About this Project

This timeline blog is an exercise in re-disorganization.

Historians have offered up an abundance of analysis on the causes of WWII, taking the events from the years leading up to the war and placing them in comprehensible silos for our understanding.  This is necessary for gaining understanding into the subject.  But all this analysis leaves me wondering, "What was it like to live through those years?"  Histories sometimes rob us of one aspect crucial to understanding events fully: their chronological context, the fluidity and uncertainty accompanying their placement in that most inescapable of human media -- time.

 

So this project simply presents, in abbreviated form, key events leading up to WWII in the order that they happened.  The entries are distilled from newspaper accounts, so they generally don't offer the kind of analysis you'll find in histories.  They don't usually draw on information we have now about what was going on behind the scenes, and they'll sometimes report rumors, distractions, even inaccuracies (though the latter will be corrected where possible).  By taking the events out of their silos and putting them back in chronological order, I'm hoping to answer my own question: "What was it like to live through those years?"  So far, I've been surprised by what got forgotten once history knew which events "mattered" and which didn't.

One thing in particular that gets lost: the background noise.  Day after day, week after week, shootings, riots, demonstrations, strikes, beatings, looting, threats, rage.  It's easy, from the comfort of our modern armchairs, to sniff at the unsophisticated people who voted this or that leader into or out of power.  But live their fear, smell the burning barricades, and you might sniff less (that smoke's just going to make you cough anyway).  

So this is not the blog for in-depth analysis, and it may tire those who want 10 years distilled into a tweet.  It's not the blog to have any particular point of view validated.  But if, like me, you've ever wondered, "How could this have happened?" hopefully this contributes something to the conversation.  It happened like everything else happens: one step at a time.