world history

  • The Weimar Republic - Germany governed by the Weimar Republic 1918-1933

  • Hyperinflation & economic depression

  • Extreme Nationalism and racism → Nazism

  • Social Darwinism influenced Hitler to believe in the superiority of the German races

  • Nazis used Henry Ford’s assembly line and other new things of the 20th Century to kill unwanted people

  • Nazis are not left-wing (Make Germany Great Again)

  • Hitler tried to start an armed uprising against the Weimar Republic in late 1923

    • Mein Kampf - Hitler’s views on race

  • Nazis were a small splinter group until the 1929 Great Depression until they won 38% of the vote in the 1932 election, becoming the largest party in the German Reichstag

  • The Reichstag building was destroyed by fire and Hitler blamed the Communist Party

    • Hitler became chancellor after the German president dies

  • Nuremberg Laws and Kristallnacht

  • Hitler recovered Germany’s economy by violating the Great War peace settlement through rearmament

  • Hitler supported Italy in its imperialist aggression in Ethiopia

    • Germany also annexed Austria

  • Britain's Prime Minister appeased Hitler then Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939

    • France and Britain declared war on Germany 2 days after the invasion

  • Blitzkrieg (lightning war) Hitler’s army crushed Poland in four weeks 

    • Est. Vichy government in France

  • Italy was an ally & Soviet Union was a friendly neutral, and only Britain was unconquered

  • Germany and Soviet Union signed a nonaggression pact but attacks them anyway

  • The Dutch, Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes received preferential treatment


4/19/24 (no class 4/17/24)

  • Western democracies lacked the will to oppose them

  • Italy completed its conquest of Ethiopia, projecting fascist power into Africa

  • Japanese invaders captured Nanjing, and they celebrated with the Rape of Nanking, killing 200K Chinese civilians

  • Isolationism remained powerful

    • Congress agreed to allow warring nations to buy arms in November 1939

  • Japanese high command planned to attack the United States

    • Tripartite Pact (1941) - FDR announced a trade embargo that denied Japanese access to oil

  • Dec. 7, 1941 - Pearl Harbor; the attack sank all of the fleet’s battleships, killed more than 2400 Americans, and almost crippled US war capacity in the Pacific

  • Americans instantly unified in their desire to avenge the attack

  • Dec. 8, 1941 - US declared war against Japan then 3 days later Italy and Germany declared war on the US

  • Americans with Japanese ancestry to be stigmatized

  • The government warned about espionage and internal subversion, with posters warning that “loose lips sink ships”

  • Executive Order 9066, which sent all Americans of Japanese descent to 10 makeshift internment camps

    • No case of subversion by a Japanese American was ever uncovered

  • Double Victory “V” Campaign - Seeking “victory over our enemies at home and victory over our enemies on the battlefield abroad”; asserted by the Pittsburgh Courier

  • Executive Order 8801 (mid-1941)- Created the Committee on Fair Employment Practices to investigate and prevent discrimination in hiring practices

  • Double V Campaign supported by the NAACP → catalyst for the Civil Rights movement

  • In 1942, numerous reports reached the US that Hitler was sending Jews, religious and political dissenters, homosexuals, and others to concentration camps

  • The World Jewish Congress appealed to the Allies to bomb the death camps and the railroad tracks leading to them, and the Allies repeatedly denied the requests, arguing that they couldn’t deviate from their military missions

  • Russia discovered Auschwitz in Poland in January

  • In Nov. 1943, FDR and Churchill agreed to launch a massive 2nd-front assault in Northern France, code-named Overlord, in May 1944

    • D-Day (June 6, 1944) - Allied soldiers finally succeeded in securing the beachhead, within a week, a flood of soldiers, tanks, and other military equipment pushed Allied forces toward Germany, on Aug. 25, the Allies liberated Paris


4/22/24

  • Manhattan Project, Los Alamos Testing Site, July 1945, convert nuclear energy into a superweapon before the Germans

  • Aug. 6, U.S. dropped a bomb on Hiroshima (250K dead by obliteration, injury, and radiation poisoning), 3 days later, U.S. dropped another bomb on Nagasaki this time then Japan surrendered

