European History

Spark Notes

AP Central

World War 1

WW1

Great War

Interwar

World War 2

WW2

Avalon- ww2

CHAPTER 30
Cold War Conflicts and Social Transformations, 1945–1985

CHAPTER OUTLINE
I.    The Division of Europe
A.    The Origins of the Cold War
1.    At conferences in Teheran in late 1943 and Yalta in early 1945, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt agreed to divide Germany along a north-south line, leaving Soviet troops to liberate eastern Europe.
2.    According to the Yalta agreements, eastern European governments were to be freely elected but pro-Russian.
3.    At Potsdam, new U.S. President Harry Truman insisted on immediate free elections in Eastern Europe; Stalin refused. This was the origin of the Cold War.
B.    West Versus East
1.    In May 1945, Truman cut off aid to the U.S.S.R.
2.    In October, he declared that the U.S. would not recognize governments established by force against the will of their people.
3.    In the meantime, Soviet agents used French and Italian Communist parties to agitate against “American plots” to take over Europe.
4.    The U.S.S.R. also put pressure on Iran, Turkey, and Greece. Along with the Chinese Civil War, this convinced Americans that Stalin was bent on exporting communism by subversion throughout the world.
5.    U.S. response was the “Truman Doctrine,” aimed at containing communism. President Truman asked Congress for and obtained military aid to Greece and Turkey.
6.    Stalin’s blockade failed to force West Berlin into submission as the U.S. and Britain airlifted supplies into the city.
7.    In 1949, the U.S. led the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; eventually, the U.S.S.R. organized its eastern European satellites into the Warsaw Pact.
8.    Communist victory in the Chinese civil war followed by the Korean War only deepened Americans’ fear of a communist conspiracy to dominate the globe.
II.    The Western Renaissance, 1945−1968
A.    The Postwar Challenge
1.    In politics, Catholic “Christian Democratic” parties dedicated to democratic ideals dominated Italy and West Germany in the postwar generation. Both socialists and Christian Democrats maintained or expanded European welfare states.
2.    U.S. military protection and American Marshall Plan financial aid also helped Western Europe to recover from the war.
3.    France combined flexible government planning with a “mixed” economy of public and private ownership to achieve high growth rates.
4.    Western European nations abandoned protectionism to create a large “Common Market” that certainly stimulated economic growth.
B.    Toward European Unity
1.    Europe made progress toward economic unity (the “Common Market” was created in 1957) but not political unity.
C.    Decolonization in East Asia
1.    The most basic cause of imperial collapse was the rising demand of Asian and African peoples for national self-determination, racial equality, and personal dignity.
2.    The power difference between rulers and ruled in European colonies greatly declined after 1945.
3.    Opponents of imperialism gained influence in postwar Europe.
4.    India played a pivotal role in decolonization.
5.    India’s nationalism drew on Western parliamentary liberalism.
6.    Chinese nationalism developed in the framework of Marxist-Leninist ideology.
7.    Most Asian countries followed the pattern of either India or China.
D.    Decolonization in the Middle East and Africa
1.    In the Middle East, the movement toward political independence continued after World War II.
2.    The establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine led to decades of conflict between Israelis and the Arab states and between Israelis and Palestinians.
3.    Gamal Abdel Nasser led a nationalist revolution in Egypt.
4.    Nasser’s success inspired nationalists in Algeria.
5.    In much of Africa south of the Sahara, decolonization proceeded much more smoothly.
6.    European countries increased their economic and cultural ties with former African colonies in the 1960s and 1970s.
E.    America’s Civil Rights Revolution
1.    In the 1950s and 1960s, blacks and their liberal allies in the Democratic party challenged and reversed discriminatory laws and practices that had made African Americans second-class citizens.
2.    After Lyndon Johnson’s landslide victory in the 1964 presidential election, Congress and the administration set up a social welfare system and antipoverty program similar to the social programs of European states.
III.    Soviet Eastern Europe, 1945−1968
A.    Stalin’s Last Years, 1945−1953
1.    Following 1945, Stalin returned the U.S.S.R. to a rigid dictatorship, focusing investment on heavy industry, reestablishing tight control of culture, and purging millions of subjects.
2.    Stalin exported his system, including forced-draft industrialization and collectivization, to the countries of Eastern Europe. Among East European communist leaders, only Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia maintained independence from Stalin.

