Praxis II Citizenship

Answer: A - In 1914, Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria and heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in an attack organized by the Black Hand, setting in motion the chain of events that ignited World War I. The Black Hand was a Serbian nationalist group that hoped to unite all of the Serbian people under one rule (many of whom were under Austrian rule at the time). The triggerman, 19-year-old Gavrilo Princip, was a member of a youth splinter group called Young Bosnia, though his actions were coordinated by Black Hand. Ferdinand and his wife were shot as they rode through Sarajevo on a diplomatic visit. The world’s great military powers had been engaged in an arms race in the years leading up to the assassination, even without a war to fight. A web of rigid alliances pulled one heavily armed country after another into the conflict until World War I was under way a month after Franz Ferdinand’s death. While those are just a few of the factors that facilitated the war, the Black Hand’s assassination of Franz Ferdinand is considered the conflict’s origin because it led to the activation of the alliance networks.