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The Provisional Government was opposed right away by the soviets, or councils of workers and peasants, who wanted the right to make their own decisions.

The commonly held notion that it was started out of outrage over the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie at the hands of Serbian nationalist secret society.

The Allies were joined after 1917 by the United States. The four years of the Great Waras it was then known saw unprecedented levels of carnage and destruction thanks to grueling trench warfare and the introduction of modern weaponry such as machine guns tanks and chemical weapons.

Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by a Serbian nationalist in Sarajevo, Bosnia. An escalation of threats and mobilization orders followed the incident leading by mid August to the outbreak of World War I which pitted Germany Austria Hungary and the Ottoman Empire against Great Britain France Russia Italy and Japan

Russia bound by treaty to Serbia announced mobilisation of its vast army in her defence a slow process that would take around six weeks to complete.

Austria-Hungary's expectation was that Serbia would reject the remarkably severe terms of the ultimatum, thereby giving her a pretext for launching a limited war against Serbia.

Austria-Hungary's reaction to the death of their heir was three weeks in coming. Arguing that the Serbian government was implicated in the machinations of the Black Hand the Austro-Hungarians opted to take the opportunity to stamp its authority upon the Serbians, crushing the nationalist movement there and cementing Austria-Hungary's influence in the Balkans.

The number of Africans shipped as slaves to America has been conservatively estimated at 10 million. That number doesn't include the thousands who died along the way. Some estimates have concluded that 15 to 25 of every 100 Africans died on those voyages.

Wealthy Europeans craved spices from Asia as well as silks and sugar. This trade had helped to further the prosperity of Italian city states like Venice and could be traced back to the time of the Crusades. Columbus himself was born in Genoa the map making capital of Europe.

Lucrative European trade with Asia had been severely curtailed by wars in the Middle East culminating with the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453.