World History, Culture and Geography: The Modern World
The modern world from the 1900's to the present, including the two world wars, the rise of democratic ideas and international relations.
- The arguments for entering into war presented by leaders from all sides of the Great War and the role of political and economic rivalries, ethnic and ideological conflicts, domestic discontent and disorder and propaganda and nationalism in mobilizing the civilian population in support of "total war,"
- The principal theaters of battle, major turning points and the importance of geographic factors in military decisions and outcomes (e.g., topography, waterways, distance, climate)
- How the Russian Revolution and the entry of the United States affected the course and outcome of the war
- The nature of the war and its human costs (military and civilian) on all sides of the conflict, including how colonial peoples contributed to the war effort
- Human rights violations and genocide, including the Ottoman government's actions against Armenian citizens
10.6 THE EFFECTS OF WWI
- The aims and negotiating roles of world leaders, the terms and influence of the Treaty of Versailles and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and the causes and effects of the United States' rejection of the League of Nations on world politics
- The effects of the war and resulting peace treaties on population movement, the international economy and shifts in the geographic and political borders of Europe and the Middle East
- The widespread disillusionment with prewar institutions, authorities and values that resulted in a void that was later filled by totalitarians
- The influence of WWI on literature, art and intellectual life in the West (e.g., Pablo Picasso, the "lost generation" of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway)
10.7 THE RISE OF TOTALITARIAN GOVERNMENTS AFTER WWI
- The causes and consequences of the Russian Revolution, including Lenin's use of totalitarian means to seize and maintain control (e.g., the Gulag)
- Stalin's rise to power in the Soviet Union and the connection between economic policies, political policies, the absence of a free press and systematic violations of human rights (e.g., the Terror Famine in Ukraine)
- The rise, agression and human costs of totalitarian regimes (Fascist and Communist) in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union, noting especially their common and dissimilar traits
10.8 THE CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF WWII
- A comparison of the German, Italian and Japanese drives for empire in the 1930's including the 1937 Rape of Nanking, other atrocities in China and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939
- The role of appeasement, nonintervention (isolationism) and the domestic distractions in Europe and the United States prior to the outbreak of WWII
- The locations of the Allied and Axis powers on a map and the major turning points of the war, the principal theaters of conflict, key strategic decisions and the resulting war conferences and political resolutions, with emphasis on the importance of geographic factors
- The political, diplomatic and military leaders during the war (e.g., Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Emperor Hirohito, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower)
- The Nazi policy of pursuing racial purity, especially against the European Jews; its transformation into the Final Solution; and the Holocaust that resulted in the murder of six million Jewish civilians (and others)
- The human costs of the war, with particular attention to the civilian and military losses in Russia, Germany, Britain, the U.S., China and Japan
10.9 THE INTERNATIONAL DEVELOPMENTS IN THE POST-WORLD WAR II WORLD
- A comparison of the economic and military power shifts caused by the war, including the Yalta Pact, the development of nuclear weapons, Soviet control over Eastern European nations and the economic recoveries of Germany and Japan
- The causes of the Cold War, with the free world on one side and Soviet client states on the other, including competition for influence in such places as Egypt, the Congo, Vietnam and Chile
- The importance of the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan, which established the pattern for America's postwar policy of supplying economic and military aid to prevent the spread of Communism and the resulting economic and political competition in arenas such as Southeast Asia (i.e., the Korean War, Vietnam War) Cuba and Africa
- The Chinese Civil War, the rise of Mao Tse-tung and the subsequent political and economic upheavals in China (e.g., the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square uprising)
- The uprisings in Poland (1956), Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968) and those countries' resurgence in the 1970s and 1980s as people in Soviet satellites sought freedom from Soviet control
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