For those of us born relatively deep into the before times of the 20th century, it may come as a rather shocking realization that WWI occurred now over a century ago, playing as the backdrop on the positive side of astonishingly rapid progress in the fields of medicine, science, technology, literature, and the arts, along with on the downside the past, as ever being the worst, such as the Spanish Flu pandemic which while WWI was raging killing about 20 million, that Spanish flu was outdoing the humans in a much shorter span killing between 50-100 million people and infected around a half a billion around the globe between 1918 and 1920.

That’s not even to mention just after the Encephalitis Lethargica which swept across the world killing over a million people while affecting numerous others, before suddenly disappearing, leaving the finest scientific minds of the age absolutely stumped, though today it’s thought to have been caused by a rare type of strep throat, which concerningly enough is still around today, and a subsequent immune response gone awry. That one was particularly horrifying as if it didn’t kill you, this illness could instead potentially trap you inside your body, stopping you from having the will to move or speak, though you’d otherwise seem perfectly healthy. A few decades after the outbreak, a treatment was found that would, for lack of a better phrase, “wake up” the patients, though within weeks they’d slip back into their trance. If that all sounds like a familiar plotline, it’s perhaps because it was the inspiration for the Robin Williams’ fronted film Awakenings.

But, we’re not here to talk about all the ways the past was the worst, else this video would end up being the longest ever posted on YouTube, even if we restricted ourselves to just the first 25 years of the 20th century. But rather, we’re going to zero in on a specific piece of that era, which will always be remembered as the century in which many of the most prominent nations on this planet decided to plunge our species into the most lethal, devastating, traumatic conflict since our ancestors had first pierced someone’s guts with the sharpened end of a stick. Not happy with just one such conflict, we went and did it twice, in the first place in The Great War, also known as ‘the war to end all of war’, and later simply as World War I when everyone realized that humans will seemingly never end warring until we have one so devastating that there are no humans left to war with. ...

Author: Arnaldo Teodorani and Daven Hiskey

Editor: Daven Hiskey

Producer: Samuel Avila

0:00 The Past was the Worst

7:45 The Truth About What Really Started WWI

14:05 King George V and Queen Mary

19:01 The Romanovs and The Windsors

22:40 Princess Mary

25:21 ‘David’, the Prince of Wales

29:01 Prince Albert

32:43 From WWI to WWII

35:38 How Everyone Gets "The Road Not Taken" Wrong and How It Helped End the Life it was Written About

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