Spartacus Educational

Venetia Stanley, H. H. Asquith and the First World War

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on 28th June, 1914, did not immediately cause a reaction amongst members of the British government. David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, pointed out that the Cabinet, although it was meeting twice a day, because of the crisis in Ireland, they did not even discuss the issue of Serbia and the assassination for another three weeks.

H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, took little interest in the event as at the time he was obsessed with his latest mistress, Venetia Stanley. In a letter to Stanley on 30th June he mentioned the assassination without expressing fears about the international complications which might follow. Colonel Edward House, President Woodrow Wilson's special envoy, who was touring Europe at the time was dismayed to find Asquith was unworried by the prospect of war.

In September, 1997, Spartacus Educational founder and managing director John Simkin became the first educational publisher in Britain to establish a website that was willing to provide teachers and students with free educational materials.

According to a survey carried out by the Fischer Trust, Spartacus Educational is one of the top three websites used by history teachers and students in Britain (the other two are BBC History and the Public Record Office’s Learning Curve). The Spartacus Educational website currently gets up to 7 million page impressions a month and 3 million unique visitors.

As well as running the Spartacus Educational website John Simkin has also produced material for the Electronic Telegraph, the European Virtual School and the Guardian's educational website, Learn. He was also a member of the European History E-Learning Project (E-Help), a project to encourage and improve use of ICT and the internet in classrooms across the continent.

We have published six e-books, Charles Dickens: A Biography (October, 2012), First World War Encyclopedia (October, 2012), Assassination of John F. Kennedy Encyclopedia (November, 2012), Gandhi: A Biography (December, 2012), The Spanish Civil War (December, 2012) and The American Civil War (December, 2012). He also contributed an article to the recently published book, Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History (December, 2012).