Season 7 2020

In January 1920, after one year of preparation, the 18th Amendment to the US Constitution went into effect. From now on alcohol prohibition was the law.

The Ottoman Empire was among the losing powers of World War 1 and left a power vacuum after the armistice of Mudros. The Great Powers had already made plans for the territory beforehand and now Greece had ambitions to take over the parts of Turkey where Greeks lived.

Woodrow Wilson's 14 Points and their idea of self-determination didn't go unnoticed in the former German colonies like German Southwest Africa. But especially South Africa had other ideas at the Paris Peace Conference and lobbied to take control over future Namibia and its lucrative diamond mines.

Dissatisfied with the new German Republic and the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, parts of the new Reichswehr and the paramilitary Freikorps decide to take matters into their own hands. The Marinebrigade Ehrhardt marches on Berlin to topple the government: It's the Kapp Putsch.

The movement for more Irish self determination had turned into a full out revolutionary movement by 1919. The British Empire was losing control over Ireland and by early 1920 was in a full out guerrilla war against the Irish Republican Army (IRA). To regain control more police forces were recruited with wide ranging authorities - and a lack of actual police training. With their mismatched equipment made from war supplies, they soon got the nickname "Black and Tans".

The League of Nations was US President Woodrow Wilson's tool for a new and peaceful world after the war of 1914-1918 - and the US should have been their most important member. But the United States never joined and today the League of Nations is often seen as a failure. Was it doomed from the start?

100 years ago at the conference of San Remo, one thing became clear: Great Britain and France wanted control over the Middle East. Justified by the fighting in the previous years and painted as "liberators" of the Middle Eastern minorities, the new map of the Middle East emerged - under the cover of the League of Nations Mandate system.

The Polish-Soviet War was one of the biggest conflicts after the armistice of 1918 and the culmination point of the many sub-conflicts that made up the Western Front of the Russian Civil War. The question about the Polish-Russian border was decided with armored trains, cavalry charges and also on the negotiating table.

It was far deadlier than even the global war that had preceded it: The Influenza pandemic or Spanish Flu that hit the world between 1918 and 1920 in multiple waves.

The last of the big peace treaties signed in Paris that finalized the borders in Europe was the Treaty of Trianon. Even at the time, Hungarians considered it a historic injustice while nations such as Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia were quite happy with the result. We examine how the treaty was signed and negotiated.

Freeing peasants and workers from oppression was one of the main messages of the Bolsheviks. The peasants in the country side where happy to get rid of the landowning class and supported socialist ideas of land reform but once the Bolshevoks turned to "War Communism" to maintain their power against the Whites and other forces, the reluctant support of the peasants dropped - and in 1920 they turned to open revolt.

The summer of 1920 was marked by escalating tensions on the borders of the German Reich. In the Rhineland, a neutral zone per the Versailles Treaty, the revolutionary uprising after the failed Kapp Putsch was put down with the help of the army and the Freikorps. In Upper Silesia, the conflict between Poland and Germany was escalating into a proxy war. And all that while the German government was negotiating the payments of reparations at the Spa Conference.

The French and British colonial powers had their own plans on how to rule the Middle East after the costly campaigns of World War 1. National self determination for the different groups in Syria, Iraq, Palestine and Arabia were not part of these plans. And so in the summer of 1920 the situation in Iraq and Syria escalated and the French-Syrian War and the Iraqi Revolt broke out.

While the Greco-Turkish War was still raging, the last of the peace treaties between the Allies and the Central Powers was finalized in Paris. But the Turkish Nationalist Movement under Mustafa Kemal would not accept the terms of the Treaty of Sèvres - even though the Ottoman government had signed it.

In the summer of 1920 the new Poland under Josef Pilsduksi stood with their backs to Warsaw against the Red Army. The Bolsheviks had advanced in the North and in the South and some of the Soviet leadership wanted to carry the revolution into Western Europe.

The conflict between the Irish independence movement and the UK government had been heating up since 1919. The summer of 1920 brought a new level of escalation with the arrival of the the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Former veterans of the First World War were brought in to quell the rebellion and get a hold of the strongholds controlled by the IRA.

In the summer of 1920 it became clear that the many different voices and local opinions on the future of the former Ottoman provinces were going to be mostly ignored. France and Britain had their own ideas for the new mandate states in the region.

By the fall of 1920, the Russian Civil War had unleashed three years of ethnic and internal conflict in Central Asia, and there was no end in sight. In this episode we’ll catch up on the dramatic events of the former Russian imperial lands in Central Asia from the revolution right up to the end of 1920, 100 years ago.

Like the other Baltic states, Lithuania declared independence at the end of World War 1 and was caught in the chaotic and violent situation of 1919 and 1920 when much of Eastern Europe was in turmoil. Territories that today belong to Lithuania were claimed by Poland and Soviet Russia alike - while these two were waging a war in the direct vicinity of Lithuania.

Italy was promised a lot of territorial gains for entering the First World War on the Allied side. But in 1919, the map of Europe had changed and the Allies were less interested in only fulfilling Italian territorial ambitions. Push came to shove when Italian Fascists around nationalist Gabriele D'Annunzio occupied the coastal city of Fiume in the newly created Yugoslavia.

The British government was confident that the guerrilla war against the Irish Independence movement would soon be under control. But with the events around Bloody Sunday and the Killmichael Ambush, the situation reached a new level of violence.

The 10 year long Mexican Revolution came to a conclusion in December of 1920. In the decade prior the country had seen peasant revolts, political assassination and and US intervention.

The Russian Civil War's most eastern front in Siberia saw a supranational intervention by several world powers in the name of stopping Bolshevism. But the tens of thousands of foreign soldiers were not the only opposition to the Bolsheviks, white warlords and anarchist peasant revolts also meddled in this complex situation.