The 20th century’s hinge.
Two wars, thirty-one years, ninety million dead. The era that ended European hegemony, redrew the map, and built the world we still live in.
Why a single hub
The two World Wars are usually taught as separate events — and rightly so. But they make most sense as one extended crisis: the Versailles settlement of 1919 contained the seeds of 1939, and the long 19th-century world ended somewhere in the middle. Treat them as the two acts of the same story.
Two wars
One long crisis.
- 1914
World War I
How a Balkan assassination became four years of trench warfare and 17 million dead. - 1939
World War II
60 million dead. The Holocaust. The atomic bomb. The end of European hegemony.
