An Age of Anxiety Lecture Flashcards

Vocabulary-style flashcards covering the major political, social, and scientific shifts of the early twentieth century as described in the lecture transcript.

Adolf Hitler

An Austrian-born personification of Europe's age of anxiety who, after serving in the German army from $1914$ to $1918$, dedicated his life to a mission of saving Germany from Jews and Marxists through political and military agendas.

Lost Generation

A label given by Gertrude Stein to a group of American intellectuals and literati, such as Ernest Hemingway, who congregated in Paris after the Great War and expressed malaise and disillusionment in their work.

Oswald Spengler

A retired German schoolteacher who published 'The Decline of the West' ($1918$–$1922$), proposing that societies pass through biological-like cycles of growth and decay and that European society had entered its final stage.

Arnold J. Toynbee

A British historian who authored the twelve-volume classic 'A Study of History' ($1934$–$1961$), which analyzed the genesis, growth, and disintegration of $26$ societies.

Karl Barth

A notable Christian theologian who published 'Epistle to the Romans' in $1919$, attacking liberal Christian theology and the belief in limitless human progress as a realization of God’s purpose.

Albert Einstein

The physicist who symbolized the revolution in science with his theory of special relativity ($1905$), which showed that space and time are relative to the motion of the observer.

Uncertainty Principle

A theory established by Werner Heisenberg in $1927$ asserting that it is impossible to specify simultaneously the position and velocity of a subatomic particle, questioning established notions of truth and causality.

Sigmund Freud

A Viennese medical doctor who developed psychoanalysis, identifying a conflict between conscious and unconscious mental processes and suggesting that sexual drives are the most important source of repression.

Oedipus complex

A Freudian concept identified through dream analysis in which male children develop an erotic attachment to their mother and hostility toward their father.

Cubism

An artistic movement led by proponents like Pablo Picasso, which displayed influences from African art forms and sought to abolish the sovereignty of appearance in favor of abstraction.

Bauhaus

An institution first located in Weimar and then Dessau, Germany, that brought together innovators to create a functional building style and interior design suited for the urban and industrial landscape of the $20 ext{th}$ century.

Walter Gropius

The first director of the Bauhaus whose theory of design emphasized that form must follow function through a marriage of engineering and art, featuring simplicity of shape and extensive use of glass.

International Style

A functionalist architectural style initiated by Bauhaus architects that gradually prevailed after $1930$ and was well suited to the construction of large apartment and office complexes.

Black Thursday

$24$ October $1929$, the day a wave of panic selling on the New York Stock Exchange caused stock prices to plummet, leading to the loss of life savings for thousands and the deepening of the global economic crisis.

Economic Nationalism

A policy pursued by governments during the Great Depression to achieve economic self-sufficiency through tariff barriers ($e.g.$, Smoot-Hawley Tariff), import quotas, and prohibitions, which ultimately backfired and restricted international trade.

John Maynard Keynes

The most influential economist of the $20 ext{th}$ century who argued in 'The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money' ($1936$) that inadequate demand was the cause of the depression and urged government intervention.

New Deal

A program of sweeping economic and social reforms by Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration designed to prevent banking collapse, provide jobs via public works, and guarantee social security in old age.

Red Terror

A campaign during the Russian civil war where Lenin’s government arrested, tried, and executed suspected anticommunists known as Whites, resulting in approximately $200,000$ deaths.

War Communism

A hasty policy of nationalization in Russia where the Bolshevik government officially annulled private property and assumed control of banks, industry, and landed estates.

New Economic Policy (NEP)

Implemented by Lenin in $1921$, this plan temporarily restored a market economy and some private enterprise, allowing small-scale industries to stay in private ownership and peasants to sell surpluses at free market prices.

Joseph Stalin

The general secretary of the Communist Party, known as 'man of steel,' who triumphed over rivals by $1928$ and established an unchallenged dictatorship in the Soviet Union.

First Five-Year Plan

A blueprint for maximum centralization implemented in $1929$ by Stalin to transform the Soviet Union from an agricultural country to a leading industrial power, emphasizing heavy industry at the expense of consumer goods.

Collectivization of Agriculture

The state-enforced process in the USSR of expropriating privately owned land to create cooperative farm units, notably targeting the kulaks ($relatively wealthy peasants$).

Great Purge

A campaign of political oppression between $1935$ and $1938$ in which Stalin removed all persons suspected of opposition, leading to $8$ million citizens in labor camps and $3$ million deaths.

Fascism

A political movement and ideology based on the primacy of the state, ultranationalism, ethnocentrism, and militarism, characterized by hostile reactions to both liberal democracy and social-class visions of the future.

Blackshirts

Fascist armed squads in Italy that used violence against socialists and were instrumental in Mussolini's rise to power during the state of incipient civil war in early $1921$.

Il Duce

The title assumed by Benito Mussolini after he seized total power as dictator and consolidated a one-party state in Italy between $1925$ and $1931$.

Pact of Steel

A ten-year political, military, and ideological alliance signed in May $1939$ between fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, formalizing the Rome-Berlin Axis.

National Socialism (Nazism)

The political party and ideology led by Adolf Hitler that emphasized racial doctrines, anti-Semitism, and the creation of a race-based national community ($ext{Reich}$).

Nuremberg Laws

$1935$ laws that deprived German Jews of their citizenship and prohibited marriage or sexual intercourse between Jews and other Germans.

Kristallnacht

Known as the 'night of broken glass' (Nov $9$–$10$, $1938$), a Nazi-arranged pogrom that destroyed thousands of Jewish stores, burned synagogues, and murdered more than $100$ Jews throughout Germany and Austria.