Final Flashcards
League of Nations
International organization founded after the First World War to solve international disputes through arbitration; it was dissolved in 1946 and it assets were transferred to the United States. (Glossary)
World War II
Worldwide war that began in September 1939 in Europe, and even earlier in Aisa (the Japanese invasion of Manchuria began in 1931), putting Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union (the Allies) against Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan (the Axis). The war ended in 1945 with Germany and Japan’s defeat. (Glossary)
NATO
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a 1949 military agreement between the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and eight Western European nations, which declared that an armed attack against any on e of the members would be regarded as an attack against all. Created during the Cold War in the face of the Soviet Union’s control of Eastern Europe, NATO continues to exist today and the membership of twenty-eight states includes former members of the Warsaw Pact as well as Albania and Turkey. (Glossary)
Warsaw Pact
(1955-1991) Military alliance between the USSR and other communist states that was established as a response to the creation of the NATO alliance. (Glossary)
First World War
A total war from August 1914 to November 1918, involving the armies of Britain, France, and Russia (the Allies) against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire (the Central Powers). Italy joined the Allies in 1915, and the United States joined them in 1917, helping to tip the balance in favor of the Allies, who also drew upon the populations and raw materials of their colonial possessions. Also known as the Great War. (Glossary)
Joseph Stalin
(1879-1953) The Bolshevik leader who succeeded Lenin as the leader of the Soviet Union and ruled until his death in 1953. (Glossary)
Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points
President Woodrow Wilson proposed these points are the foundation on which to build peace in the world after the First World War. They called for an end to secret treaties, “open covenants, openly arrived at”, freedom of the seas, the removal of international tariffs, the reduction of arms, the “self-determination of peoples”, and the establishment of a league of nations to settle international conflicts. (Glossary)
Benito Mussolini
(1883-1945) The Italian founder of the Fascist party who came to power in Italy in 1922 and allied himself with Hitler and the Nazis during the Second World War. (Glossary)
Adolf Hitler
(1889-1945) The author of Mein Kampf and leader of the Nazis who became chancellor of Germany in 1933. Hitler and his Nazi regime started the Second World War and orchestrated the systematic murders of over five million Jews. (Glossary)
Stalingrad
(1942-1943) The turning point on the Eastern Front during the Second World War came when the German army tried to take the city of Stalingrad in an effort to break the back of Soviet industry. The Germany and Soviet armies fought a bitter battle, in which more than half a million Germany, Italian, and Romanian soldiers were killed and the Soviets suffered over a million casualties. The German army surrendered after over five months of fighting. After Stalingrad, the Soviet army launched a series of attacks that pushed the Germans back. (Glossary).
Anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism refers to hostility toward Jewish people. Religious forms of anti-Semitism have a long history in Europe, but in the nineteenth century anti-semitism emerged as a potent ideology for mobilizing new constituencies in the era of mass politics. Playing on popular conspiracy theories about alleged Jewish influence in society, Anti-Semites effectively rallied large boides of supporters in France during the rise of National Socialism in Germany after the First World War. The Holocaust would not have been possible without the acquiescence or cooperation of many thousands of people who shared anti-Semitic views. (Glossary)
Trench Warfare
Weapons such as barbed wire and the machine gun gave tremendous advantage to defensive positions in World War I, leading to prolonged battles between entrenched armies in fixed positions.The trenches eventually consisted of twenty five thousand miles of holes and ditches that stretched across the Western Front in northern France, from the Atlantic cost to the Swiss border during the First World War, on the eastern front, the large express of territories made trench warfare less significant. (Glossary)
Yalta Accords
Meeting between Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Premier Joseph Stalin that occurred in the Crimea in 1945 shortly before the end of the Second World War to plan for the postwar order. (Glossary).
Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi
(1869-1948) The Indian leader who advocated nonviolent noncooperation to protest colonial rule and helped win home rule for India in 1947. (Glossary).
Berlin Wall
The wall built in 1961 by East German Communists to prevent citizens of East Germany from fleeting to West Germany; it was torn down in 1989. (Glossary)
Cuban Missile Crisis
(1962) Diplomatic standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union that was provoked by the Soviet Union’s attempt to base nuclear missiles in Cuba; it brought the world closer to nuclear war than ever before or since. (Glossary).
Schlieffen Plan
Devised by German general Alfred von Schlieffen in 1905 to avoid the dilemma of a two-front war against France and Russia. The Schlieffen plan required that Germany attack France first through Belgium and secure a quick victoria before wheeling to the east to meet the slower armies of the Russians on the Eastern Front. The Schlieffen Plan was put into operation on August 2, 1914, at the outset of the First World War. (Glossary)
Marxists
Followers of the socialist political economist Karl Marx who called for workers everywhere to united and create an independent political force. Marxist believed that industrialization produced an inevitable struggle between laborers and the class of capitalist property owners, and that this struggle would culminate in a revolution that would abolish private property and establish a society committed to social equality. (Glossary).
Modernism
There were several different modernist movements in art and literature, but they shared three key characteristics. First, they had a sense that the world had radically changed and that this change should be embraced. Second, they believed that traditional aesthetic values and assumptions about creativity were ill-suited to the present. Third, they developed a new conception of what art could do that emphasized expression over representation and insisted on the value of novelty, experimentation, and creative freedom. (Glossary).
Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939) The Austrian physician who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis and suggested that human behavior was largely motivated by unconscious and irrational forces. (Glossary).
