Prompt: “Assess relative impact of World War I”

Trevor Meylach

4/17/09

Period 1

Mr. Marshall

AP World History

Check-off list:

Planning

Thesis

Historical Context

Analysis V

Rule of Three XII

Groupings V

Additional Documents VIII

Point of Views VII

Reliability of Documents VII

All Documents were used

Sprite Categories IV + Environmental

Topic Sentence VII

Segue/Closure VII

Long-Term Effects VIII

Short-Term Effects XIII

Transitions VII

Body Paragraphs V

Profound Thesis Statement

DBQ answers all parts of the question

Shows Change Over Time

Continuity IV

Connection X

Time is mentioned throughout the DBQ

Compare and Contrast VIII

-Cover Page (with heading)

-Bibliography Included (MLA Style)

-5 minimum sources (XVI)

Planning:

Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points included the establishment of countries on borders of ethnic groups which would avoid conflicts within a country and thusly avoid revolutions and it would also make it easier for these nations to balance their power in a League of Nations. Wilson labeled this concept “national self-determination”

  • Social:
  • The 8-10 million deaths of WWI depressed the masses
  • Refugees from the war migrated to the U.S and France primarily but nationalist feelings amongst native citizens spurred anti-immigrant feelings and the passing of anti-immigration laws
  • At the Paris Peace Conference the Japanese proposal of treating all races equal was rejected
  • While the Western world experience a large decline in the population as a result of the War China actually experienced population growth with unfortunate ramifications
  • During the War the importance of professionals and wealth increased which caused the importance of lineage to decrease and the importance of the middle class to increase as well
  • The treatment of the labor force didn’t change
  • In 1920 the 19th Amendment granted women’s suffrage; this accompanied the growing importance and freedom of women
  • In Russia where a new oppressive government had replaced the old oppressive government the treatment of the people as only workers grew. Since the Soviet Union was a Communist nation there was no personal wealth and the role of the citizens could be equated to serfs of the government
  • The global depression drove much of the world’s population into poverty and out of their homes, people went without food or shelter for extended periods of time and many died of starvation
  • Political:
  • At the Paris Peace Conference the dominant attitudes of the U.S, British, and French neglected the interests of other nations and peoples
  • The U.S isolationism caused them to not join the League of Nations and thusly prevented Wilson’s Fourteen Points from being accepted. Instead the Treaty of Versailles was signed in 1919 and it imposed unreasonable punishments on Germany
  • The Treaty also established a League of Nations
  • Many new nations were formed in the post-war period
  • By 1921 the Communists in Russia had defeated all opposing powers. In 1922 they merged with Communist Ukraine and established the USSR
  • The Establishment of Turkey and the division of all Ottoman lands into separate nations prevented an establishment of a Middle Eastern empire
  • The British and other world powers controlled territories in the Middle East, Africa and Asia through the mandate system which was basically a continuation of the furthering of imperialist goals
  • In Stalin’s Russia the man of steel took complete control and executed all who opposed him. He collectivized the agricultural economy and industrialized and sent his prisoners to labor camps called gulags.
  • During the global depression of the 30’s many nations called for autarchy (independence from the global economy)
  • In Italy Benito Mussolini took control of the Fascist Party and then took control of Italy
  • In Germany Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor, his radical beliefs made him a wild gamble at hope against the growing popularity of Communism in Germany. Hitler went beyond Chancellor and declared himself the Fuhrer or ruler of Germany or the Third Reich as he dubbed his empire.
  • In China the government of Chiang Kai-shek was challenged by the Communist Party whichwas headed by Mao Zedong. Chiang’s Guomindang Party pushed Zedong’s Communists out of China and out of the estimated 100,000 who began with the Communists in this Long March, nearly 96,000 were killed.
  • The Japanese pushed into China in 1937 and the Guomindang government retreated westward
  • Economic:
  • Germany was forced to pay huge reparations to the Allies in the Treaty of Versailles
  • Lenin’s New Economic Policy that allowed peasants to own land and sell crops, merchants to trade, and workshops to distribute goods on the free market saved it from economic disintegration
  • The Japanese Economy grew four times faster than that of Europe during the War and the Chinese economy grew four times slower than that of Europe during the War
  • In Stalin’s series of Five Year Plans he rapidly industrialized the Soviet Union to pay for its investments, Russia collectivized its agriculture which meant that peasants would work together on commonly owned fields and all revenues would go to the government. The peasants would be paid in rations.
  • In 1929 the New York Stock Market crashed, the crashed evolved into a global depression. The U.S economy shrunk by half and the unemployment rate rose to 25%, global production dropped 36% and global trade dropped 62%.
  • American banks stopped loaning money to the Germans and Austrians for their reparations and when they couldn’t pay their reparations Britain and France could not repay their war loans to the U.S
  • The Depression spread to Europe and the French and British endured by forcing their colonies to buy goods from them. The unemployment rate in Germany grew drastically and more than half of the population was driven to poverty
  • The U.S, France, and Britain’s governments intervened with their economies but maintained their democracies but Germany and Japan became war hungry military machines
  • The non-industrial regions of the world that produced the raw materials that were exported to the industrial world were also hit hard by the depression as the industrial world couldn’t buy as much of their products during the Depression and several of these non-industrial nations, especially the ones in Latin America, began to form dictatorships with authoritarian rule
  • South Africa boomed during the Depression because gold and copper prices rose. The Russians also boomed because of Stalin’s series of Five Year Plans
  • Technological:
  • In the 1920’s aviation became a sport and a way of showing technological accomplishments amongst industrial nations
  • In the 1930’s aviation became more of a means of transportation, business, and male preserve
  • The world powers began to compete in the building of aviation technologies with the rapid production of newer models of planes and weaponry in a post-war arms race
  • Electricity began to bring modernity to the households of the middle class and provided power for several helpful appliances
  • Radio technology that had been used during the war was applied to the home country with the creation of hundreds of broadcasting stations
  • During the war much was discovered about the transmitting of diseases though unhygienic practices and after the war many advances were made in waste management and hygiene technologies and new medical technologies like the x-ray improved the quality of diagnoses and treatments
  • Several discoveries about the nature of atoms were made
  • Albert Einstein proposed that time, space, and mass were relative to each other
  • Advances in sociology in the post-war era also rocked the world
  • Environmental:
  • The war left Europe scarred with trenched and bomb craters
  • Many forests were destroyed to make trenches, build factories, and build roads and railroads.
  • The urban environment was transformed by automobiles and skyscrapers
  • The gasoline-powered tractor made the farming of large tracts of land possible
  • Dams and canals, technologies that had been put to much use in the War began to be used by businesses and manufacturers; the increased building of dams and canals transformed the waterways of theworld

