Key Concepts in 19th-20th Century Political and Social Movements

Marxists

They believed that industrialization brought about an inevitable struggle between laborers and the class of capitalist property owners.

Anarchists

People who renounced parties, unions, and any form of modern mass organization, and fell back on the tradition of conspiratorial violence.

Syndicalists

Embraced a strategy of strikes and sabotage by workers, hoping that a general strike by all workers would bring down the capitalist state and replace it with trade associations.

Social Democrat Party

Believed that democracy and social welfare go hand in hand and that diminishing the sharp inequalities of class society is crucial to fortifying democratic culture.

Labour Party

Founded in Britain in 1900, this party represented workers and was based on socialist principles.

Women's suffrage

Campaigns led by women to gain the right to vote and run for office.

Dreyfus Affair

The 1894 French scandal involving accusations that a Jewish captain sold military secrets to the Germans.

Antisemitism

Refers to hostility toward Jewish people.

Zionism

A political movement that the Jewish people constitute a nation and are entitled to a national homeland in Palestine.

Pogrom

Russian term for violent attacks on civilians usually aimed at Jewish communities.

Kulturkampf

Cultural struggle.

Bolsheviks

Advocated for the destruction of capitalist political and economic institutions and started the Russian Revolution.

Mensheviks

Advocated slow changes and a gradual move toward socialism.

Russian Revolution 1905

Workers went on strike, soldiers mutinied, and peasants revolted resulting in pledges of individual liberties and provided for the election of a Duma.

Young Turks

Reformists movement that aimed to modernize the Ottoman Empire, restore parliamentary rule, and depose Sultan Abdul Hamid II.

Sigmund Freud

Austrian physician who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis and suggested that human behavior was largely motivated by unconscious and irrational forces.

Yellow journalism

A style of newspaper reporting that emphasizes sensationalism over facts, often exaggerating or distorting news to attract readers.

Modernism

Believed that the world had radically changed and that this change should be embraced; that traditional aesthetic values and assumptions about creativity were ill suited to the present; and developed a new conception of what art could do that emphasized expression over representation and insisted on the value of novelty, experimentation, and creative freedom.

Pavlov

Russian physician asserted that animal behavior could be understood as a series of trained responses to physical stimuli.

Nietzsche

German philosopher argued that bourgeois faith in such concepts as science, progress, democracy, and religion represented a futile and reprehensible search for security and truth.

Sepoy

the traditional term for Indian soldiers employed by the British.

Sati

a widow immolates herself on her husband's funeral pyre

Immolates

kill or offer as a sacrifice, especially by burning.

Pyre

a heap of combustible material, especially one for burning a corpse as part of a funeral ceremony.

Opium War

fought between the British and Quing China to protect British trade that resulted in the ceding of Hong Kong to the British.

Open Door Policy

demanded the China trade with all countries on an equal basis.

Boxer Rebellion

Chinese peasant movement that opposed foreign influence, especially that of Christian missionaries.

Russo-Japanese War

Japanese and Russian expansionists goals collided in Manchuria and Korea.

Berlin Conference

leading colonial powers met and established ground rules for the partition of Africa by European nations.

Partition

divide into parts

theory of evolution

Darwin's theory linking biology to history. Individuals who were better adapted to their environment survived, whereas the weak perished.

Pan-African conference

a 1900 assembly in London that sought to draw attention to the sovereignty of African people and their mistreatment by colonial powers.

Fashoda incident

disagreements between the French and the British over land claims in North Africa led to a standoff between armies of the two nations.

Boer War

Conflict between British and ethnically European Afrikaners in South Africa.

Spanish-American War

war in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.