``ColonelDax welcome to the boards, I’m honored you chose to make your first post in my thread. I have allways been a bit shady about the ArchDuke’s assassination, was the Kaiser gearing up for war before this event? Was it a trigger for WWI, or an excuse?’’
Why, thank you. I used to read the Straight Dope ages ago in City Paper when I lived in Washington and have a couple of the books kicking around somewhere, but only recently came across the website.
As far as the origins of World War I, it was Austria-Hungary that was spoiling for a fight (with Serbia), not Germany. The two Balkan Wars of 1911-13 left Austria-Hungary nervous about Serbian aspirations to form a ``Greater Serbia’’ that would have involved annexing some Austro-Hungarian territory. So Austria-Hungary, which was not itself a participant in the Balkan Wars, was already looking for an excuse to come down hard on Serbia when Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo by Serb nationalists.
Austria-Hungary, convinced it had a ``blank check’’ commitment of support from Germany even if Russia should back its Serb allies, presented Serbia with an ultimatum that was deliberately made so harsh as to provoke a war. Russia backed Serbia after getting assurances of support from its allies, Britain and France, leading Serbia to reject the Austrian ultimatum on 25 July 1914. Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia on 28 July, Russia began to mobilize its forces the next day and the rest, as they say, is history. Kaiser William tried to persuade the Russians to call off their mobilization, but no luck.
I will go with the microprocessor. It’s going to do nothing but become more and more important over the coming years. It will make the future possible.
Pickett’s charge. That could have gone either way, a pivotal point, and had it gone the other way, the next one hundred years would have been completely different in the history of the world. I put it over the assassination; something would have touched off that set of dominos, and even over the funeral, since (again, IMHO) the golden hoard was at the end of its supply lines, even living off the land. After Gettysburg, the fate of the South was sealed. Had Pickett overwhelmed the Union position, and Lee marched down on Washington from the north, the next one hundred years of history (up through both World Wars) would have been much different indeed.
June 6, 1944. Had the invasion failed, we would not have been able to mount another. Stalin would have been forced to negotiate with a newly secure Hitler. Europe would have been split between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, with England alone.
(I’m halfway through Ambrose’s book on it, and with every page my admiration for my father’s generation grows).
Defeat of the Spanish Armada.
The world could easily have become Spanish-ruled if Brit colonies in North America were under the Spanish umbrella as well as all of South America.
The transistor was the major invention, but the microprocessor was the major application. So to me it’s kind of like the Wright brothers invented the airplane, but it wasn’t much good for transportation. So where to give the credit? To the person that invented the brick or the person that built first the house?