentieth century.  But the immediate cause of the war ā€“ instability and wars in the Balkans ā€“ reappeared again with the breakup of Serbian-dominated Yugoslavia, which was created after World War I. Rivalry among nations over influence in the Central European "borderlands" continues. Violence in the Middle East is partly a result of the arbitrary national boundaries drawn up by French and British imperialists during World War I. The economic dislocations caused by Wo...