In the sto­ry of World War II we all know, a hand­ful of mur­der­ous vil­lains and flawed yet capa­ble defend­ers of democ­ra­cy dri­ve the nar­ra­tive. The authors of a Kings Col­lege Lon­don project argue that this con­ven­tion­al his­to­ry shows “a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the cul­pa­bil­i­ty of states­men.…. Above all else, the debate about war in 1939 revolves around per­son­al­i­ties.” But there is anoth­er way to see the caus­es of war: through the esca­lat­ing arms race of the 1930s, despite the glob­al push for dis­ar­ma­ment fol­low­ing World War I’s dev­as­ta­tion.

The lead­ers of Ger­many, Italy and Japan want­ed war, yet their abil­i­ty to wage it, and the ways in which that war played out, came down to logis­ti­cal con­tests between war machines. “First in Berlin, then in Rome and final­ly in Tokyo,” writes his­to­ri­an Joseph Maio­lo, “the ebb and flow of arms com­pe­ti­tion com­pelled lead­ers to make now-or-nev­er deci­sions about war.” Such deci­sions pro­duced a wealth of unin­tend­ed con­se­quences, and led to cat­a­stroph­ic loss­es of life. Air, sea, and land pow­er cre­at­ed at an unheard-of indus­tri­al scale turned war into an assem­bly line-like process that “would see humans as no more than pieces of a larg­er mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al machine,” as the­o­rist of war Manuel De Lan­da writes.

Thus, we see the enor­mi­ty of the casu­al­ties of WWII. Mil­lions of sol­diers were fed to the front lines in “the need to pre­pare for future total wars that would demand sweep­ing mobi­liza­tion,” writes Maio­lo. Wars for glob­al suprema­cy demand­ed all of the state’s cap­i­tal, espe­cial­ly its human resources. The ani­mat­ed map above tells that sto­ry in raw num­bers: “WWII Every Day with Army Sizes.” Begin­ning with Ger­many’s dec­la­ra­tion of war on Poland on Sep­tem­ber 1st, 1939, the map cov­ers the entire­ty of the war, show­ing num­bers — some­times in the tens of mil­lions — fluc­tu­at­ing wild­ly along the front lines of every the­ater.

1939 may be the only log­i­cal start­ing point for this pre­sen­ta­tion. Yet when it comes to under­stand­ing why World War II claimed more lives than any oth­er war in his­to­ry, the expla­na­tion must begin sev­er­al years ear­li­er with arms deal­ers and gen­er­als seek­ing big­ger and big­ger bud­gets for more sophis­ti­cat­ed weapon­ry. As tech­ni­cal prob­lems increased so too did the human costs, until the strug­gle for glob­al suprema­cy dur­ing WWII became a pro­lif­er­at­ing race toward mutu­al­ly assured destruc­tion after the war’s end.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch World War II Rage Across Europe in a 7 Minute Time-Lapse Film: Every Day From 1939 to 1945

The Stag­ger­ing Human Cost of World War II Visu­al­ized in a Cre­ative, New Ani­mat­ed Doc­u­men­tary

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The adjec­tive medieval tends to con­jure up vivid and some­times off-putting images, not least when applied to sex. But how many of us have any sense at all of what the real peo­ple of the Mid­dle Ages got up to in bed? To get one, we could do worse than ask­ing his­to­ri­an Eleanor Jane­ga, teacher of the course Medieval Gen­der and Sex­u­al­i­ty and host of the His­to­ry Hit video above, “What Was Sex Real­ly Like For Medieval Peo­ple?” In it, Jane­ga has first to make clear that, yes, medieval Euro­peans had sex; if they had­n’t, of course, many of us would­n’t be here today. But we’d be for­giv­en for assum­ing that the seem­ing­ly absolute dom­i­nance of the Church quashed any and all of their erot­ic oppor­tu­ni­ties.

Accord­ing to the medieval Church, Jane­ga says, “the only time sex is accept­able is between two mar­ried peo­ple for pro­cre­ative pur­pos­es.” Its many oth­er restric­tions includ­ed “no sex on Sat­ur­days and Sun­days in case you’re too turned on dur­ing mass; only have sex in the mis­sion­ary posi­tion, because any­thing else sub­verts the nat­ur­al rela­tion­ship between men and women; don’t get ful­ly naked dur­ing sex, because it’s just too excit­ing; in short, dur­ing sex, you should be try­ing to have the least amount of fun pos­si­ble.” Strict and unam­bigu­ous though these rules were, “nobody real­ly lis­tened to them” — and what’s more, giv­en the lack of pri­vate spaces, “sex was almost a pub­lic affair in the Mid­dle Ages.”

