Status Updates From History's Greatest Wars: Th...

The Arab-Israeli conflict grows directly from the horror of genocide in WWII, the impetus for the founding of the modern state of Israel, so that the Jews would once again have a place to call their own, and not be sojourners. But in the almost two millennia since the Jewish people lost the Promised Land they'd held since the Exodus, others had come to view it as their own, and didn't want to give it up.

World War II -- the most destructive war in history, but even its seemingly decisive end proved the beginning of the Cold War, with its brushfire conflicts at the peripheries as the principals glowered at each other but dared not fight directly, lest the entire world be engulfed in nuclear annihilation.

We tend to think of the Russian Revolution as a single event. In fact, it was a long and drawn-out ordeal. The February Revolution that unseated Tsar Nicholas, the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks (Communists) swept away the Provisional Government, and the years of civil war in which the Red Army defeated a variety of counter-revolutionary forces, which resulted in atrocities and mass famine.

The disaster that was WWI. Interlocking secret treaties, rigid operational plans, and expectations based upon the Napoleonic Wars (those barbarians across the water have nothing to teach us, dear), and stupid pride combined to destroy the old order and usher in the horrors of the Twentieth: WWII, the Shoah, the Cold War and the specter of nuclear Armageddon.

The Taiping rebellion turns truly ugly. Its leader has gone over the edge, calling weeds "manna," while the government's armies carry out unrestrained massacres, exterminating entire cities. Enormous amounts of suffering as refugees flood the countryside.

Trouble in the Middle Kingdom, as a religious cult becomes a political force. The seeds of the downfall of a dynasty and the rise of the Chinese Communist Party are planted.

Pride goeth before a fall -- the story of Napoleon, summed up millennia before his birth

The Seven Years' War (French and Indian War) created the economic conditions for the taxes that sparked the American Revolution. Its example led to the French Revolution, which soon went down a dark and bloodstained path that would ultimately create the conditions for the rise of Napoleon.

How the Thirty Years' War made the modern world of nation-states and standing armies. A war so terrible that its destruction would not be equaled until WWII -- and on a per-capita basis, still hasn't been, for the simple reason that Europe of the early 1600's was far less densely populated.

The Hundred Years' War, which lies on the boundary between the medieval and the modern. Cannon, albeit primitive appear for the first time -- but there's still a medieval mindset, including the story of Joan of Arc, on a mission from God.

The Crusades, which at first created Latin-rite Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land, but in time were recaptured, largely because the Crusaders didn't really create fundamentals under them. No body of loyal locals willing to fight and die to preserve their polities.

How Islam went from an obscure new sect to one of the world's major religions, and transformed the Middle East.

The Fall of the (Western) Roman Empire -- and some of the stranger moments, including the point at which Attila was nearly defeated, but was allowed to escape lest the barbarian army that would've defeated it prove a worse danger to Rome. And just how much of a catastrophic fall it was, vs. a slip-slide from Roman to barbarian overlordship.

The conquests of Alexander the Great, whose empire fell apart because it had no fundamentals, just his outsized personality. The Punic Wars, the story of a rivalry that could only end in the destruction of one of the two rivals.

The Battle of Thermopylae, a defeat that made victory possible by holding the Persians back just long enough that other Greek forces could assemble for the battle that would end the Persian attempt to conquer Greece.

The war between the Greeks and the Persians determined that Western culture would be dominated by Greek philosophy, rather than Persian governance.