![]() The assassination presented Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm II with an opportunity to push for the conflict they had long prepared for. On June 28, 1914, a nineteen-year-old Bosnian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, shot and killed the Archduke of Austria and heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand, along with his wife, Sophie, in the capital city of Sarajevo. The forces of nationalism, militarism, and imperialism swelled in the decades following the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, gripping the continent with fear, envy, and mistrust.4 Colonial rivalries and a precarious alliance system exacerbated tensions. ![]() The European crisis had been long in the making. His thirteen-year-old daughter, Yolande, and his wife, Nina, were scheduled to leave for England at the end of the month.2 Yolande had received admission to the prestigious Bedales boarding school in Hampshire, where, as her father intended, she would be “trained to become a healthy woman, of broad outlook and spiritual resources, able to earn a living in some line of work which she likes and is fitted for.”3 Du Bois believed that Nina should dutifully relocate as well and settle in nearby London to provide motherly support whenever necessary. It was August 1914, and war engulfed Europe. “The present war in Europe is one of the great disasters due to race and color prejudice and it but foreshadows greater disasters in the future.”1ĭU BOIS FEARED FOR his family’s safety. ![]()
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