So says Kate Lis­ter, who research­es the his­to­ry of sex­u­al­i­ty, and who turns up to bring her own knowl­edge of the sub­ject to the par­ty. “We tend to think about medieval peo­ple as being real prudes,” says Jane­ga, but even scant his­tor­i­cal records — and rather more copi­ous erot­ic man­u­script mar­gin­a­lia — show that “they were inter­est­ed in all kinds of sex and romance that we would find com­plete­ly unac­cept­able.” Lis­ter adds that, “in many ways, we’re not open like the medieval peo­ple were. We don’t have pub­lic com­mu­nal bathing. We don’t have sex in the same room as oth­er peo­ple. We don’t go to a high-brow din­ner par­ty and tell pubic-hair jokes.” Or we don’t, at least, if we haven’t devot­ed our careers to the sex­u­al­i­ty of the Mid­dle Ages, a field of his­to­ry clear­ly unfit for prudes.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Ear­li­est Known Appear­ance of the F‑Word, in a Bizarre Court Record Entry from 1310

Peo­ple in the Mid­dle Ages Slept Not Once But Twice Each Night: How This Lost Prac­tice Was Redis­cov­ered

What Did Peo­ple Eat in Medieval Times? A Video Series and New Cook­book Explain

Why Butt Trum­pets & Oth­er Bizarre Images Appeared in Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts

Medieval Monks Com­plained About Con­stant Dis­trac­tions: Learn How They Worked to Over­come Them

The Turin Erot­ic Papyrus: The Old­est Known Depic­tion of Human Sex­u­al­i­ty (Cir­ca 1150 B.C.E.)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Paris counts among the most beloved cities on Earth, a sta­tus that owes in part to the rel­a­tive lack of dam­age tak­en in dur­ing both World Wars. The desire to pro­tect and pre­serve Paris thus runs high today, but then, it also did a cen­tu­ry ago. The prospect of the city’s oblit­er­a­tion dur­ing what was then called the Great War inspired an espe­cial­ly ambi­tious defen­sive scheme. “At the begin­ning of 1917, a wild idea was float­ed,” writes the Dai­ly Beast­’s Alli­son McN­ear­ney. “Why not build a repli­ca of Paris just out­side of the city and fool Ger­man bombers into drop­ping their destruc­tive loads where only the decoys made of wood and fab­ric could be harmed.”

This Paris leurre (decoy) is the sub­ject of the 35-minute British Pathé doc­u­men­tary above, Illu­sion: The City That Nev­er Was. Its detailed plan “called for the con­struc­tion of three sep­a­rate ‘sham’ neigh­bor­hoods just out­side of the city”: a large train sta­tion mod­eled after Gare du Nord, a repli­ca city cen­ter with its own Champs-Élysées, and a “faux indus­tri­al zone with fac­to­ries and oth­er indi­ca­tions of wartime pro­duc­tion.”

Built most­ly out of wood and fab­ric, these remote unin­hab­it­ed quar­ters were to be equipped with ele­ments like work­ing street light­ing — designed by Fer­nand Jacopozzi, lat­er famed for his illu­mi­na­tion of the Eif­fel Tow­er — and a mov­ing train.

As it turned out, the train was one of the few ele­ments of this elab­o­rate fake City of Light actu­al­ly con­struct­ed. “In 1918, before the project could be com­plet­ed, the war came to an end and the gov­ern­ment quick­ly moved to dis­man­tle their secret project and sup­press all infor­ma­tion con­cern­ing its exis­tence,” writes McN­ear­ney. Only in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry has this World War I‑era push to build a fake Paris come to light. Though nev­er com­plet­ed, its sheer ambi­tion speaks to France’s own con­cep­tion of its cap­i­tal as a store of price­less cul­tur­al and his­tor­i­cal her­itage. In a sense, Paris is civ­i­liza­tion, or at least French civ­i­liza­tion. One must ask: would human­i­ty go to the same lengths to pro­tect it today?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Albert Camus, Edi­tor of the French Resis­tance News­pa­per Com­bat, Writes Mov­ing­ly About Life, Pol­i­tics & War (1944–47)

Col­or Footage of the Lib­er­a­tion of Paris, Shot by Hol­ly­wood Direc­tor George Stevens (1944)

How France Hid the Mona Lisa & Oth­er Lou­vre Mas­ter­pieces Dur­ing World War II

Jean-Luc Godard’s Breath­less: How World War II Changed Cin­e­ma & Helped Cre­ate the French New Wave

See Berlin Before and After World War II in Star­tling Col­or Video

Time Trav­el Back to Tokyo After World War II, and See the City in Remark­ably High-Qual­i­ty 1940s Video

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.