ap world age of anxiety

“lost generation”

described the disillusioned, expatriate American writers and artists in 1920s Paris (like Hemingway, Fitzgerald) who felt spiritually adrift after World War I, their traditional values shattered by the war, leading to themes of aimlessness, broken dreams, and societal critique in their modernist work

Oswald Spengler

the philosopher behind The Decline of the West, described the post-World War I era as an "Age of Anxiety," a period where Western civilization felt its world was collapsing, marked by crises, loss of faith in progress, and existential dread

Karl Barth

• a pivotal figure who challenged liberal theology,

• asserting humanity's deep sinfulness and God's transcendent grace, offering a path beyond despair not through human reason, but radical reliance on God's Word

• emphasizing faith's courageous confrontation with life's brokenness rather than seeking easy answers or illusions of control

uncertainty principle

a core quantum mechanics concept stating you can't simultaneously know a particle's exact position and momentum by Werner Heisenberg

Sigmund Freud

• developed a theory of psychoanalysis that focused on psychological rather than physiological explanations of mental disorders

• identified a conflict between conscious and subconscious mental processes that lay at the root of neurotic behaviour

• believed dreams held the key to the deepest recesses of the human psyche

Dadaism

• a radical, anti-art movement born from World War I's chaos (circa 1916), rejecting logic, reason, and bourgeois values through absurd, nonsensical, and anarchic art, performance, and literature,

• using techniques like collage, photomontage, readymades (e.g., Duchamp's Fountain), and sound poetry

• to protest war and challenge what art is, profoundly influencing Surrealism and later conceptual art

neue sachlichkeit (new objectivity)

• a German art movement in the 1920s that rejected Expressionism's idealism for a stark, unsentimental, and critical realism

• focusing on depicting the harsh realities, social injustices, and decadence of post-World War I Weimar Germany through precise, often satirical, portrayals of modern life, urban landscapes, and its marginalized figures

Great Depression

the worst global economic downturn in modern history, lasting from 1929 to 1939

• triggered by the U.S. stock market crash and marked by massive unemployment (peaking at 25% in the U.S.)

• widespread bank failures, plummeting industrial production, and extreme poverty

• fundamentally reshaped economies and societies worldwide until World War II spurred recovery. 

black thursday

he name given to October 24, 1929, the day the 1929 Stock Market Crash began and the first major wave of panic selling occurred on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), marking the start of the economic decline that led to the Great Depression. 

economic nationalism

prioritizes a nation's economy by using government intervention, protectionism (tariffs, subsidies), and restrictions (on capital/labor) to boost domestic jobs, industries, and self-sufficiency

Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act

• a U.S. law that drastically raised tariffs (taxes) on over 20,000 imported goods to protect American farmers and industries during the nascent Great Depression

• backfired spectacularly, leading to global trade collapse as other nations retaliated with their own tariffs

John Maynard Keynes

• a revolutionary British economist, the "father of modern macroeconomics," who argued that active government intervention, especially increased spending (fiscal policy), is essential to manage economic downturns, boost aggregate demand, and ensure full employment, challenging classical ideas of self-correcting markets

• The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

Franklin Delano Roosevelt

tackled the Great Depression with his New Deal, a massive series of programs and reforms from 1933-1939 focused on Relief, Recovery, and Reform, expanding government's role in the economy through agencies like the CCC (jobs), FDIC (banking), and TVA (infrastructure), creating social safety nets like Social Security, and restoring public confidence with "fireside chats"

New Deal

• a series of massive U.S. government programs and reforms under President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) from 1933-1938

• aimed at combating the Great Depression through Relief, Recovery, and Reform (the 3 Rs) by providing jobs (WPA, CCC), stabilizing the economy (FDIC for banks, SEC for markets), and reforming systems (Social Security, labor laws) to prevent future crises

• fundamentally expanding the government's role in the economy and social welfare. 

war communism

the Bolsheviks' severe economic system in Soviet Russia (1918-1921) during the Civil War

• centralizing control by nationalizing industries

• banning private trade

• forcing grain seizures from peasants (prodrazvyorstka)

• militarizing labor

• abolishing money to supply the Red Army and sustain the state,

• caused famine, economic collapse, and revolts

• eventually leading to the New Economic Policy (NEP)

new economic policy

blended socialism with limited capitalism (market trading, private enterprise) to revive the war-torn economy

Joseph Stalin

First Five-year Plan

a series of state-directed economic development programs, most famously initiated by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union (1928-1932), focusing on rapid industrialization (heavy industry like coal, steel, electricity) and agricultural collectivization, often at severe human cost

collectivization of agriculture

system where individual farms are merged into large, state-controlled or communal farms (like kolkhozes or sovkhozes in the USSR)

• to increase production, achieve efficiency, and centralize control

• often under socialist policies to fund industrialization

• historically led to peasant resistance, massive loss of life through famine (like Ukraine's Holodomor), and severe social disruption as private land and livestock were seized. 

kulaks

• wealthy peasants (thru NEP) in the Russian Empire and early Soviet Union

• seen by Communists as class enemies, especially during Stalin's forced collectivization in the 1930s, leading to mass arrests, deportations to Siberia, forced labor, and execution

great purge (1936-1938)

• Stalin's brutal campaign of political repression in the Soviet Union

• targeting perceived enemies—Old Bolsheviks, military leaders, intellectuals, ethnic minorities (Poles, Germans), and ordinary citizens—through mass arrests, show trials, torture, forced confessions, and executions

• resulting in hundreds of thousands to over a million deaths and millions sent to Gulag camps

• solidifying Stalin's absolute power by eliminating opposition through terror. 

Fascism

• a far-right, authoritarian political ideology

• emphasizing extreme nationalism, a strong centralized government

• led by a dictator, militarism, and the suppression of opposition

• placing the nation or race above individual rights

• especially attractive to middle and rural class

• emphasized chauvinism and xenophobia

chauvinism

an unreasonable, excessive belief in the superiority and dominance of one's own group, country, sex, or cause, leading to blind devotion and contempt for others, often seen as extreme nationalism

xenophobia

the fear, dislike, or prejudice against people from other countries, cultures, or groups perceived as foreign or strange

Benito Mussolini

Italian dictator (1922-1943) who founded Fascism, creating a totalitarian state with himself as "Il Duce" (The Leader), suppressing opposition, and glorifying the nation, culminating in alliances with Hitler and involvement in World War II, leading to his downfall and execution by partisans in 1945

National Socialism

National Socialism, or Nazism, was the totalitarian, far-right, and racist ideology of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) led by Adolf Hitler in Germany from 1933 to 1945. It was a form of fascism characterized by extreme nationalism, antisemitism, and a belief in the superiority of the "Aryan" race. 

• appealed to members of the lower-middle class

eugenics

a discredited pseudoscience based on the belief that the human population can be "improved" by selectively breeding people with specific "desirable" hereditary traits and discouraging or preventing those with "undesirable" traits from reproducing

Nuremberg Laws

a set of antisemitic and racist laws enacted in Nazi Germany on September 15, 1935, that provided the legal framework for the systematic persecution and marginalization of Jews and other groups.

Kristallnacht

Night of Broken Glass" or the November Pogroms, was a state-sponsored wave of violent anti-Jewish pogroms that took place throughout Nazi Germany, annexed Austria, and the Sudetenland on November 9 and 10, 1938. 

pogrom

yiddish for “devestation”