Modern World History: Final Exam Review Reading – Overview of the Twentieth Century
The Twentieth Century was a period of unprecedented change for the human race in almost every way people lived their lives – by the end of the century people were living longer, freer and in greater comfort than they had at the beginning of the century. However, it was also a century of tremendous conflict and upheaval.
World War One (1914 – 1918)
World War One was second worst war ever fought. In the course of the four-year war about 16 million people were killed and 20 million more were wounded. The war was mostly fought in Europe and the reasons for the war were based in the complex balance of alliances that developed between the major countries of Europe. This complex balance of alliances between countries made it so a single act of terrorism – the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria – sparked a series of events that led to war between all of the major countries of Europe, with the first fighting beginning with Germany attacking France in August 1914. While this war was fought across Europe and around the world, the most important and worst fighting on the Western Front, in the area between France and Germany. On the Western Front, both sides (the Allies of France and England) and Germany fought a trench war in which soldiers dug defensive positions in the dirt (trenches) from which it was hard to drive them out. In the four years of the war, both sides used massive attacks on the trenches, large bombardments of the trenches and even poison gas to drive the other side’s army out of the trenches – all to no effect. The front line of trenches moved less than 20 miles despite the massive losses of soldiers’ lives.
World War One was a total war that required the warring countries to commit their productive power to fighting in the war. This meant drafting men into the army and having women go to work in factories and on farms to produce materials for the war. The importance of using the support of the entire country in the war effort is shown by the term “home front” to describe this work – it was just as important an the “fighting fronts” where battles were fought. Total war meant that a country could only be defeated when it has lost the willingness and ability to fight. Countries continued to fight the war no matter how many soldiers each side lost in any battle. A country was only defeated when it could no longer support its army. World War One ended when the home fronts of Russia, Austria, and Germany collapsed because their populations were starving and could no longer feed and arm their armies – and in the case of Germany, they were running out of young men to be soldiers.
In November 1918, the fighting of World War One came to an end with a cease fire known as the Armistice. The Germans had asked for this cease-fire because the country was exhausted from the war that had killed an entire generation of young men (the Allies were almost equally exhausted). The Allied side in the war (which was England, France and the United States) punished Germany in the Versailles Peace Treaty at the end of the war by making Germany take responsibility for the war and forcing Germany to pay $33 billion for the damages caused by the war. This peace treaty angered the Germans and was a direct cause for World War Two.
Interwar Years (1919 – 1939)
The destruction and death of World War One caused the governments of many European countries to collapse. In some places, the new governments were democracies in which participation in government was expanded to give women the right to vote – like in the Ireland and Czechoslovakia. However, in other countries, like Germany and the Soviet Union, the new government came to power were often dictatorships that had the goal of radically changing these countries.
The first country to change this way was Russia, which has lost 8 million men in the World War One. It fell into revolution in February 1917(even before World War One ended), when the absolute monarch Czar Nicholas was forced to abdicate by a popular revolt. A weak democratic government took power, but it was soon overthrown in October 1917 by a group called the Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were communists and they wanted to radically change Russia into a communist society. Communists want to create a society where the government owns everything and people do not work for personal gain, but to improve society. The wealth of society is divided between everyone in society. Lenin died soon after the Bolsheviks took over Russia and renamed it the Soviet Union (the first communist country in the world).
After Lenin, Joseph Stalin took over the Soviet Union. Stalin ruled the Soviet Union as a totalitarian dictator, which meant that he had full control over the people who lived in the country - he controlled where they lived and worked. He used this power to make sweeping changes to the country that took away private property (like land and houses) and forced people to work on government projects to make the country an industrial power. For example, farmers were forced to turn their private firms into giant collective farms owned by the government and they were ordered grow food for the government. If they did not grow enough food, then they would not be given any food. It is estimated that 7 million farmers were starved to death because they could not grow enough food. Stalin also forced people to build industrial projects, like factories, railroads and hydroelectric dams, across the country. This made the Soviet Union an industrial power – but it came at a terrible price in human lives. In order to make people obey his rule, he used a secret police force to called the NKVD to kill anyone who showed any opposition to his rule and to force millions more to work in prison labor camps called the GULAG. It is estimated that 20 million people died under Stalin’s rule.
Germany was shattered by the World War One and the Versailles Peace Treaty that ended the war. The weak democracy that came to power in Germany after the war was never strong. The world-wide economic crisis called the Great Depression which began in 1929 caused millions in Germany to lose their jobs and pushed many in the country into poverty. In 1932, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party used this popular anger over the Depression and the end of World War One to take over Germany with the popular support of many people. Hitler and the Nazis wanted to create a racially pure Germany in which the only people who would be able to live in Germany would be people they considered to be part of the “German” race. Everyone who they did not think was “German” would be thrown out of the country, made into slaves or killed. Hitler and Nazis focused most of their hatred on Jewish people who they irrationally saw as being responsible for all of Germany’s problems, including the peace treaty that ended World War One. Once he came to power, Hitler made himself a totalitarian dictator and ruled with the support of a secret police force called the Gestapo who would kill anyone who opposed him. He used his dictatorial powers to drive the Jews out of Germany and build up the German army to take over large parts of Europe, which his goal of making a “Greater Germany”.
