Status Updates From The Assassination of the Ar...

"Delivered to the Austrian Embassy in Belgrade shortly before the 6:00 PM deadline on July 25, the Serbian reply was a masterpiece of equivocations. History has usually portrayed it as a near-capitulation, asserting that Serbia agreed to all but two points. In fact, as Fromkin points out, 'historians no longer believe that.'"

"The trio shared remarkably similar backgrounds and ideas. Born Bosnian Serbs, they had all unwillingly become Austrian citizens after the 1908 annexation. All were nineteen; though born Orthodox, none practiced their faith — indeed, Principe was an avowed atheist. They were not members of Dimitrijević's organization but rather identified themselves as part of Mlada Bosna [...] an offshoot of the Black Hand..."

"Potoriek pointedly neglected to mention the significance of this particular date, though he certainly knew what it would mean in the disaffected population in Sarajevo. June 28 was St. Vitus's Day, or Vidovdan, the Serb national holiday marking the 1389 battle of Kosovo, when the Turkish army had reduced Serbia to vassals of the Ottoman Empire."

"....One Croat tried to kill Archduke Leopold Salvator during a spring 1914 visit to Zagreb; another student armed with a revolver was arrested boarding a train to Vienna. His target was Franz Ferdinand, 'the enemy of all South Slavs,' he said, 'and I wished to eliminate this garbage which is hampering our national aspirations."

"Franz Ferdinand had reason to avoid Bosnian crowds. In 1910, a student named Bogdan Žerajić had tried to kill the Austrian governor general of Bosnia and Herzegovina. [...] Two years later, an assassin with ties to the Black Hand in Serbia killed the Croatian secretary of education, and in August 1913 the governor general of Croatia was shot and wounded as he left a church..."