A century ago this year, artillery fell silent across Europe. Communists dismantled an empire. The most devastating pandemic in six centuries swept the globe.

The events of 1918 still resonate today.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year, the gunfire of World War I ceased over borders wholly transformed. The bodies of the fallen littered Europe from the English Channel to the Adriatic Sea. Politically and socially, the ripple effects reached far beyond the trenches and chemical laboratories from which the war had been fought.

Russia, reeling from the previous year’s revolution, endured a vicious civil war, punctuated by the execution of Czar Nicholas II and his family in the dead of night. Finland fought its own civil war after breaking from the Russian Empire. Polish troops, fresh off their nation’s declaration of statehood, massacred Jews in three days of pogroms.