In 1914 every country in Europe was brimming with a sense of war. The ‘Spirit of 1914’ the Germans called it. It was the War everyone wanted, unstoppable, unavoidable. Happy the people were when it finally arrived, this ‘fresh and joyous war’. That shot fired in Sarajevo had merely been the excuse to start what had been a long time coming…

The description above depicts the view that the First World War originated from a mind-set of warmongering that, at the time, had been present throughout Europe for over a decade. To any historian this will sound an oversimplification that is in grave need of some nuance.

In this activity students will form groups that represent five countries that each had a prominent part in World War One: Austria-Hungary, Britain, France, Germany, and Russia. From each country several ‘key players’ are presented. It is for the students to find out what the perspective of each player was on the prospect of a war. Was he or she either a ‘dove’, trying to maintain the peace, or a ‘hawk’, eager to plunge their country into war?

The main premise of the activity is this: when you make up the balance between ‘doves’ and ‘hawks’ in each country, the start of World War One might not have been so ‘unavoidable’ as it has often been depicted. Each group makes up the balance for ‘their’ country, finding an answer to the question: would this country have descended into war in 1914, solely based on the dominant view of its key players?

The main aim of this activity is to provide students with a better grasp of the complexity surrounding certain events like the start of World War One. It does so by taking into account a lot of national and international perspectives of ‘key players’ in the time leading up to the War.

Learning objectives

Students will:

  • Practise their reading skills of informational texts on a historical topic.
  • Create an overview of different perspectives within a certain time frame and geographical area (for example Germany between 1900 and 1914).
  • Formulate evidence based historical arguments to support their answer on the question if a certain country would have gone to war in 1914 when all the key players are taken into account.
  • Discuss the process of simplification and importance of complexity in historical writing and history education (transfer).

Students will need:

  • Step-by-step student guide and worksheet.
  • Five sets of key player cards – cut-up.
  • Access to the Historiana World War One module – key players (either online or downloaded).

Activity Plan

The student material contains a step-by-step guide, including a worksheet and five sets of key player cards that have to be cut out. Both the cards and the activity as a whole help scaffold the topic for the students.

NOTE: As a teacher you mainly have a supporting role, while most of the research is done by the students.

Introduction:

  • Students form either five or ten teams, depending on group size and experience with historical reading and reasoning skills (or you divide them into, more or less, equal groups).
  • They read the enquiry question and discuss any preconceptions they have about the ‘unavoidability’ of the start of World War One.

NOTE: The premise of the activity is that the general view on the start of World War One is that the war was ‘unavoidable’. The goal of this activity is to nuance that view and show the complexity of the situation in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Understanding and applying historical knowledge:

  • Students study the Historiana historical informational text ‘The descent into war: the key players’ while making use of the key player cards provided in the activity. The aim of the cards is to provide faces with the many names mentioned in the text.
  • They can use additional information (either from their handbooks and/or the Internet) to get a better grasp of the background of each of the key players.
  • They use this historical knowledge to divide the key players into ‘doves’ and ‘hawks’ on the provided ‘scale of war and peace’ worksheet.
  • They provide historical arguments for each of their choices.

NOTE: As with most historical thinking activities, the process of placing the key players on the scale not so much about the ‘definitive’ outcome, but mostly about the use of adequate historical arguments to support a claim (e.g. ‘This key player should be on the side of the ‘doves’, because…, while this other key player is more a ‘hawk’, because…).

Presenting the past:

  • Students answer the enquiry question as to whether World War One was really ‘unavoidable’, if seen solely from the perspective of the key players of the county they researched.
  • They present their outcomes to the other groups and compare and contrast the findings on the different countries.
  • [OPTIONAL]: have a round table session where each country group sends one representative (either a ‘dove’ or a ‘hawk’) to discuss the question if there should be a war on an international level. The groups support their representative with historical information to use in the debate. Additionally another balance can be made up, using the international key players.

To conclude and assess the learning:

  • Discuss how students approached the activity and what they did during each step.
  • Discuss the process of simplification and importance of complexity in historical writing and history education. For this you can return to the original premise of World War One being seen as ‘the unavoidable war’.

NOTE: Discussing the process of simplifying a complex historical situation to an easier to understand historical narrative should give the students some insight into how history and history education work: the ‘truth’ is too complex, so historians (and people in general) need simplification to get a grasp of the past. Yet, simplification always has the danger of oversimplifying things, leading to historical narratives that not do necessarily do the actual past justice. This insight is transferable to many historical situations and could be discussed here as such.

Note about sources:

All sources that are used in this activity come from the public domain and as such are freely available online. Most of the portraits of the key players on the cards have been resized to fit the design.