One thing I like to focus on in teaching about World War One is just how little the public understood the danger. Here is the NY Times front page on June 27, 1914, day before Archduke Franz Ferdinand's assassination. Top story? Columbia University wins an intercollegiate regatta.

Two days later the news from Sarajevo hit the front pages in America. The other top story was the ongoing Mexican Revolution.

After another day of top coverage from Europe, the story was off the top line of the front page by July 1.

Three weeks later - July 21, 1914 - still nothing. A story about the Kaiser...being insulted by an American diplomat for knocking his hat off. And a looming baseball strike.

On July 25 the story finally returns to the front, with the prospect of a European war "in the balance," thanks to Russian support for Serbia.

From then onward, the war was the top story.

Just one week later...

The point here is not that Americans *should* have seen anything coming. Rather, the point is that history often turns on events largely unforeseen. This is a great example of "contingency" in history - largely unexpected incidents that occur at a particular place and time.

We often use hindsight in evaluating the past, as if people in an earlier time knew how their stories would unfold. But they didn't know what their futures held. For example, there had been two recent Balkan wars already. Was this one going to snowball into a massive war?

We can look back and find the strategic blunders and miscalculations from various European autocrats, or to the deeper sets of alliances, military buildups and imperial rivalries. Or to cultural tides of chauvinistic nationalism. Or to European class conflict. All are important.

But none of those deeper structural explanations will capture the lived experience of those who encountered these events of 1914 as they happened. What matters is what people *didn't* know and what they *thought* they knew at the time, and how they acted upon all of it.

The job of the historian and history educator is to grab that moment of uncertainty with all its sideshows, media squabbles, personal peculiarities and public predictions of doom, glory or status quo. They knew as little of their own futures as we know of ours.