B.    Reform and De-Stalinization, 1953−1964
1.    Stalin’s successor as party leader, Nikita Khrushchev, launched a program of “liberalization” or “de-Stalinization.”
a)    He denounced Stalin’s Great Purges to the Twentieth Party Congress.
b)    He shifted investment somewhat from heavy industry to consumer goods and agriculture.
c)    De-Stalinization created a literary ferment as authors such as Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote about the terror and concentration camps of the Stalin years.
d)    Khrushchev declared that “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist West was possible. He let occupied Austria become truly independent in 1955.
e)    Khrushchev’s reforms stimulated rebellion in the East European satellites.
f)    In 1956 riots in Poland led to formation of a new government, which won more autonomy from the U.S.S.R.
g)    In Hungary, a reformist government fell to Soviet invasion after promising free elections and leaving the Warsaw Pact (1956).
C.    The End of Reform
1.    In 1964, party leaders deposed Khrushchev and replaced him with Leonid Brezhnev. Khrushchev’s liberal policies were a threat to the party’s monopoly on political power.
2.    One reason Khrushchev fell was apparent Soviet humiliation in the Cuban missile crisis, when an American naval blockade of Cuba forced Khrushchev to remove Soviet missiles from the island.
3.    Brezhnev’s “neo-Stalinist” direction was confirmed in 1968, when the Soviet Union intervened militarily in Czechoslovakia to stop Communist party leader Alexander Dubcek’s reforms.
D.    The Soviet Union to 1985
1.    Re-Stalinization of the U.S.S.R., but now dictatorship was collective rather than personal and coercion replaced terror.
2.    There was apparent stability in the Soviet Union due to a slowly rising standard of living and enduring nationalism.
3.    The strength of the government was expressed in the re-Stalinization of culture and art. Dissidents were blacklisted, quietly imprisoned, and in the case of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, permanently expelled from the country.
4.    During this time, the Soviet Union was experiencing profound changes:
a)    The growth of the urban population
b)    The number of highly trained scientists, managers, and specialists increased fourfold between 1960 and 1985
c)    Education and freedom for experts in their special areas helped foster the gradual growth of Soviet public opinion.
IV.    Postwar Social Transformations, 1945−1968
A.    Science and Technology
1.    During World War II, scientists in the major combatant powers generally worked for the state to create or improve weapons.
2.    The development of the atomic bomb by the U.S. was the most dramatic result of this development.
3.    World War II inspired a new model for science, combining theoretical work with sophisticated engineering and massive government support. This model became known to some as “Big Science.”
4.    After 1945, about one-quarter of all men and women trained in science or engineering in the West worked full-time to produce weapons.
5.    One result was the space race between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S., culminating in the U.S. landing men on the moon in 1969.
6.    The number of scientists in Western societies escalated rapidly after 1945. They were highly specialized and had to work in large, bureaucratic organizations.
B.    The Changing Class Structure
1.    After World War II, a new middle class of managers and experts working for huge organizations replaced the traditional middle class of small property owners, professionals, and independent businessmen.
2.    Members of this new middle class often came from working-class backgrounds.
3.    The new middle class was based on specialized skills and high levels of education, and was more insecure, open, and democratic than the old one.
4.    There was a mass exodus from farms to the cities in Europe. White-collar and service industry jobs increased in number.
5.    More social security benefits, such as national health care systems, established a humane floor of well-being.
6.    Government-sponsored pension programs made people more willing to go into debt and purchase newly available and cheap consumer products⎯cars, televisions, and so on⎯and to travel.
C.    New Roles for Women
1.    From the late nineteenth century onward improved diet, higher incomes, the use of contraception, and urbanization caused birthrates to drop.
2.    Consequently, married women’s whole lives were no longer occupied with child raising.
3.    Three factors helped women get into the workforce in the West after World War II.
a)    The postwar economic boom.
b)    The shift to white-collar and service industries, in which women had already been employed for generations.
c)    Young women gained access to the expanding postwar education system.
4.    The trend toward employment of women went furthest in communist Eastern Europe.
5.    For many women, entering the workforce meant an exhausting “double day” of work and domestic duties.
6.    As women came to expect to work for most of their lives, they were less willing to accept lower pay, sexism, and discrimination in the workplace.
D.    Youth and the Counterculture
1.    Economic prosperity, a more democratic class structure, and the postwar “baby boom” helped create a distinctive youth culture.
2.    By the late 1950s in certain U.S. urban neighborhoods, the young fashioned a subculture that combined leftist politics, experimentation with drugs and communal living, and new artistic styles.
3.    Greater sexual freedom was part of the new youth culture, as many couples chose to live together without marrying.
4.    Several factors contributed to the emergence of international youth culture in the 1960s.
a)    Mass communications and youth travel
b)    Postwar baby boom
c)    Prosperity and greater equality meant that youth had more purchasing power.
d)    Prosperity also meant that young job seekers were in demand and could behave with relative freedom.
5.    Youth culture and counterculture fused in the late 1960s in opposition to middle-class conformity and the perceived excesses of Western imperialism⎯particularly to the Vietnam War.
6.    Expanding university populations in Europe and the U.S., together with attendant stresses, helped catalyze the student rebellions of 1968 in France and elsewhere.
V.    Conflict and Challenge in the Late Cold War, 1968−1985
A.    The United States and Vietnam
1.    After French withdrawal, the United States became heavily involved in Vietnam due to the policy of containment of communism.
2.    President Lyndon Johnson greatly expanded American involvement.
3.    American strategy was to escalate the war through bombing of North Vietnam, insertion of U.S. troops in the South, and military aid to the South. The U.S. did not want to escalate so much as to provoke Soviet or Chinese intervention, however, and so never invaded or blockaded the North.
4.    Criticism of the war grew rapidly in the United States, beginning on college campuses.
5.    After the communist Tet Offensive against South Vietnamese cities, Johnson called for negotiations with the North and withdrew from the presidential election.
6.    Johnson’s successor, Richard Nixon, gradually pulled out of Vietnam. In 1972, he reached a rapprochement with communist China, and in 1973 he signed a peace agreement with the North Vietnamese.
7.    In the Watergate scandal, Nixon was eventually fingered for ordering an illegal break-in to Democratic party headquarters in Washington, D.C. In 1974, he resigned the presidency.
B.    Détente or Cold War?
1.    Détente began with West German chancellor Willy Brandt’s policy of improving relations with East Germany and Eastern Europe in general (beginning in December 1970).
2.    Détente peaked when the U.S., Canada, and most European nations signed the Helsinki Accords, accepting existing political frontiers and guaranteeing human rights and political freedoms.
3.    The Brezhnev regime in the Soviet Union ignored the Helsinki Accords in practice, and in 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ended détente.
4.    The U.S. responded with a massive military buildup, begun by President Jimmy Carter and continued by the more conservative Ronald Reagan.
C.    The Women’s Movement
1.    In the 1970s, a broad-based feminist movement that aimed at securing gender equality through political action emerged in Europe and the U.S.
2.    One work that influenced the movement strongly was Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949).
3.    Betty Friedan founded the National Organization of Women in the United States in 1966 to press for women’s rights.
4.    The new women’s movements aimed to change laws regarding women. They pressed for equal pay for equal work, affordable day care, the right to divorce (in Catholic countries), legalized abortion, and protection from rape and physical abuse.
5.    The achievements of the women’s movements encouraged mobilization by other groups that were frequent targets of discrimination and harassment, including the disabled, and gay and lesbian men and women.
D.    The Troubled Economy
1.    From the early 1970s through the middle 1980s, Western economies stagnated. Causes were multiple.
a)    In heavy foreign debt, the United States went off the gold standard in 1971.
b)    The oil embargo by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries following the Arab-Israeli War of 1973 raised crude oil prices by four times.
c)    The Iranian Revolution of 1979 caused Iranian oil production to collapse and again raised oil prices.
E.    Society in a Time of Economic Uncertainty
1.    The welfare states of the West cushioned the material impact of economic stagnation. The impact of the recession was rather psychological⎯a more pessimistic mood.
2.    In the 1980s, a reaction to the rapid growth of government spending set in, particularly in Britain. In the United States, President Ronald Reagan cut taxes in 1981 but did not cut the federal budget. A huge deficit resulted.
3.    Economic troubles made university students much more practical and less idealistic than the students of the 1960s.

AP students: here are several high quality review sites:

Mr. Lloyd

Ms. Pojer

Art for APEH

Cave Review Part 1

Cave review Part 2

Essential Questions

Essential People

Women in History (this takes you to a site with pdf links)

Era Charts

MC Review Questions This site will have new questions from the 23rd through the exam day. Test yourself!

Mr. Barber’s Study Aids

Please work through the lesson on The Rise of Hitler.

Do sections 1,2, and 3. Watch that green check marks appear on each section as you finish. Go to the conclusion section. Your notes you recorded should appear. Answer the concluding question. Print that page.

Turn in the printed page and a short (3-4 paragraph) newspaper sytle article on the rise of Nazism and Hitler. Write as if you are a writer of that time period. Due on Friday/Monday.

Dictatorships and the Second World War, 1919–1945

CHAPTER OUTLINE
I.    Authoritarian States
A.    Conservative Authoritarianism
1.    Traditional authoritarian governments aimed to preserve their power and the status quo using repressive measures. They did not seek to control the daily lives of their subjects.
2.    After World War I, this kind of authoritarian government revived.
a)    In the eastern part of Europe, all states except Czechoslovakia were more or less authoritarian by 1938.
b)    Spain and Portugal were also authoritarian dictatorships.
c)    Large landowners and the Church were still powerful in these areas. They were the bulwarks of authoritarian regimes.
B.    Radical Totalitarian Dictatorships
1.    In the Soviet Union, Germany, and to some extent in Italy, a new type of regime emerged by the 1930s.
2.    By the 1930s, British, American, and German commentators were using the word totalitarian to describe these regimes’ subordination of all institutions and classes to the state’s aims.
3.    Totalitarian states used modern technology to achieve complete political power. The state also attempted to control economic, social, intellectual, and cultural life.
4.    Totalitarian states were a radical revolt against the liberal commitment to rationality, peaceful progress, and economic freedom. They sought to use violence and total mobilization to achieve state goals regardless of individual rights.
5.    There were differences between Stalin and Hitler’s regimes. The Soviet regime seized all private property for the state and crushed the middle classes. Hitler did not.
6.    Comparative studies of fascism across Europe have shown that fascist regimes shared extreme nationalism, antisocialism, alliances with powerful capitalists and landowners, a dynamic and violent leader, and glorification of war and the military.
7.    Although recent scholars have emphasized the unique aspects of the Soviet and Nazi regimes, the term totalitarian does serve to emphasize their total claim on the belief and behavior of their subjects.
II.    Stalin’s Soviet Union
A.    From Lenin to Stalin
1.    By spring 1921, Lenin and the Bolsheviks had one the civil war, but Russia was in ruins.
2.    Following the destruction and chaos of the Russian civil war, Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) aimed to restore the economy by ending forced requisitioning of grain and allowing small-scale private business and trade.
3.    In the struggle for power following Lenin’s incapacitation and death (1924), Joseph Stalin defeated Leon Trotsky because he controlled the Central Committee apparatus, and hence, the party.
B.    The Five-Year Plans
1.    The “First Five Year Plan” (1928−1932) was in fact a second revolution.
2.    Stalin and allies hoped to stamp out NEP’s incipient capitalism.
3.    They wanted to raise industrial and agricultural production.
4.    They wanted to industrialize and catch up to the West.
5.    They aimed to make the peasants pay for this revolution by forcing them onto collective farms.
6.    Collectivization became an economic and human disaster, as the regime deported and murdered millions of peasants and stood by as millions of others starved.
7.    The industrialization drive was more successful. Soviet industry produced about four times as much in 1937 as in 1928.
8.    Labor unions were crushed during the First Five Year Plan.
9.    Foreign engineers played key roles in Soviet industrialization.
C.    Life and Culture in Soviet Society
1.    Living standards for ordinary Soviet subjects, including workers and peasants, declined, at least through 1940.
2.    The regime did provide old-age pensions, free medical services, free education, free day care, and full employment.
3.    Personal advancement through specialized skills and technical education was possible.
4.    Women’s rights broadened as divorce and abortion became easier in the 1920s. Some determined women were able to enter the professions or become skilled technical specialists.
5.    Women really had to work outside the home because incomes were so low.
6.    In the 1930s, the party/state took complete control of culture.
D.    Stalinist Terror and the Great Purges
1.    Dissent within the party against collectivization and the 1934 assassination of party leader Sergei Kirov helped provoke Stalin’s massive purge of the party.
2.    Ordinary citizens were also caught up in the purge.
3.    Millions were deported to forced labor camps and/or executed (1936−1939).
III.    Mussolini and Fascism in Italy
A.    The Seizure of Power
1.    World War I discredited the liberal parliamentary government, as great sacrifices led to little gain at Versailles.
2.    The Russian Revolution inspired revolutionary socialists in Italy to begin seizing factories and land.
3.    Benito Mussolini, a veteran of World War I and former socialist, organized other veterans into a fascist political movement that used violence to intimidate socialists.
4.    The fascists created enough disorder to discredit the liberal regime, and then marched on Rome, where King Victor Emmanuel asked Mussolini to form a government.
B.    The Regime in Action
1.    Under the slogan, “everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state,” Mussolini abolished freedom of the press, fixed elections, ruled by decree, arrested political opponents, disbanded independent labor unions, and put fascists in control of the schools.
2.    Mussolini drew support from the Catholic Church, signing the Lateran Agreement in 1929.
3.    Italy never really became totalitarian, however, because Mussolini never truly controlled big business, the Catholic Church, or the army.
4.    Mussolini promoted conservative gender norms and his government did not pass racial laws until 1938.
IV.    Hitler and Nazism in Germany
A.    The Roots of Nazism
1.    Hitler developed his political beliefs as a young man living in Vienna. He was strongly influenced by Viennese mayor Karl Luger (1844–1910).
2.    Hitler hated Jews and Slavs, and explained everything by supposed machinations of Jewish conspirators. He also espoused the most extreme Social Darwinism.
3.    Service in the German (not Austrian) Army in World War I gave Hitler’s life meaning. When Germany lost he blamed Jews and Marxists.
4.    By 1921, Hitler controlled a small party known as the German Workers’ Party, which espoused “national socialism.”
B.    Hitler’s Road to Power
1.    Imprisoned for a coup attempt against the Weimar Republic, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf (“My Struggle”).
a)    His basic themes in this work were anti-Semitism, Germany’s need to conquer “living space,” and the necessity of a leader-dictator (Führer) with unlimited power.
2.    The Great Depression caused many small businessmen, office workers, artisans, and peasants to vote Nazi. Hitler promised to use government programs to end the economic crisis.
3.    The Nazi party was dominated by youth and strongly appealed to them.
4.    After May 1930, German President Hindenburg authorized Chancellor Heinrich Bruning to rule by decree. Bruning’s cuts in government spending and in wages and prices worsened the Depression in Germany.
5.    In January 1933, conservative and nationalist Germans supported Hindenburg’s appointment of Hitler as chancellor.
C.    The Nazi State and Society
1.    When fire damaged the Reichstag building in spring 1933, Hitler blamed the communists and persuaded President Hindenburg to sign dictatorial emergency decrees.
2.    Hitler then convinced the Reichstag to endorse emergency powers for himself and moved to establish a one-party state.
3.    The Nazis took over the German bureaucracy, professional organizations, publishing houses, and universities.
4.    The Nazis persecuted Jews, driving them from their jobs and from public life, and destroying their property.
D.    Hitler’s Popularity
1.    Military and public works spending improved profits for business and real wages for German workers in the mid-1930s, increasing Hitler’s popularity.
2.    Hitler’s nationalism remained popular.
3.    Although Nazi propaganda claimed that Germany was becoming a more egalitarian society, in reality there was little change.
4.    Resistance to the Nazis first appeared among communists and socialists. Later, Protestant and Catholic churchmen sought to preserve independent religious life. Even later, there were plots against Hitler in the army.
E.    Aggression and Appeasement, 1933−1939
1.    The guiding goal of the Nazi regime was the territorial expansion of the superior German race.
2.    Early in his rule, Hitler proclaimed his peaceful intentions but did withdraw from the League of Nations (October 1933).
3.    After 1935, British appeasement prevented the formation of a united front against Hitler. When German troops entered the demilitarized Rhineland in March 1936, Britain refused to support French action against them.
4.    British appeasement lasted far into 1939.
5.    Many British conservatives saw Hitler as a bulwark against communism.
6.    In 1935, Mussolini invaded Ethiopia. Hitler supported him and formed an alliance. From 1936, the Fascists and Nazis supported Francisco Franco’s fascist movement against the Spanish republic.
7.    In 1938, Hitler occupied Austria and the Sudetenland, with British approval.
8.    In 1939, he took all of Czechoslovakia and then demanded territory from Poland. Britain and France promised to fight should he invade Poland.
9.    After concluding an alliance with the Soviet Union to divide Poland, Hitler invaded on September 1, 1939. Britain and France soon declared war.
V.    The Second World War
A.    Hitler’s Empire, 1939−1942
1.    After overrunning Poland with new blitzkrieg (“lightning warfare”) that used tanks and aircraft to break enemy lines, the German army conquered Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, and France in the spring and summer of 1940.
2.    British victory in the epic air battle known as the “Battle of Britain” prevented German invasion of the home islands (fall 1940).
3.    In April 1941, Hitler conquered Greece and Yugoslavia and subjugated the entire Balkans.
4.    In June, the German Army attacked the U.S.S.R., in accordance with Hitler’s own dream of “living space” in the East.
5.    In the winter of 1941−1942, the Soviets stopped the German advance just outside Moscow.
6.    Hitler’s New Order was based on the principle of racial imperialism.
B.    The Holocaust
1.    After the fall of Warsaw, the Nazis began deporting all German Jews to occupied Poland.
2.    In 1941, as part of the “war of annihilation” in the Soviet Union, the Nazis began exterminating Soviet Jews.
3.    The Nazis decided to pursue the “final solution.”
4.    By 1945, 6 million Jews had been murdered.
5.    The issue of responsibility for the Holocaust is both complicated and controversial.
C.    Japan’s Empire in Asia
1.    By late 1938, 1.5 million Japanese troops were bogged down in China.
2.    Japanese leaders were, therefore, eager to find new alliances and opportunities that might improve their position.
3.    The outbreak of war in Europe provided such opportunities.
4.    Japanese–U.S. relations steadily worsened, a trend that culminated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
5.    The Japanese claimed that they were freeing Asians from imperialism and creating a Greater East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.
6.    Asian faith in co-prosperity and support for Japan declined as the war went on.
D.    The Grand Alliance
1.    After the Japanese attack on the U.S. in December 1941, Britain, the U.S., and the U.S.S.R. found themselves allied. Britain and the U.S. decided to focus on defeating Germany before Japan.
2.    The economic strength of this Grand Alliance was tremendous.
a)    The U.S. had immense industrial resources and could draw on Latin American raw materials.
b)    Britain had a strong, fully mobilized economy.
c)    The Soviets managed to move many of their factories east to the Ural Mountains to maintain war production.
3.    The Alliance also had the help of resisters to the Nazis inside Europe.
E.    The War in Europe, 1942–1945
1.    In the winter of 1942–1943, the Germans suffered a terrible defeat at Stalingrad.
2.    Allied victories in North Africa put increasing pressure on Germany and Italy.
3.    The Allies launched an invasion of Italy in the spring of 1943.
4.    The Germans fought on for almost two more years.
5.    On June 6, 1944 (“D-Day”), the Allies invaded France.
6.    In 1944 and early 1945, American, British, and Soviet forces closed in on Germany.
7.    The Germans surrendered on May 7, 1945.
F.    The War in the Pacific, 1942–1945
1.    Naval battles decided the fate of the war in the Pacific.
2.    As U.S. production ramped up, America gradually gained control of the sea and air in the Pacific war.
3.    In July 1943, America and its allies opened an “island hopping campaign toward Japan.
4.    The war in the Pacific was brutal and atrocities were committed on both sides.
5.    In spite of numerous defeats, the Japanese continued to fight with enormous determination.
6.    On August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan.
7.    On August 14, 1945, the Japanese announced their surrender.

The Age of Anxiety (ca 1900–1940)

I.    Uncertainty in Modern Thought
A.    Modern Philosophy
1.    Before World War I, Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) proclaimed that the optimistic Christian order of the West was obsolete, and that it stifled creativity and excellence. He called for superior individuals to recognize the emptiness of social convention and the meaninglessness of individual life.
2.    The Frenchman Henri Bergson (1859–1941) argued that immediate experience and intuition were at least as important as rational thinking and science.
3.    Georges Sorel (1847–1922) described Marxian socialism as an inspiring religion, not a scientific truth. He believed that after the workers’ revolution a small revolutionary elite would have to run society.
4.    World War I accelerated change in philosophical thought. Change took two main directions.
5.    In English-speaking countries, logical empiricism dominated.
a)    Ludwig Wittgenstein reduced philosophy to the study of language, arguing that philosophers could not make meaningful statements about God, freedom, morality, and so on.
6.    On the Continent, existentialism dominated.
a)    Existentialists generally were atheists, but they sought moral values in a world of terror and uncertainty.
b)    Jean-Paul Sartre argued that human beings are forced to define themselves by their choices. If they do so consciously, they can overcome life’s meaninglessness.
c)    Existentialism first gained popularity in Germany in the 1920s as Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers attracted followers.
d)    Existentialism flowered during and right after World War II. The existentialists Sartre and Albert Camus were both active in the French resistance against Hitler.
B.    The Revival of Christianity
1.    Loss of faith in human reason and progress led to renewed interest in Christianity.
2.    Among the theologians and thinkers who turned toward faith in God as the only answer to the loneliness and anxiety of the world after the Great War were Karl Barth, Gabriel Marcel, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Max Planck, and many others.
C.    The New Physics
1.    The research of Marie Curie (1867–1934) and Max Planck (1858–1947) showed that the old view of atoms as stable, unbreakable building blocks of nature was inadequate.
2.    Albert Einstein (1879–1955) undermined Newtonian physics by postulating the equivalence of mass and energy and by demonstrating that space and time are relative to the viewpoint of the observer.
3.    Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) demonstrated that the atom could be split.
4.    Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976) hypothesized that it was impossible to know precisely the position and speed of an individual electron.
5.    The stable, rational world of Newtonian physics dissolved into a universe of tendencies and probabilities.
D.    Freudian Psychology
1.    Prior to Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), most professional psychologists believed that human behavior was the result of rational calculation by the conscious mind.
2.    Beginning in the late 1880s, Sigmund Freud argued that unconscious and instinctual drives were important factors in determining human behavior.
3.    After 1918, Freudian psychology was popularized in the U.S. and Europe.
E.    Twentieth-Century Literature
1.    Nineteenth-century authors had written typically as all-knowing narrators describing characters and their relationships.
2.    In the early twentieth century, authors such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, William Faulkner, and James Joyce wrote from the point of view of a single, confused individual or multiple individuals.
II.    Modern Art and Music
A.    Architecture and Design
1.    From the 1890s onward, architects in Europe and the U.S. pioneered new building styles that stressed functionalism and efficiency of design and used cheap steel and reinforced concrete.
2.    In Germany, the Bauhaus school of architecture founded by Walter Gropius (1883–1969) developed this trend in the 1920s and 1930s.
B.    Modern Painting
1.    Modern painting developed as a reaction to the “superrealism” of French impressionism.
2.    After 1905, art became increasingly nonrepresentational and abstract.
3.    Postimpressionists like Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) and Paul Gauguin (1848–1903) sought to express a complicated psychological viewpoint as well as emotional intensity.
4.    Modern art began by painting real objects but with primary attention to the arrangement of color, line, and form. Examples of this approach include Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973).
5.    Art developed toward the representation of pure form without reference to real objects, as in the work of Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), and to attacks on all accepted conventions of art and behavior, as exemplified by the work of the surrealists and the Dadaists.
C.    Modern Music
1.    Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971) was attracted to the emotional intensity of expressionism.
2.    Alban Berg (1885–1935) brought expressionism into opera.
3.    Some composers, such as Arnold Schönberg (1874–1951), moved in the direction of dissonance and entirely atonal music without recognizable harmonies.
III.    Movies and Radio
A.    Movies
1.    Movies became a form of mass entertainment that replaced traditional arts and amusement for rural people.
2.    By the 1930s, movies were weekly entertainment for much of the population in Europe and North America.
B.    Radio
1.    Radio became commercially viable in the 1920s.
2.    By the late 1930s, most households in Britain and Germany had inexpensive individual sets.
3.    Radio was an extremely powerful outlet for political propaganda.
4.    Motion pictures also became powerful tools of political indoctrination.
IV.    The Search for Peace and Political Stability
A.    Germany and the Western Powers
1.    After Versailles, the British were ready for conciliation with Germany, while the French took a hard line.
2.    In April 1921, the Allied reparations commission ordered Germany to pay huge reparations.
3.    In 1922, the German (Weimar) Republic refused to pay, prompting Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr. As the German government printed money to pay striking Ruhr workers unemployment benefits, runaway inflation destroyed the savings of retirees and the middle class.
4.    Under the leadership of Gustav Stresemann (1878–1929), Germany was able to move toward reconciliation with France.
B.    Hope in Foreign Affairs, 1924–1929
1.    The Dawes Plan (1924) stabilized the situation, cutting reparations and providing private American loans to pay for what remained.
2.    Agreements signed among European nations at Locarno, Switzerland, in 1925 gave Europeans a sense of growing international security.
C.    Hope in Democratic Government
1.    After 1923, democracy seemed to take root in Weimar Germany.
2.    After 1924, the government of France rested mainly in the hands of a coalition of moderates and business interests.
3.    In Britain, the rise of the Labour party and passage of welfare measures guaranteed social peace and maintained relative equality among the classes.
V.    The Great Depression, 1929−1939
A.    The Economic Crisis
1.    In the late 1920s, American investment in the stock market boomed as direct investment in factories, farms, equipment, and so on fell.
2.    Much of the stock market investment was “on margin”; that is, bought with loans. As the stock market began to fall in October 1929, investors began a mass sell-off, which caused the market to collapse.
3.    Recall of private loans by American banks caused the world banking system to fall apart.
4.    The financial crisis caused world production of goods to fall by more than one-third between 1929 and 1933.
5.    Traditional economic theory did not recognize that government deficit spending to stimulate the economy was a possible solution in this situation.

B.    Mass Unemployment
1.    The need for large-scale government spending was tied to mass unemployment.
2.    Unemployment posed grave social problems.
C.    The New Deal in the United States
1.    In 1933, newly elected U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began using government intervention in the economy to fight the Depression.
2.    Roosevelt’s administration passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act that aimed to raise prices and farm income by limiting production.
3.    Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration was supposed to fix wages and prices for the benefit of all, but the Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional in 1935.
4.    Under Roosevelt, the U.S. government hired many unemployed workers through the Works Progress Administration.
5.    The United States also created a national social security system and legalized collective bargaining by unions in this period.
D.    The Scandinavian Response to the Depression
1.    The Swedish Social Democratic party had great success dealing with the Depression by increasing social welfare benefits and using government deficit spending to finance big public works projects.
E.    Recovery and Reform in Britain and France
1.    British manufacturing’s reorientation from international to national markets for consumer goods alleviated the worst of the Depression.
2.    In France, political disunity prevented effective action to deal with the economic crisis. The only attempt to do so was that of Leon Blum’s Popular Front government, a coalition of communist and moderate left parties.

Please go to the following link on the interwar years

Read over the summary, context, important terms, people and events and timeline sections of the site. Consider the following questions:

What were the economic reasons for unrest in Europe during the interwar years?

What were the political reasons for unrest in Europe during the interwar years?

What were the cultural/social reasons for unrest in Europe during the interwar years?

You will discuss these questions in class and share out group answers.

I will divide you into pairs (or you will work singly in A4) and assign you to read over one of the folllowing nine sections:

You and your partner will report on your section for the class.

All of you need to read Nazi Germany (1919-1938)

Be prepared to write an essay on the topics covered. Essay possibilities will be drawn from the study questions on the site.

I meant to write/tell you this earlier:

If you buy a ticket and attend the junior high play: The King and I, you can earn up to 35 points extra credit.

You must have a paid ticket stub and be seen at the beginning and at the end by either Mr. Branson or me (I sure hope I am well enough by tomorrow!!). This will earn you 25 points. If you write a short paper (1/2 page) on how the show illustrates the imperialism of Great Britain in the 19th century, you can earn an additional 10 points. You cannot earn credit for writing the paper without attending the play.

Hope to see you there- in more ways than one!

The Great Break: War  1914–1920

I.    The First World War
A.    The Bismarckian System of Alliances
1.    After the German victory over France in 1871, Bismarck strove successfully to maintain peace between Austria-Hungary and Russia, and to keep France diplomatically isolated.
2.    The Three Emperors’ League linked Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia.
3.    Bismarck maintained good relations with Britain and Italy.
B.    The Rival Blocs
1.    In 1890, the new emperor, William II of Germany, dismissed Bismarck, partly because of his friendly policy towards Russia.
2.    William then refused to renew the neutrality treaty between Germany and Russia (the Russian-German Reinsurance Treaty).
3.    As a result, France and Russia concluded a military alliance in 1894.
4.    Commercial rivalry and expansion of the German fleet led to tensions between Britain and Germany.
5.    Between 1900 and 1904, Britain improved relations with France and the U.S. and signed a formal alliance with Japan.
6.    The Moroccan crisis (1905–1906) brought France and Britain closer together and left Germany increasingly isolated.
C.    The Outbreak of War
1.    The weakening of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of independent and fiercely nationalist states in the Balkans, and Austrian attempts to expand in the area raised tension between Austria and Russian-backed Serbia.
2.    On June 28, 1914, a Serbian nationalist assassinated Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne.
3.    Austria decided that Serbia should be harshly punished and issued an ultimatum.
4.    Germany offered Austria unconditional support and Russia backed the Serbs.
5.    Fearful of falling behind in mobilization, all the major powers rushed toward war.
6.    As part of its war plan against France, Germany attacked neutral Belgium. In response, Britain joined the Franco-Russian war against Germany.
D.    Reflections on the Origins of the War
1.    German encouragement of the Austrian attack on Serbia, plus Germany’s precipitous attack on Belgium and France, created a Europe-wide war.
2.    German leaders after 1890 felt that Germany’s “Great Power” status was threatened.
3.    Some historians argue that German leaders deliberately sought war to reduce social tension and the political power of socialism in Germany.
4.    Nationalism certainly played a major role in motivating the war’s outbreak.
E.    Stalemate and Slaughter
1.    The French stopped the initial German advance into France at the Battle of the Marne (September 6, 1914).
2.    The western front then settled into bloody, brutal, and indecisive trench warfare.
F.    The Widening War
1.    On the eastern front, warfare was more mobile, and the Russians and Austrians took heavy casualties.
2.    In May 1915, Italy joined the Triple Entente of Great Britain, France, and Russia.
3.    In October 1914, the Ottoman Empire joined Austria and Germany in the Central Powers.
4.    The entry of the Ottomans brought the war into the Middle East.
5.    The Balkans, with the exception of Greece, came to be occupied by the Central Powers.
6.    In 1915, the Ottoman government ordered a genocidal mass deportation of the Armenians.
7.    British efforts to capture the Dardanelles and Constantinople failed.
8.    The British had some success inciting Arab revolts against the Turks.
9.    Similar victories were eventually scored in the Ottoman province of Iraq.
10.    War also spread to East Asia and Africa.
11.    Unrestricted submarine warfare against merchant vessels by Germany brought the U.S. into the war in April 1917 on the Allied side.
II.    The Home Front
A.    Mobilizing for Total War
1.    At first there was mass enthusiasm for the war, even among socialists.
2.    Demands for munitions and other material far exceeded supplies, leading to central government coordination of economies.
3.    In each country, government began to plan and control economic and social life in order to wage total war.
4.    In Germany Walter Rathenau, head of the nation’s largest electric company, directed the War Raw Materials Board that inventoried and rationed every useful material from oil to barnyard manure.
5.    After the Battles of the Somme and Verdun in 1916, the military leaders Hindenburg and Ludendorf were de facto rulers of Germany.
6.    In late 1916, Germany introduced forced labor for adult males.
7.    Food rations dropped to just over 1,000 calories per day by the end of the war.
8.    In Germany, total war led to the creation of the first “totalitarian” society.
9.    Great Britain mobilized for total war less rapidly and less completely than Germany.
B.    The Social Impact
1.    War created full employment. Labor unions cooperated with government and private industry.
2.    Large numbers of women left home to work in industry, transport, and offices. Women also served as nurses and doctors at the front.
3.    War promoted greater social equality.
4.    In some countries, notably Britain, full employment greatly improved the material lot of the poor.
C.    Growing Political Tensions
1.    The pressures of total war eventually led to strikes, mutinies, and demonstrations in the combatant powers by 1916.
2.    In Austria nationalist dissatisfaction with the Empire grew.
3.    The strain of war was also evident in Germany.

IV.    The Peace Settlement
A.    The End of the War
1.    After a renewed German offensive in summer 1918 failed, newly arrived American troops helped the French and British turn the tide and begin a war-winning attack.
2.    In November 1918, German military discipline collapsed, the Kaiser abdicated, and socialist leaders declared a German republic.
3.    On November 11, new leaders of the republic agreed to Allied terms for an armistice.
B.    Revolution in Germany
1.    In Austria-Hungary as in Russia, defeat led to revolution, but nationalist revolution. Independent Austrian, Hungarian, and Czech states were established.
2.    In Germany as well, revolution broke out and took two directions, moderate socialist and radical communist, as in Russia. Unlike in Russia, the moderate socialists won.
C.    The Treaty of Versailles
1.    At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sought the creation of a League of Nations to avoid future international conflict. Wilson also wanted lenient terms for Germany.
2.    Lloyd George of Britain and Georges Clemenceau of France were indifferent to the League and sought harsher terms for Germany. France in particular feared future German attack.
3.    Terms of the Treaty of Versailles
a)    German colonies went to France, Britain, and Japan.
b)    Alsace-Lorraine returned to France.
c)    German army limited to 100,000.
d)    Germany to pay war reparations.
4.    Separate peace treaties were concluded with the other defeated powers.
D.    American Rejection of the Versailles Treaty
1.    The U.S. Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles.
2.    Republicans led by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge disliked the League of Nations’ power to require member states to take collective action against aggression.
3.    The United States refused to back up the peace settlement, leaving France to face Germany alone.
E.    The Peace Settlement in the Middle East
1.    The Ottoman Empire was broken up and Britain and France expanded their power in the Middle East.
2.    Arab nationalists felt cheated and betrayed by the British.
3.    The Balfour Declaration of November 1917 declared that Britain favored a “National Home for the Jewish People” in Palestine.
4.    In 1914, Jews accounted for only 11 percent of the population of the three Ottoman administrative units the British lumped together to form Palestine.
5.    Hussein ibn-Ali’s efforts at the conference to secure Arab independence came to nothing.
6.    In 1920, Syria and Iraq declared their independence.
7.    The French attacked Syria and the British took control of Iraq.
8.    The Allies sought to impose even harsher terms on the Turks than the “liberated” Arabs.
9.    Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), later known as Atatürk, the Turks successfully resisted Allied efforts to dissolve their country.
10.    Mustafa Kemal created a secular republic dedicated to modernization.