Final Modern History

Permanent Mandate Commission

A commission created by the League of Nations to oversee the developed nations’ fulfillment of their international responsibility toward their mandates.

Balfour Declaration

A 1917 statement by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour that supported the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

Zaibatsu

Giant conglomerate firms established in Japan beginning in the Meiji period and lasting until the end of World War II.

Long March

The 6,000-mile retreat of the Chinese Communist army in 1934 to a remote region on the northwestern border of China, during which tens of thousands lost their lives.

New Deal

Franklin Delano Roosevelt's plan to reform capitalism in the United States through forceful government intervention in the economy.

Totalitarianism

A radical dictatorship that exercises complete political power and control over all aspects of society and seeks to mobilize the masses for action.

Fascism

A movement characterized by extreme, often expansionist nationalism, anti-socialism, a dynamic and violent leader, and glorification of war and the military.

Collectivization

Stalin's forcible consolidation, beginning in 1929, of individual peasant farms in the Soviet Union into large, state-controlled enterprises.

Nazism

A movement born of extreme nationalism and racism and dominated by Adolf Hitler from 1933 until the end of World War II in 1945.

Europe First Policy

The military strategy, set forth by Churchill and adopted by Roosevelt, that called for the defeat of Hitler in Europe before the United States launched an all-out strike against Japan in the Pacific.

Cold War

The post-World War II conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Truman Doctrine

The 1945 American policy of preventing the spread of Communist rule.

Marshall Plan

A 1948 American plan for providing economic aid to Europe to help it rebuild after World War II.

Modernization Theory

The belief that all countries evolved in a linear progression from traditional to mature held in the mid-twentieth century.

Liberation Theology

A movement within the Catholic Church to support the poor in situations of exploitation that emerged particularly in Latin America in the 1960s.

Arab Socialism

A modernizing, secular, and nationalist project of nation building in the Middle East aimed at economic development and developing a strong military.

Great Leap Forward

Mao Zedong's acceleration of Chinese development where industrial growth was based on small-scale backyard workshops run by peasants living in gigantic self-contained communes.

Pan-Africanists

People who, through a movement beginning in 1919, sought black solidarity and envisioned a vast self-governing union of all African peoples.