Walk the line
The date that
keeps building cages
Three colours run through this timeline: amber for the war machine, crimson for the hinge of June 28, teal for the wild and its enclosure. Follow them from a Sarajevo street corner to a Yellowstone boardwalk.
Gavrilo Princip kills Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie. The hinge swings for the first time.
Ultimatums and alliances pull the great powers into war within six weeks. The total war state is switched on: conscription, censorship, rationing.
The armistice ends the fighting after some twenty million deaths — but not the war on paper.
The Treaty of Versailles is signed, five years to the day after the murder. Article 231 lays all blame on Germany.
Grievance bred at Versailles feeds the rise of the Nazi Party and a second, greater war — the unintended afterlife of a system built from grief.
Nine-year-old Andy Hecht dies in Crested Pool. There is no guardrail. The hinge swings again — on the same date, toward a gentler machine.
The Hecht family's campaign brings new funding, safety officers, warning signs and barriers. The duty of care follows the citizen into the wild.
112 years since the shot; 56 since the pool. Two machines still humming, both born on this date. What we trade for them →