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Assassination of Franz Ferdinand
Archduke Franz Ferdinand was Assassination on his visit to Sarajevo, Bosnia And Herzegovina by Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip -
Germany invades Belgium
The Germans invaded Belgium to execute the Schlieffen Plan. The Schlieffen Plan, devised a decade before the start of World War I, was a failed strategy for Germany to win World War I. The United Kingdom joins the war as a result of the Schlieffen Plan for violating Belgen neutrality. -
Battle of Marne
The Battle of the Marne was a battle of the First World War fought from 6 to 12 September 1914. It resulted in an Allied victory against the German armies in the west -
Gallipoli Campaign
The Gallipoli campaign was a military campaign in the First World War that took place on the Gallipoli peninsula, from 17 February 1915 to 9 January 1916. The Entente powers, sought to weaken the Ottoman Empire, by taking control of the Turkish straits -
Battle of Verdun
The Battle of Verdun was fought from 21 February to 18 December 1916 on the Western Front in France. The battle was the longest of the First World War and took place on the hills north of Verdun-sur-Meuse. -
Battle of the Somme
The Battle of the Somme, costly and largely unsuccessful Allied offensive on the Western Front during World War I. The horrific bloodshed on the first day of the battle became a metaphor for futile and indiscriminate slaughter. -
Death of Grigori Rasputin
Rasputin, a Siberian-born muzhik, or peasant, who underwent a religious conversion as a teenager and proclaimed himself a healer with the ability to predict the future, won the favor of Czar Nicholas II and Czarina Alexandra through his ability to stop the bleeding of their hemophiliac son, Alexei, in 1908. According to a myth, Rasputin's defiance of death was such that he was thrown into water and drowned. -
Tsar Nicholas abdicates
On 15 March 1917 Tsar Nicholas II abdicated from the Russian throne. This brought to an end the Romanov dynasty that had ruled Russia for over three hundred years -
US declares war on Germany
On April 6, Congress granted the request and the United States was formally at war with Germany. Several key events leading up to this act included the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, and the Zimmerman Telegram sent to Mexico by Germany in January 1917 -
Lenin's return to from exile
On April 16, 1917, With help from the Germans, Vladimir Lenin, leader of the revolutionary Bolshevik Party, returns to Petrograd after a decade of exile to take the reins of the Russian Revolution. After his exile ended in 1900, Lenin went to Western Europe, where he continued his revolutionary activity. -
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
The Brest-Litovsk Treaty was the end of Russian participation in World War 1. The terms of the treaty were harsh to Russia. It include a large territory loss and large financial payment. It also freed up a large number of Austrian and German troops to fight elsewhere -
Armistice ending WWI
At the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ends. At 5 a.m. that morning, Germany, bereft of manpower and supplies and faced with imminent invasion, signed an armistice agreement with the Allies in a railroad car outside Compiégne, France. -
Treaty of Versailles signed
The Versailles Treaty forced Germany to give up territory to Belgium, Czechoslovakia and Poland, return Alsace and Lorraine to France and cede all of its overseas colonies in China, Pacific and Africa to the Allied nations.