    • 80K incinerated

  • Yalta Conference - Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt (Big 3) met to discussed their plans for the post-war world

  • The Big 3 created the United Nations (permanent members: China, France, GB, USSR, and the US)

  • WWII → Cold War

    • Clashing Soviet and American interests

  • Allies divided occupied Germany

  • Churchill warned about an “iron curtain”

  • Marshall Plan by George C. Marshall - Over the next 5 years, the U.S. spent $13 billion to restore the economies of 16 European nations

  • The U.S. made a six-pronged defense strategy in the name of containment

  • The U.S. strove to maintain a nuclear advantage, and the superpowers became locked in an escalating nuclear arms race

  • WWII → national liberation movements against war-weakened imperial powers

  • Ideological Contest

    • Capitalism v. Communism

  • Anticommunism

  • Vigilance against subversion

  • SOCIALISM - PEOPLE OWN THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION

  • COMMUNISM - THE STATE OWNS THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION


4/24/24

  • Brown v. Board of Education - Plessy v. Ferguson unconstitutional

  • Dwight Eisenhower sent the 101st airborne unit of the US Army to ensure that the students could enroll without facing violence from white mobs for the Little Rock Nine

  • Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted for 381 days

  • “Outside Agitator” - The Civil Rights Movement is not a natural, homegrown movement

  • Escalating Tensions of the Cold War

    • Nuclear arms race

    • An ideological contest between capitalism and communism

    • Russia launches 1st artificial Earth satellite before America (1957)

  • American National Exhibition in Moscow (Jul. 1959) - Showcase all the U.S. has to offer

    • President Nixon and Soviet Premier Khrushchev engaged in an impromptu debate about Communism v. Capitalism in front of an “average” kitchen set (Kitchen Debate)

  • After WWII, nationalist movements grew economically (seeking industrialization and development), politically (seeking other industrialized nations), and intellectually (reacting against Western assumptions of white supremacy)

  • Former colonies faced intense pressure to align themselves ideologically and economically

  • Dependency Theory - The first regions to industrialize (Western Europe & the US) in the 19th Century locked in a lasting economic advantage magnified by colonialism and recolonialism

    • The prosperity of Europe and the US was built on the impoverishment of other regions

  • Modernization Theory - Societies passed through phases of development from primitive to modern, and adopting the political, economic, and political practices of places like the US was the best remedy for poverty

  • Liberation Theology - Urged clergy to exercise a “preferential option for the poor” by working toward “social justice”

  • In China, Nationalist and Communist armies that had cooperated against Japanese invaders confronted each other in civil war after the end of WWII

    • Communists won under Mao Zedong and est. the People’s Republic of China in 1949

    • Shaped Japan’s reconstruction

    • US fear of the spread of Communism → Korean and Vietnam War

  • Mao proclaimed a Great Leap Forward in which industrial growth would be based on small-scale backyard workshops and steel mills run by peasants living in self-contained  communes → economic disaster, 30M people died in famines from 1960-61

  • Mao made a comeback, launching the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

  • Red Guards - Radical groups made of young people

  • Little Red Book - Scripture to the Red Guards (Mao’s thoughts and speeches); they sought to erase all traces of the “bourgeois” culture and thought

  • Ho Chi Minh declared an independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam, and the French suffered a decisive defeat at Dien Bien Phu

  • At the peak of the Vietnam War, 500K American forces joined in combat

4/29/24

  • Pan-Africanists sought solidarity and a self-governing union of all African people; the first nationalist impulse came from the US and the Caribbean. W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey are tied directly to civil rights activism in what was the old Atlantic World

    • Post-war African nationalists accepted prevailing colonial borders to avoid disputes and achieve freedom quickly

  • Kwame Nkrumah studied in the US, was influenced by socialists and Marcus Garvey, and returned to the Gold Coast after WWII and entered politics; under his leadership, it was renamed Ghana, and the nation became the first sub-Saharan state to emerge from colonialism

  • South African National Party created a segregationist system of racial discrimination known as apartheid