This week marks the anniversary of an very momentous event in modern civilization: Dec. 31 is the day Thomas Edison first demonstrated his incandescent lightbulb in Menlo Park, NJ. The lightbulb was nothing new in 1879. It had been around longer than the 32-year-old Edison. Older models were expensive and didn’t burn for long. Edison […]
The Causes of World War I: Part 1 – Alliances
In 1878, the major European powers met in Germany to discuss territorial disputes. The Congress of Berlin assigned regions to different empires. Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, was given to Austria-Hungary. It soon became clear that there were problems with this arrangement. The powers could not incur new territory without risking war with another country. Russia, especially, […]