Curated playlist
Former countries of the interwar period
- Federal State of AustriaThe Federal State of Austria lasted just four years, from 1934 to 1938, but its story is one of the most compressed political dramas in modern European history. A chancellor seized dictatorial power using a World War I emergency law. A…
- Second Spanish RepublicThe Spanish Republic, commonly known as the Second Spanish Republic, was proclaimed on the 14th of April 1931, and King Alfonso XIII left the country for exile. Eight years later, on the 1st of April 1939, it dissolved after surrendering…
- Italian EritreaItalian Eritrea was born not from a military conquest but from a business deal. In the autumn of 1869, a former missionary named Giuseppe Sapeto paid a small deposit to the Danakil chiefs at Assab Bay, securing their promise to hand over…
- Italian SomalilandItalian Somaliland existed for barely half a century, and it began to unravel with a single ambush few people remember. In November 1896, Consul Antonio Cecchi set off on what was meant to be a pleasure trip near Lafoole, a village near…
- Mandate for Syria and the LebanonThe Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon was born on the 29th of September 1923, when France was formally assigned control over a vast stretch of the eastern Mediterranean world. It covered the territories of present-day Syria, Lebanon, and…
- Italian East AfricaItalian East Africa announced itself to the world from the balcony of Palazzo Venezia on the 9th of May 1936, when Benito Mussolini addressed a crowd of two hundred thousand people and declared that Ethiopia was Italian. The territory he…
- Kingdom of Hungary (1920–1946)The Kingdom of Hungary, as it existed between 1920 and 1946, had no king. That was the paradox at the heart of this central European state. An admiral with no fleet ruled a landlocked country in the name of a monarchy with no monarch, and…
- Kingdom of ItalyOn the 17th of March 1861, Victor Emmanuel II of Sardinia was proclaimed King of Italy in Turin. This event marked the birth of a new state from decades of struggle known as the Risorgimento. The movement to unite the Italian peninsula…
- ManchukuoManchukuo lasted just thirteen years, from 1932 until its dissolution in 1945, yet it carried the grand title of empire and the trappings of a brand new civilization. A press release from the Japanese Information Service on the 1st of…
- Weimar RepublicThe Weimar Republic was born on the 9th of November 1918 from the ruins of a war that had killed more than 20 million people, among them over 2 million German soldiers. A republic was proclaimed that day at the Reichstag building in Berlin…
- Territory of the Saar BasinThe Territory of the Saar Basin flew its own flag from the 28th of July 1920, a horizontal tricolour of blue, white and black. Blue and white honored Bavaria; white and black honored Prussia, the two German lands the territory had been cut…
- Korea under Japanese ruleKorea under Japanese rule began on the 22nd of August 1910, when a treaty signed by Prime Minister Ye Wanyong and Japan's Minister of War, Terauchi Masatake, transferred the entirety of Korean sovereignty to the Emperor of Japan. Article 1…
- Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet RepublicThe Transcaucasian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic was born from a Soviet invasion, lasted barely fourteen years, and helped write the founding charter of the USSR itself. Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, three ancient nations…
- Ottoman EmpireThe Ottoman Empire began as a single beylik, a small principality founded around 1299 in northwestern Anatolia by a Turkoman tribal leader named Osman I. From that obscure frontier holding, his successors built a state that stretched…
- Free City of DanzigSee structured fields below.
- Second Polish RepublicThe Second Polish Republic lasted exactly twenty-one years, and it was taken on the eve of its own anniversary. On the 7th of October 1918, a new Polish state declared itself to the world after more than a century of being carved up among…
- Emirate of AfghanistanThe Emirate of Afghanistan was born on the 14th of March 1823, when Afghan forces lost the Valley of Peshawar to the Sikh Empire at the Battle of Nowshera. It was a humbling start for a state that had only just emerged from the ruins of…