Bolsheviks
Former members of the Russian Social Democratic Party who advocated the destruction of capitalist political and economic institutions and started the Russian Revolution. In 1918 the Bolsheviks change their name to the Russian Communist Party. Prominent Bolsheviks included Vladimir Lenin. (Glossary).
Auschwitz-Birkenau
The Nazi concentration camp in Poland between 1942 and 1944 over one million people were killed in Auschwitz-Birkeneau. (Glossary)
Fascism
The doctrine founded by Benito Mussolini, which emphasized three main ideas: Statism (“nothing above the state, northing outside the state, nothing against the state”) nationalism, and militarism. It’s name derives from the latin faces, a symbol of Roman imperial power adopted by Mussolini. (Glossary).
New Economic Policy (NEP)
In 1921, The Bolsheviks abandoned war communism in favor of the New Economic Party (NEP). Under NEP, the state still controlled all major industry and financial concerns, while individuals could own private property, trade freely within limits, and farm their own land for their own benefit. Fixed taxes replaced gain requisition. The policy successfully helped Soviet agriculture recover from the civil war, but was later abandoned in favor of collectivization. (Glossary).
Blitzkrieg
The German “lightening war” strategy used during the Second World War; the Germans invaded Poland, France, Russia, and other countries with fast-moving and well-coordinated attacks using aircraft, tanks and other armored vehicles, followed by infantry. (Glossary).
Vladimir Lenin
(1870-1924 Leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917) and the first leader of the Soviet Union. (Glossary).
Treaty of Versailles
signed on June 28, 1919, this peace settlement ended the First World War and required Germany to surrender a large part of its most valuable territories and to pay huge reparations to the Allies. (Glossary).
Hitler-Stalin Pact
(1939) Treaty between Stalin and Hitler, which promised Stalin a share of Poland, Finland, and Baltic States, and Bessarabia in the event of a Germany invasion of Poland, which began shortly thereafter, on September 1, 1939. (Glossary).
Americanization
The fear o many Europeans, since the 1920’s, that U.S. cultural products, such as film, television, and music, exerted too much influence. Many of the criticisms centered on America’s emphasis on mass production and organization. The fears about Americanization were not limited to culture. They extended to corporations, business techniques, global trade, and marketing. (Glossary).
Lusitania
The British passenger liner that was sunk by a German U-boat (submarine) on May 7, 1915. Public outrage over the sinking contributed to the U.S. decision to enter the First World War. (Glossary).
Civilizing Mission
An argument made by Europeans to justify colonial expansion in the nineteenth century. Supporters of the idea believed that Europeans had a duty to impose western ideas of economic and political progress on the indigenous peoples they ruled over in their colonies. In practice, the colonial powers often found that ambitious plans to impose European practices on colonial subjects led to unrest that threatened the stability of colonial rule, and by the early 20th century most colonial powers were more cautious in their plans for political or cultural transformation. (Glossary).
Berlin Conference
(1884) At this conference, the leading colonial powers met and established ground rules for the partition of Africa by European nations. By 1914, 90 percent of African territory was under European control. The Berlin Conference ceded control of the Congo region t o a private company run by King Leopold II of Belgium. They agreed to make the Congo valleys open to free trade and commerce, to end the slave trade in the region, and to establish a Congo Free State. In reality, King Leopold II’s company established a regime that was so brutal in its treatment of local populations that an international scandal forced the Belgian state to take over the colony in 1908. (Glossary).
Boxer Rebellion
(1899-1900) Chinese peasant movement that opposed foreign influence, especially that of Christian missionaries; it was finally put down after the Boxers were defeated by a foreign army composed of mostly Japanese, Russian, British, French, and American soldiers. (Glossary).
Italian invasion of Ethiopia
(1896) Italy invaded Ethiopia, which was the last major independent African Kingdom. Menelik II, the Ethiopian emperor, soundly defeated him. (Glossary).
Russo-Japanese War
(1904-1905) Japanese and Russian expansion collided in Mongolia and Manchuria. Russia was humiliated after the Japanese navy sunk its fleet, which helped provoke a revolt in Russia and led to an American-brokered peace treaty.
Boer War
(1898-1902) Conflict between British and ethnically European Afrikaners in South Africa, with terrible casualties on both sides. (Glossary).
Fashoda Incident
(1898) Disagreements between the French and the British over land claims in North Africa led to a standoff between armies of the two nations at the Sudanese town of Fashoda. The crisis was solved diplomatically. France ceded southern Sudan to Britain in exchange for a stop to further expansion by the British. (Glossary).
Spanish-American War
(1898) War between the United States and Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It ended with a treaty in which the United States took over the Philippines, Gaum, Puerto Rico; Cuba won partial independence. (Glossary).
Atomic Bomb
In 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagaski in Japan, ending the Second World War. In 1949, the Soviet Union test their first atomic bomb, and in 1953 both superpowers demonstrated their new hydrogen bombs. Strategically, the nuclearization of welfare polarized the world. Countries without nuclear weapons found it difficult to avoid joining either the Soviet or American military pacts. Over time countries split into two groups: the superpowers with enormous military budgets and those countries taht relied on agreements and international law. The nuclearization of welfare also encourage “proxy wars” between clients of superpowers. Culturally, the hydrogen bomb came to symbolize the age and both humanity’s power and vulnerability. (Glossary).
Apartheid
The racial segregation policy of the Afrikaner-dominated South African government. Legislated in 1948 by the Afrikaner National Party, it existed in South Africa for many years. (Glossary).
