What did 1919 look like outside Paris?
The armistice of November 1918 ended the great war on the Western Front, but violence, pandemic and imperial collapse did not stop with it. The story of 1919 is how the language of peace became different promises to different people: Paris designed a new order, influenza moved along wartime networks, Russia remained at civil war, and Anatolia eventually forced part of the settlement to be rewritten by war.
What you will follow
This guided story moves the same world map through 13 sourced scenes. It begins at the opening rather than dropping you into an unexplained year.
How to read the map: The map uses discrete, approximate border snapshots. A narrated year may use the closest available snapshot, and schematic arrows show relationships rather than precise routes.
Related subjects on the map
- The First World War
- The 1918 influenza pandemic
- The collapse and partition of the Ottoman Empire
- The Russian revolution and civil war
Sources used by this story
- Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001).
- Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
- David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Henry Holt, 1989).
- Michael Provence, The Last Ottoman Generation and the Making of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
- Laura Spinney, Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World (London: Jonathan Cape, 2017).
- Niall P. A. S. Johnson and Juergen Mueller, 'Updating the accounts: global mortality of the 1918-1920 "Spanish" influenza pandemic', Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76, no. 1 (2002): 105-115.
- Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2005).
- Robert Gerwarth, The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923 (London: Allen Lane, 2016).