ESSAY:

Background Information:World War 1 was a war unlike any other before; due to new technological advances that were products of the industrial revolution war could now be fought over huge tracts of land with the ability to rapidly deploy massive numbers of soldiers. Short-term Effect:As a result of the ability to deploy soldiers this fast and the new weaponry that they used to fight more soldiers were killed in this war than in any previous war. Background Information Contd.: By the end of the war it was of a consensus that peace needed to be had and, eager for peace and the Paris Peace Conference was called but unfortunately here the leaders of France, Britain and the U.S ignored the will of the rest of the world. U.S President Woodrow Wilson proposed his Fourteen Points, a plan that focused on national self-determination (placing national borders on ethnic and linguistic borders to avoid internal conflict) as the proper means of repairing Europe and the rest of the world. Connection:Wilson’s idea of nations’ borders being drawn based on ethnic and linguistic borders is very similar to the way that borders were drawn in the post-WWII era; many of these borders still exist today after the decolonization that lasted through the Cold War era. Wilson also proposed a League of Nations but the U.S populous’ isolationist feelings prevented the U.S from joining when this was established in 1919 and as a result the Treaty of Versailles was enacted. Thesis:The unfortunate effects of the First World War had such a long reach that we are still seeing them today, while some were highly beneficial the majority of the effects were oppositely detrimental; some apparent patterns that made themselves apparent in the post-WWI period are political instability, economic fragmentation, and social transformation (for better or for worse) that would result from the neglectful attitudes of Britain, France, and the U.S at the Paris Peace Conference and the unreasonable punishments enacted by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919; other apparent patterns include technological evolution and environmental transformation that are traceable to the advancements made in technology in the WWI and pre-WWI era.Segue:Of these trends one of the most apparent and harmful was the political instability and lack of power balance that was brought on by the harmful aspects of the Treaty of Versailles.

