C. 25 wor-def (War) Flashcards
Triple Alliance
The alliance of Austria, Germany, and Italy. Italy left the alliance when war broke out in 1914 on the grounds that Austria had launched a war of aggression.
Triple Entente
The alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia prior to and during the First World War.
Schlieffen Plan
Failed German plan calling for a lightning attack through neutral Belgium and a quick defeat of France before turning on Russia.
total war
A war in which distinctions between the soldiers on the battlefield and civilians at home are blurred, and where the government plans and controls economic and social life in order to supply the armies at the front with supplies and weapons.
trench warfare
A type of fighting used in World War I behind rows of trenches, mines, and barbed wire; the cost in lives was staggering and the gains in territory minimal.
February Revolution
Unplanned uprisings accompanied by violent street demonstrations begun in March 1917 (old calendar February) in Petrograd, Russia, that led to the abdication of the tsar and the establishment of a provisional government.
Petrograd Soviet
A huge, fluctuating mass meeting of two to three thousand workers, soldiers, and socialist intellectuals modeled on the revolutionary soviets of 1905.
Bolsheviks
Lenin’s radical, revolutionary arm of the Russian party of Marxist socialism, which successfully installed a dictatorial socialist regime in Russia.
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
Peace treaty signed in March 1918 between the Central Powers and Russia that ended Russian participation in World War I and ceded Russian territories containing a third of the Russian Empire’s population to the Central Powers.
War Communism
The application of centralized state control during the Russian civil war, in which the Bolsheviks seized grain from peasants, introduced rationing, nationalized all banks and industry, and required everyone to work.
Treaty of Versailles
The 1919 peace settlement that ended war between Germany and the Allied powers.
Fourteen Points
Wilson’s 1918 peace proposal calling for open diplomacy, a reduction in armaments, freedom of commerce and trade, the establishment of the League of Nations, and national self-determination.
League of Nations
A permanent international organization, established during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, designed to protect member states from aggression and avert future wars.
national self-determination
The notion that peoples should be able to choose their own national governments through democratic majority-rule elections and live free from outside interference in nation-states with clearly defined borders.
war guilt clause
An article in the Treaty of Versailles that declared that Germany (with Austria) was solely responsible for the war and had to pay reparations equal to all civilian damages caused by the fighting.
mandate system
The plan to allow Britain and France to administer former Ottoman territories, put into place after the end of the First World War.
Balfour Declaration
A 1917 British statement that declared British support of a National Home for the Jewish People in Palestine.
Kaiser William II (Hohenzollern)
the last German emperor and king of Prussia from 15 June 1888 until his abdication on 9 November 1918
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
the heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary. His assassination in Sarajevo was the most immediate cause of World War I.
Georges Jacques Clemenceau
was a French statesman who served as Prime Minister of France from 1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 until 1920, most notably successfully leading France through the end of the First World War.
Tsar/Czar Nicholas II (Romanov)
last Tsar of the Russian Empire who ruled between 1894 and 1917
Black Hand
Killed the archduke of Austria, being one of the greatest causes for WWI
Alfred von Schlieffen
a German field marshal and strategist who served as chief of the Imperial German General Staff from 1891 to 1906, created the Schlieffen Plan
Gregori Rasputin
a Russian mystic and self-proclaimed holy man. He is best-known for having befriended the royal family of Nicholas II, the last Emperor of Russia, through whom he gained considerable influence in the later years of the Russian Empire
Vladimir Lenin
a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924
Leon Trotsky
a Russian revolutionary, political theorist and Soviet politician. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Trotskyism
David Lloyd George
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1916 to 1922
Woodrow Wilson
American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 192
King Faisal
the first ever Saudi Arabian royal to visit England. His visit lasted for five months, and he met with British officials. During the same period, he also visited France, again being the first Saudi Arabian royal to pay an official visit there.
Central Powers
one of the two main coalitions that fought in World War I (1914–1918). It consisted of the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Bulgaria and was also known as the Quadruple Alliance.
Battle of the Marne
signaled the demise of Germany’s aggressive two-front war strategy, known as the Schlieffen Plan
The War Raw Materials Board
It was intended to help the U.S. prepare for World War I by increasing industrial production and coordinating the purchase of war materials by the Army and the Navy
Propaganda
information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view
The Lusitania
a British ocean liner that was launched by the Cunard Line in 1906 and held the Blue Riband appellation for the fastest Atlantic crossing in 1908. It was briefly the world’s largest passenger ship until the completion of the Mauretania three months later.
Armenian Genocide
the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress
