World Wars

Indian troops from Punjab in France, 1917

World Wars

c. 1900-Today

Objectives

Explain how internal and external factors contributed to change in various states after 1900.
Explain the causes and consequences of World War I.
Explain how governments used a variety of methods to conduct war.
Explain how different governments responded to economic crisis after 1900.
Explain the continuities and changes in territorial holdings from 1900 to the present.
Explain the causes and consequences of World War II.
Explain similarities and differences in how governments used a variety of methods to conduct war.
Explain the various causes and consequences of mass atrocities in the period from 1900 to the present.
Explain how different governments responded to economic crisis after 1900.
Explain the continuities and changes in territorial holdings from 1900 to the present.

The Mexican Revolution

Pancho Villa and followers. An estimated 1.7-2.7 million died during the Mexican Revolution

"I've Had About Enough of This". Uncle Sam leaps across the border to chase Pancho Villa during the Punitive Expedition.

States around the world challenged the existing political and social order, including the Mexican Revolution that arose as a result of political crisis.

Soldaderas conduct firing practice, 1911

The Mexican Revolution

The Great War

World War I was the first total war. Governments used a variety of strategies, including political propaganda, art, media, and intensified forms of nationalism, to mobilize populations (both in the home countries and the colonies) for the purpose of waging war.
New military technology led to increased levels of wartime casualties.

Japanese capture of the German colony of Tsingtao, China, 1914

British machine gunners

British ship-based air-raid on German naval forces, Christmas Day, 1914

The Bikaner Camel Corps, British Imperial Service Troops from India, during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign, 1915

Austro-Hungarian troops on the mountainous Italian Front

German East African soliders

The Great War in 1914-1915

German Zeppelin-Staaken R.VI giant bomber

British Mark I tank during the battle of the Somme, September 1916

Vietnamese workers from French Indochina at a train station in Saint-Raphaël, France, in 1916

Australian soldiers at Ypres, France during the Battle of Paschendale.

Germans passing a captured British trench during the Spring 1918 Offensive

Canadian troops resting during the Hundred Days Offensive

officers of the American 366th Infantry

1919 postcard depicting the battle of Château-Thierry

The Great War in 1916-1918

Imperial Collapse

"The Big Four" - David Lloyd George of Britain, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, Georges Clemenceau of France, and Woodrow Wilson of the U.S. - made all the major decisions at the Paris Peace Conference.

In January 1919, communists tried to seize power in Germany during the failed Spartacist Uprising.

1919 illustration of the stab-in-the-back myth, a dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory that blamed Germany's defeat in World War I on Jews, liberals, socialists, and communists, and contributed to the rise of the Nazi Party.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey (1923-1938) transformed Turkey into a progressive, secular, industrial nation.

Yuan Shikai (left) and Sun Yat-sen (right) with flags representing the Republic of China

The West dominated the global political order at the beginning of the 20th century, but both land-based and maritime empires gave way to new states by the century’s end.
The older, land-based Ottoman, Russian, and Qing empires collapsed due to a combination of internal and external factors. These changes in Russia eventually led to communist revolution.

Imperial Collapse

Soviet Modernization

Joseph Stalin (left), Vladimir Lenin (center), and Leon Trotsky (right) led the Bolshevik Revolution and founded the Soviet Union.

Soviet propaganda poster depicting Stalin leading Soviet forces during the Second World War.

The sculpture Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937) is one of the most famous art works of Socialist Realism.

In the Soviet Union, the government controlled the national economy through the Five Year Plans, often implementing repressive policies, with negative repercussions for the population.

Now you see him. Now you don't. Victims of the Great Purge were erased from the Soviet historical record through elaborate document falsification.

Soviet Modernization

The Great Depression

"Bread Line during the Louisville flood, Kentucky, 1937"
photo by Margaret Bourke-White

Art and literature of the 1920s reflected the traumatic experience of World War I and pessimism, angst, and anxiety about the future.

During the Ruhr Crisis, Weimar Republic suffered extreme hyperinflation which crippled the German economy.

Text: "It's the Soviets pulling the strings of the Popular Front." French right-wing critics denounced the Popular Front alliance of Liberals, Socialists, and Communists as puppets of the Soviet Union.

propaganda depicting Brazilian dictator Getúlio Vargas, 1938

Down Argentine Way (1940) introduced Carmen Miranda to American audiences. FDR's Good Neighbor Policy relied on such films to help improve U.S.-Latin American relations.

Following World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, governments began to take a more active role in economic life.

The Great Depression

Fascism

'Piece by Piece': American cartoon on Japan's expansion in Asia

Fascist Party Headquarters in Rome in 1934

Rare color photographs of Nazi Germany by Adolf Hitler's personal photographer. Hitler murdered his Nazi Party rivals and assumed the powers of the presidency to become Germany's Führer in 1934.

Japanese troops during a chemical attack against Chinese forces in the Second Sino-Japanese War, 1937

Between the two world wars, Western and Japanese imperial states predominantly maintained control over colonial holdings; in some cases, they gained additional territories through conquest or treaty settlement and in other cases faced anti-imperial resistance.

political cartoons reacting to the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact

Fascism

The Second World War

Japanese propaganda poster depicting a samurai triumphing over Allied navy ships with the Axis Power flags of Germany, Japan, and Italy fluttering in the background.

The causes of World War II included the unsustainable peace settlement after World War I, the global economic crisis engendered by the Great Depression, continued imperialist aspirations, and especially the rise to power of fascist and totalitarian regimes that resulted in the aggressive militarism of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler.
World War II was a total war. Governments used a variety of strategies, including political propaganda, art, media, and intensified forms of nationalism, to mobilize populations (both in the home countries and the colonies or former colonies) for the purpose of waging war. Governments used ideologies, including fascism and communism to mobilize all of their state’s resources for war and, in the case of totalitarian states, to repress basic freedoms and dominate many aspects of daily life during the course of the conflicts and beyond.
New military technology and new tactics, including the atomic bomb, fire-bombing, and the waging of “total war” led to increased levels of wartime casualties.

German airplanes during the Second World War emblazoned with the Nazi swastika symbol on their tails.

World War II, 1939-1941

Soviet soldiers fly the flag of the USSR after the Battle of Berlin.

American marines raise the US flag after the Battle of Iwo Jima.

1942-1945

World War II, 1942-1945

Total War and Genocide

The Sowers (1942) by Thomas Hart Benton portrays the barbarity of fascism.

Images from the Holocaust

A survivor of a vicious machete attack, the main weapon of murder in the Rwandan Genocide (1994).

At 50 million megatons, the Tsar Bomba thermonuclear device is the most powerful weapon ever developed. It was tested in 1961 during the peak of the Cold War. Reaching 35 miles into the atmosphere, the mushroom cloud was seven times the height of Mount Everest.

The rise of extremist groups in power led to the attempted destruction of specific populations, notably the Nazi killing of the Jews in the Holocaust during World War II, and to other atrocities, acts of genocide, or ethnic violence.