Downton Abbey Season 1: Recap & History | 1912 - 1914

A recap of Season One of Downton Abbey and all the real historical events the Crawleys and their staff somehow wound up involved in.
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Join brothers Brandon and Nevin on their crazy trip through time as they dive into some of the weirdest (but true!) and most interesting bits of world history. Laughing Historically is a fun educational web show that’s teacher/classroom friendly and great for kids of all ages!
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TRANSCRIPT:
Assassination, Seduction, and fox hunts, here's what happened in real life and the first season of Downton Abbey.
Pharaoh the dog and his family, Lord Robert Crawley Earl of Grantham, his wife Cora, and their three daughters (but no son) live at Downton Abbey, a fictional North Yorkshire estate somewhere in the Downton Bermuda Triangle of Ripon, Easingwold, and Thirsk.
The show opens at the end of the Edwardian era in April 1912, Europe is going through a time of transition and turmoil and the old system of estates and servants is starting to feel their time is numbered. 24 years prior, Lord Grantham, fearing that the Abbey, like many European fortunes at the time, would go broke, married rich American Cora, who was drawn by the allure of a title and the two soon fall in actual love. This was pretty common, rich american women, or Dollar Princesses as they were sometimes called, took their fortunes to often struggling European aristocrats.
Like Jennie Jerome, daughter of an American Wallstreet tycoon, who moved across the atlantic to marry Lord Randolph Churchill, eight months later they would have their first son, Winston… future prime minster.
News arrives that Robert’s cousins and heir to the estate have died in the sinking of the RMS Titanic - which also claimed the lives of more than 1,500 passengers including John Astor of the Waldorf Astoria, Isidor Straus, owner of Macy’s, and Jack Dawson.
As an overhaul of British property law would not be passed until 1926, the title of heir of the Earldom and all the colorful characters who work downstairs falls not to oldest daughter, Mary but to distant Cousin Matthew.
Meanwhile, the First Balkan War, in which the Serbians, Greece, Montenegro, and Bulgaria fought the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire was well under way at this point. The London Peace Conference is held in September 1912. A turkish diplomat in the country to attend the conference, Kemal Pemauk (who did not exist), visits the Abbey and dies of a heart attack while in bed with Lady Mary. Fearing the consequences for England and Lady Mary’s love life, the family covers up where the death occurred, and two seasons worth of drama begin.
Matthew ends up proposing to daughter Mary - she says she’ll consider it.
Daughter Sybil falls in love with the new irish republican chauffeur Tom Branson, and gets mixed up in politics, such as the rising women’s suffrage movement, which was becoming more vocal and active than ever in 1912 and 13 in their pleas for voting rights for women.
Also, daughter Edith has bad luck with men.
Thanks partly to the instability in the Balkans caused by the Balkan Wars, the archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria is assassinated by Serbia in 1914.
Upon the news, Mary decides she wants to marry Matthew, who now questions her motives.
Just as a new device starting to gain adoption called a Telephone is installed, Lord Grantham receives a telegram that the United Kingdom is at war with Germany and World War I has started… but of course they don’t know its called World War I yet.
Also Bates fell down, Anna loves Bates, but Bates is married,
O'Brien basically murders Cora's unborn child, also Pharaoh dies and is replaced by Isis but no one seems to notice!