Grouping 1: Political Instability: Background Information: For centuries prior to the Great War the nations of Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Russia, and the rest of the European Powers along with (later on) Japan had set about building vast global empires. Topic Sentence: During the First World War the European Powers seized the opportunity to attempt and gain European land from their rival Powers but at the end of the war borders had to change. Analysis:With the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles a large portion of the tracts of land owned by these European empires were taken away and made independent while a few nations maintained their control. Fact 1: Very much land was taken from Austria and the newly formed Hungary as well as Russia and Germany (Bulliet 747-748, Armstrong 242-243, animatedatlas.com).Additionally, according to animatedatlas.com, the Hapsburg Dynasty which ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire was completely disbanded (animatedatlas.com). Fact 2:Out of these territories several new nations were formed including Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia while Romania and Italy expanded (Bulliet 748, animatedatlas.com). Short-Term Effect:The establishment of these nations to separate the borders of the Central Powers and the rest of Europe was intended to deter them from launching future strikes, these nations were for all purposes “buffer nations”; unfortunately the establishment of these nations had an opposite effect. Long-Term Effect:While these new nations did help to maintain peace for a while it was possibly their existence that may have contributed greatly to the tension that brought on WWII for while it may have been necessary to create these nations to both appease the people and create buffers, there may have been an excess of land. Fact 3:After their unfortunate choice to side with the Central Powers in the war the Ottoman Empire was disbanded by the Treaty of Versailles and the Turks were left with to defend themselves; they succeeded in protecting the area that is now Turkey in Asia Minor and in 1923 Ataturk declared the nation of Turkey (Bulliet 753, Armstrong 243, Spodek 605).Continuity: Compare-Contrast:Unlike the Central Powers and Russia, Britain and France were not only able to maintain much of their previously held colonies but they were also able to continue in their colonialism as supported by the Treaty of Versailles with the mandate system; out of the Ottoman Empire France mandated Lebanon and Syriawhile Britain mandated Palestine,Transjordan, and Iraq (Bulliet 752-753, Spodek 605-607, historyscoop.wordpress.com). The website history.worldpress.comis an excerpt from Professor David Woodward account of the warring against the Ottomans; in it the disintegration of the empire is termed as Balkanization and tells of how the British and French used the excuse to mandate the area that if they were to grant self-determination to the freed lands then the result would the balkanization of those new nations (history.worldpress.com).Transition:In addition to the removal of territory and establishment of new nations, the Treaty of Versailles and more so the Paris Peace Conference itself had one dominant effect – aside from the monetary orders given – it enraged or neglected all other nations aside from the U.S, Britain, and France; the effect would be the spread of revolutionary ideas throughout Europe and the eventual onset of the Second World War. Fact 1:During the Paris Peace Conference U.S President Woodrow Wilson, British prime minister David George, and French premier Georges Clemenceau basically worked amongst themselves and ignored the interests of Italy and Japan along with thousands of delegates from different peoples while the Central Powers and Russiaweren’t even invited to the conference that would ultimately decide their own fait (Bulliet 746, Spodek 605-606). Fact 2: Short-Term Effect:As a result of the neglect of Russia due to its being in a civil war the Communists were able to take absolute power and while the effect of this may not have permeated Russian borders otherwise it was due to, at least in part, the neglect of Russian interests in the Treaty of Versailles that encouraged them to work with Germany during early WWII(Bulliet 746, www2.sunysuffolk.edu). Long-Term Effect: It is possible that is Russian interests had been respected at the Paris Peace Conference WWII would have seen a much quicker defeat of Germany and subsequently a largely smaller amount of deaths in the war. POV:Many of the people of the world, including some in seats of power, recognized and were upset with the disregarding attitudes with which the three world leaders went about drawing up the Treaty of Versailles (Bulliet 746).Reliability:In the words of the British Secretary of the time, Arthur Balfour, they were “three all-powerful, all-ignorant men, sitting there carving up continents” (Bulliet 746). Fact 3:Long-Term Effect:What likely resulted in large part from the overly neglect and overly harsh punishment of Germany and the ignoring of the interests of Italy (who had fought against the Central Powers) was the adoption fascist policies and the eventual rule of Hitler and Mussolini (respectively) and finally the launching of the Second World War (Bulliet 746, 773-775; Andrea 394). Short-Term Effect: Connection to Economic & Social:In accumulation with the global economic fragmentation and the resulting widespread social dismay, several of the European nation looked to new types of government for salvation: Russia and Hungary became communist dictatorships although Hungary later became conservative; Germany and Italy became fascist dictatorships; and Romania, Yugoslavia, Portugal, Poland, Spain, and Greece became conservative dictatorships while Turkey was a secularized dictatorship(Doc 8). Compare-Contrast: Connection:In the 1920’s in China a Communist uprising led by Mao Zedong failed and over 96,000 Communists were killed by Chiang Kai-shek and his Guomindang forces; there control only lasted until 1937 when Japan invaded and pushed them out of eastern and central China (Bulliet 752, Armstrong 249-250). Compare-Contrast: Connection:While the United States, Britain, and France never changed their form of government in this period they did see socialist booms in the mid-1920’s and during the Depression all three nations had to regulate their trade and taxes to avoid disintegration (Bulliet 772, chicousd.org). Segue:The Great War had already cost a huge deal of resources and that accompanied with the harsh punishments imposed by the Treaty of Versailles led to a period off tragic global economic fragmentation.