Audibly Speaking: Listening to History

Audibly Speaking: Listening to History


Unit 4, Discussion 5: Imperialism and the Long Fuse to World War I, 1860-1914

October 11, 2019

"The Duty of Great Nations," by Udo Keppler (1899). John Bull of Great Britain is encouraging a skeptical Uncle Sam to jump on the imperialism bandwagon with England. Soon, Uncle Sam would practice imperialism himself.
















In this last podcast of Unit 4, we see the end result of all the others in Unit 4: the shocking bloodshed of World War 1, which proved that all of the theories of progress in the nineteenth century were wrong. One idea we have not covered, but do cover in this podcast, is the idea of imperialism, a mixture of Social Darwinism and nationalism in its ugliest form. Imperialism reigned supreme between 1880 and 1914, and put nations in conflict with one another, helping to lead to the greatest conflict of all in the period, the First World War.