Great War

The Great War, also known as the First World War and World War I, was a global imperialist war originating in Europe that lasted from 28 July 1914 to 7 October 1918.

On 28 June 1914, a group of unknown assailants connected with the Black Hand secret society assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. In the coming weeks, a tangle of alliances and secret treaties resulted in an outbreak of war between the Allied Powers (the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and Ottoman Empire) and the Entente (the British Empire, the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United States).

The war would result in the deaths of twenty million soldiers and civilians, as well as the shattering of the empires of Eastern Europe by nationalist or socialist revolutions. In the United States, the unpopularity of the war contributed to the radicalization of the Socialist Labor Party into a revolutionary communist party, setting the stage for the Second American Civil War.