The Great War: American Front grim official holiday marking the 1882 surrender and keeping alive the dream of revenge for the two humiliations inflicted by the South. The novel's main plot begins on June 28, 1914, the same day Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg of Austria-Hungary, are assassinated in Sarajevo by Nedeljko Čabrinović with a bomb thrown into their car and explodes (as opposed to Gavrilo Princip with a gun in our timeline), with the incident drawing the European powers into a whirlwind of war. At the eruption of an alternate World War I known as the Great War, the
Archduke Ferdinand Karl Viktor of Austria-Este Archduke Ferdinand Karl Viktor of Austria-Este Ferdinand Karl Viktor (20 July 1821 – 15 December 1849) was Archduke of Austria-Este and Prince of Modena. Born in Modena, he was the second son of Francis IV of Modena and his niece-consort Maria Beatrice of Savoy. His paternal grandmother had been heiress to the Duchy of Modena, because her father Ercole III d'Este had no sons. Ferdinand married Archduchess Elisabeth Franziska of Austria, daughter of Archduke Josef Anton of Austria and his third wife Duchess Maria Dorothea of Württemberg on 4 December 1846 in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna. Elisabeth and Ferdinand