During the Interwar Years in Asia, China fell into revolution and civil war when the Emperor of China was overthrown in 1905. A democratically inspired nationalist leader called Sun Yat-sen tried to build a new government in China, however in the chaos of the revolution the country fell apart with different war lords taking over parts of the country. Finally he help of the Soviet Union, Sun Yat-Sen was able to build a Nationalist army to re-take the country from the war lords. However, Sun Yat-sen died before this could happen and his assistant Chiang Kai-shek would be the one to unite China again. However, Chiang Kai-shek did not support democracy and made himself a dictator. This lead to a civil war in China, in which Mao Zedong, a communist leader supported by the Soviet Union, attempted to overthrown Chiang Kai-shek. However, Chiang Kai-shek had the stronger army and was able to defeat Mao and communists, but he was unable to destroy them. In 1934, Mao was forced to lead his army on a 6,000 mile retreat across China called the Long March. While Mao lost most of his army during the Long March, he was able to keep enough support so was able to rebuild his army and continue the civil war against Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists.
World War Two (1939 – 1945)
World War Two was the worst war in human history. More than 60 million people (2.5% of the world population) were killed in this conflict. The war was fought as two conflicts, one in Europe and the other in Asia.
World War Two in Europe began in September 1939, when Hitler ordered the German army to attack the country of Poland. Hitler was joined by Stalin in this attack, and in a few short weeks Germany and the Soviet Union conquered Poland and divided it between them. In the spring of the next year, Hitler attacked the countries of Western Europe and, again in just a few weeks, conquered most of Western Europe. The only country to hold out was Britain under the leadership of Winston Churchill. Churchill rallied the British people to hold out against Hitler’s Germany despite the daily bombing raids the Germany air force carried out on Britain by saying that Britain would "Never Surrender". The British fought back in the Battle of Britain and prevented Germany from invading Britain. Unable to conquer Britain, Hitler next turned to attack Stalin’s Soviet Union. Hitler’s attacked the Soviet Union to fulfill his goal of gaining “living space” for the German people. , Hitler broke his treaty with Stalin and launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union and nearly captured the Soviet capital of Moscow before the Germany army was stopped by the winter. Hitler considered the Russian people to be “sub-human” and he wanted to build a German empire in Russia and turn the Russians into slaves. The war between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union was a brutally vicious war in which both sides killed prisoners of war and civilians. For the first two years of the war, the Germans were winning the war, but in the summer of 1943, the Soviets were able to turn the tide by winning the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk. By this time, the United States had joined the Allied side (Britain, France and Soviet Union) in the war and together they fought for two more years to defeat Nazi Germany. The United States played a crucial role in the Allied war effort because it is larger industrial base. It could produce the weapons the Allied side needed to defeat Germany - this is the reason the United States was called the "Great Arsenal of Democracy." The war in Europe only ended in the spring of 1945, when the Soviet army captured the German capital of Berlin and Hitler committed suicide. However, before he died, over the course of World War Two, Nazi Germany carried out the Holocaust, one of the worst genocides in history when it attempted to kill all of the Jewish people in Europe. As the German army had conquered Europe, it had rounded up millions of Jewish people to be sent extermination camps like Auschwitz. In all, the Nazis killed six million Jews and four million other people they considered “sub-human”.
World War Two in Asia began when Japan attacked China in 1937 to get resources it needed for its industry. The Japanese were allied with Nazi Germany. The Japanese attack on coastal China was only the start of move to conquer large parts of Southeast Asia and the Pacific Ocean with the goal of building a Japanese Empire. The Japanese brutally treated the people they conquered. Chinese people. Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government was not able to stop the Japanese invasion, and many Chinese people turned to support Mao and the communists during the war. . Then in 1941, the Japanese attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. In response the United States entered World War Two on the side of the Allies (Britain, France and Soviet Union). The United States began fighting the Japanese for control of the Pacific Ocean and assisting the Chinese in their war against Japan. After four years of brutal island fighting, in which the United States slowly pushed the Japanese back across the Pacific, the United States ended the war by dropping two atomic bombs on Japan. After the atomic bombs were dropped, Japan quickly surrendered.
The development and use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War Two introduced a radical new weapon to war. By harnessing the power from splitting the atom, the United States was able to build a bomb that could destroy an entire city in seconds. However, the United States was not the only country to build the atomic bomb. Shortly after the war, the Soviet Union also developed the atomic bomb. This set the stage for the Cold war conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that would dominate the second half of the twentieth century.
Cold War (1945 – 1989)
At the end of the World War Two, the only major powers left in the world were the United States and the Soviet Union. These two countries were called “Super Powers” because they controlled and influenced events around the world. These two countries were hostile to each other because they had very different views about the world. The United States was a capitalist democracy and the Soviet Union was a communist dictatorship. Between 1945 and 1989, these two countries fought a global conflict called the Cold War. In this conflict, the two countries acted toward each other like they were at war, however because of nuclear weapons, they could not directly fight each other – that is why it was said the war was “cold” (a “hot” war means fighting). Instead, they fought by supporting other groups in conflicts around the world. The Soviet Union supported groups that were fighting to spread communism around the world and the United States supported groups that were opposed to communism.
After World War Two in Europe, the continent was divided by the United States and the Soviet Union. The United States build permanent bases in Europe and defended the rebuilding of democracy and capitalism in Western Europe. The United States even rebuild and protected the western part of Germany, which became the country of West Germany. The Soviet Union made all of the countries of Eastern Europe into communist countries that were defended by the Soviet Union. Germany was divided into two countries. Europe remained divided between the United States and the Soviet Union until 1989, when communism began to fall apart and the countries of Eastern Europe became capitalist democracies.
In Asia, after World War Two, the Soviet Union supported Mao Zedong in the Chinese Civil War. Despite, United States’ help to Chiang Kai-shek, Mao was able to win the Chinese Civil War and make China a communist country in 1949. Mao enacted radical plans to make China into a Communist country. First, in 1958, he announced the Great Leap Forward to make China an industrial country in 10 years. Mao ordered the peasants to move onto large communal farms and work in back-yard steel furnaces. The result was a massive famine that killed as many as 50 million people. After this, in 1966, Mao announced the Cultural Revolution, in which the young people of China were encouraged to rebel against the authority of the government. The result was social chaos that only ended when the army was sent in to restore order across China.
Despite the problems in China, communism continued to spread across Asia. After China fell to communism, the next Cold War battle began in 1950 when Communist North Korea attacked Democratic South Korea. The United States fought to defend the South and the Soviet Union supported the North. After several years of fighting, with neither side able to win, both sides signed a cease-fire and Korea remained divided between a democratic South Korea and a communist North Korea. The third Cold War conflict in Asia were the Vietnam Wars, when the North Vietnamese, lead by Ho Chi Minh, fought first the French for independence and then the United States to make all of Vietnam a communist country. The wars in Vietnam raged from the mid 1950’s all the way to 1975, when the United States pulled out of the war.
Following World War Two, the nation of Israel was created in the Middle East as homeland for the Jewish people. The near destruction of the Jewish people in the Holocaust convinced them and the world that the Jewish people needed their own country. However, many of the Arab people in the Middle East opposed the creation of Israel because it was being formed on Arab land. The Palestinian people were an Arab people who had lived in the area that was to become Israel. The wanted their own country of Palestine. As a result, on the day Israel was created in 1948, it was attacked by the Arab nations. Israel had to fight, and ultimately defeated the Arabs in this first war. The Arabs attempted to destroy Israel in two more wars in 1967 and 1973. In both of these wars, the region of the Middle East became part of the Cold War conflict as the Soviet Union supported the Arab nations and the United States supported Israel. Israel won both of these wars. However, the Palestinian people lost their country and were forced to live in refugee camps. They were organized to fight against Israel by Yasser Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization. This group used terrorist attacks to hurt Israel.
End of the Cold War (1989 – Present)
Over the course of the second part of the twentieth century, it became clear that the communist countries could not compete with the democratic countries. Quite simply, people in the democratic capitalist countries in Europe, North America and Asia (Japan and South Korea) were freer and enjoyed a higher quality of life than people in the communist countries. All across the communist world, governments tried to reform, but the communist system could not be fixed easily. In the Soviet Union, the leader Mikhail Gorbachev came to power with the goal of reforming the Soviet Union and ending the Cold War with the United States. He succeeded in negotiating an end to the Cold War with American President Ronald Regan. He also carried out the policies of Glasnost and Perestroika. Glasnost gave people in the Soviet Union freedom of speech and Perestroika tried to reform the economy by letting people run their own businesses. However, his efforts to fix the communist system in the Soviet Union result in the collapse of the Soviet Union. Quite simply, when people were given a choice about communism, they chose to get rid of communism. First, in 1989, the countries of Eastern Europe which has been communist since the end of World War Two, rebelled against Soviet rule and became democratic countries. Then, in 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist and country of Russia was reborn.
At roughly, the same time, the communist government in China, under the rule of Deng Xiaoping began to reform by allowing American and European countries to build factories in China and by making the country more capitalist and less communist. However, unlike Gorbachev, when the Chinese people asked for democracy in 1989 at large protests in Tiananmen Square, Deng Xiaoping ordered the Chinese army to crush the protests. As a result, China remained communist in name, but slowly move to being more capitalist – but without democracy.
The end of the Cold War meant that the United States was the only Super Power left in the world.