History And Crime: Stories Of Famous Figure Assassinations

This book consists of assassinations that changed the world. Political assassinations have often had an effect on how the world operates, mostly in unexpected forms for the killers and their cohorts. In 1914, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the successor to the Austrian throne, by nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip, sparked the First World War. Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson was free to intensify the Vietnam War. Although Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination did not derail the fight for African American civil rights in the United States, it did cause many to drop his commitment to nonviolence in favor of more extreme tactics.

More lone-wolf killers pursue their fifteen minutes of glory by assassinating a recognizable figure in a world globalized by social media, while world leaders have little to gain by decapitating extremist groups and obliterating their leaders using the new surveillance technologies.