(GCP) Years in Between the Wars Lesson

Years in Between the Wars Lesson

After World War I, there was a brief period of economic prosperity particularly in the U.S. and Western Europe when consumerism was up due to a large number of new conveniences such as the refrigerator, the first wave of feminism hit, music, art, and literature flourished and there were many new scientific discoveries such as the splitting of the first atoms.  However, as with all good things, this period came to an end with onset of the Great Depression because of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 in the United States. The dire economic conditions in many countries along with high unemployment created unstable political situations that gave rise to fanatical forms of governments such as Fascism that promised simple solutions to complicated problems.

 

 

In the Soviet Union, the government controlled the national economy through Stalin's Five Year Plans and often implemented repressive policies that had negative consequences for the population. The Weimar Republic failed in Germany as the depression hit hard in the late 1920's giving rise to Adolf Hitler and the totalitarian NAZI party. Italy, who felt slighted by the Treaty of Versailles, had already fallen to a Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini in the immediate years after WWI. The military had assumed control of Japan after WWI and continued its aggression in the Pacific because of it's need for natural resources. Between the two world wars, Western and Japanese imperial states will predominantly maintain control over colonial holdings and in some cases, they will gain more holdings through conquest, like the Japanese, or treaty settlements and in other cases face anti-imperial resistance as the British will experience with India. The United States will continue to struggle with the Depression throughout the 1930s but under the leadership of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal policies and the entrance of the US into WWII, will emerge as a superpower immediately after WWII.

 

View the information in the Rise of Totalitarian Dictators presentation below.

 

 

 

Questions to Consider

Let's do a quick check for learning and understanding.  Can you answer the questions below?

 

 

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