The banner reads, “The street corner that started the Twentieth Century.”

It hangs over an intersection in the center of town in faraway, Sarajevo, capital of the small, mountainous country of Bosnia, in southeastern Europe. As unlikely as it may seem, the banner speaks the truth. The 20th century, and just as surely the 21st, did begin right on that very spot. One hundred years ago this summer, on the 28th of June, 1914, the sequence of events that define our world today began with the assassination of the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie.

Those two deaths would lead to 15 million more in the Great War (as World War I was known in its day). And from that Pandora’s Box of troubles would come Lenin’s Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and Mussolini’s Fascism in Italy, and Hitler’s Nazism in Germany, and not simply another depression, but the Great Depression. And then, would come World War II and the Holocaust.

Also, the Great War gave rise to the national boundaries, and many of the problems of today’s Middle East, from Syria to Yemen, from Iraq to Gaza. In fact, it is precisely those European-drawn post-war boundaries that the ominous “ISIS” is determined to erase here in the war’s centennial year of 2014. The anti-imperialist sentiment of that goal is reasonable and is one source of its popular support.

The savage means to that end is gut-churning and is the source of popular horror. But to wallow in the sensation of the latter without acknowledging the historical grievance of the former is to misunderstand the issue, and to make it virtually impossible to erode that support.

The happenings of a century past are truly as relevant as today’s headlines.

So, why did it all happen? From 6 to 7 p.m. beginning Thursday, Copiah-Lincoln Community College’s Natchez campus will offer a class drawing on the best of recent historical scholarship in an attempt to answer that question.

During the fall semester, we will meet for 11 weeks to delve into the causes and course of World War I itself, with emphasis on those aspects of the struggle with the greatest relevance for later history. Then, in the spring semester, beginning in January, we will meet for another 10 weeks to sort through the ever-widening wake of events set in motion by the war.

However, this will not be a story of effects mechanically following causes. The study of the past, in fact, tells us that the past does not dictate the future, though it does limit our options, at times severely. But humans never completely lose the immense power, and frightening responsibility, of choice. In contrast to the vulgarized version of history repeated so often recently, we will see that neither the war, nor the Treaty of Versailles, nor reparations, nor hyperinflation, nor depression made Hitler’s assumption of power an inevitability. Each may have been a necessary step, but none were sufficient to complete the process.

That completion came on one day, Jan. 30, 1933, when a handful of smug, small men in grand positions made a dreadful error, and elevated the Nazi führer to the German Chancellorship. Trenches and treaties aside, it did not have to be so.

Likewise, Franz-Ferdinand’s assassination did not have to lead to war, though it did. The fall of the Russian tsar did not have to be followed by the Bolshevik terror, though it was. The culprits, therefore, were all the usual suspects: human frailty and fanaticism, vainglory and venality. However, at each stage of the downward spiral, brave voices of reason were raised in opposition, even if ignored, or violently silenced.

From this litany of disaster, then, we can actually draw hope. Fate was not, is not, our master.

History is not a straightjacket. If we heed the examples, and learn from the mistakes, maybe, just maybe, we can do better.

As always, “special interest” means no tests, no grades, low fees ($5 per meeting). If you’re interested, please pre-register by contacting Emily Edwards at Co-Lin at 601-446-1103 or by email at emily.edwards@colin.edu, or come by the Willie Mae Dunn Library in the Reed Academic Building.

 

James Wiggins is a history instructor at Copiah-Lincoln Community College’s Natchez Campus.