READ: Unit 7 Introduction – Global Conflict, 1900–Present

Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.

Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.

By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:

Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.

At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:

Unit 7 begins a little over a decade before the First World War (1914–1918). This was a conflict caused by unrestrained nationalism ... or maybe aggressive imperialism, or industrial militarism, or just a series of bad mistakes. It really depends on which historian you ask. Whatever the cause, the consequences were enormous death and suffering, including at least one genocide. The end of that war was followed by two decades of uneasy peace, even though it was apparent that the issues that had started the war remained unresolved. Instead of international cooperation and peace, the 1920s and 1930s were an era of rising nationalism and authoritarianism—expressed in communist, fascist, and nationalist regimes. Then came the terror of the Second World War (1939–1945) and the genocide known as the Holocaust. Victory for the Allies ended this war after five-and-a-half years of conflict. However, war—and even genocide—remain a part of the human experience still today.

How should we understand these thirty years or so of war and peace? What lessons do they hold for us? This era and the ways people experienced it were so traumatic that they still hold a lot of meaning today. Films and television shows about the First and Second World Wars draw huge numbers of viewers. Today, you sometimes hear politicians and protesters calling each other “fascists” or even “Nazis.” When we use terms that originated from this era as modern buzzwords, we invoke the past, although not always in an accurate or useful way. Still, there is much to be learned from a careful study of this period. So let’s go there.

The First World War may be a tragic example of a war that didn’t have to happen, but it also may be a warning that the combination of nationalism and militarism equals disaster. In the first half of the unit, we look at the evidence and debate about what started the First World War. Was it really just an assassin’s bullet, publicly and dramatically finding its target in the Archduke in Sarajevo? Or was the conflict a result of longer, darker trends underneath the surface of the convenient story we told ourselves? Did the rise of the new, self-governing communities, known as nation-states, also bring the waves of nationalism that fomented hatred and anger between nations? We’ll also think about the economic transformations that defined the Industrial Revolution. Did this marvelous new capacity for cranking out consumer goods also give us more and bigger weapons for killing each other? As railroads and airplanes expanded communication, travel, and trade, did they also deliver conflict to new destinations? Did capitalism, together with vast empires, create the capacity for total mobilization and almost endless resources for fighting?

Once we have explored how the war began, we can begin to understand the changes that followed. We can think about the individuals who served, like the Indian soldiers in the image above. We’ll discuss how their experiences changed the way they saw the world around them. We also consider how whole societies were transformed by the perhaps first “total” war in history. It involved almost everyone in many of the countries that participated, even if they were not fighters themselves. Finally, we will see how the First World War led to massive events, such as civilian mass-murders made possible by modern weapons, as well as social and economic upheavals like the Russian Revolution.

When the First World War ended in 1918, many people hoped that they could avoid another global conflict. Yet just two decades later, an even larger and more devastating war broke out. What went wrong? In the first two lessons of this unit we try to understand how the Second World War could have happened. We see how a movement for international cooperation and peace seemed to blossom in the 1920s, then quickly wilted. The treaty that ended the First World War harshly punished the losing side by taking land and collecting enormous fines. This created resentment and also destabilized the global financial system. A great economic depression in the 1930s made things worse. Democracy and international cooperation had been believed to be what could make life better for people, but that belief was now dangerously in doubt in some places. As a result, extreme nationalism reemerged, more powerfully than before. It took many forms, including racism and antisemitism. But perhaps the most menacing element was the rise of fascism, an ideology that mixes extreme nationalism and racist ideology with a call for obedience, action, and violence.

Fascists and people with similar ideas emerged in many places, including the United States. They actually managed to take power in a few countries, including Italy, Japan, and Germany. In the 1920s, Japan began to take territory in nearby countries, mostly China, and the international community failed to stop them. In the 1930s, Fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany began to invade their vulnerable neighbors in Europe and North Africa. Again, nobody was willing to stop them. Germany kept pushing the limits until, in 1939, Britain and France warned Germany not to invade Poland. But invade it did, so Britain and France declared war, marking the start of the Second World War.

The war itself lasted more than five years, cost tens of millions of lives, and reached nearly every corner of the globe. The world sort of organized into two sides, with Germany, Japan, Italy, and some smaller countries becoming known as the Axis powers. They fought against a vast alliance, sometimes called the Allied powers, that included Britain, France, the United States, the Soviet Union, and dozens of smaller states. These allies won, in the end. Their victory was partly due to larger numbers and economies, but their superior technology certainly gave them an edge as well. Humanity’s ability to kill reached new heights in this war, culminating in the nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which forced Japan’s surrender and ended the war.

Through pre-war aggression and military campaigns during the war, the Axis powers had been able to build vast empires, but after 1941 they were gradually driven back and defeated by an alliance of other powers. It was dramatic. It was epic. It’s been the subject of books, films, plays, paintings, ballets, operas, video games, and even board games. But the global battlefront is only part of the story. The Second World War was also a collective human experience of devastation and terror. The war years allowed the Nazi party in Germany to carry out the largest planned, mass murder of a group of people in world history—the Holocaust. Other states carried out war crimes against civilian populations across wide regions of Europe and Asia. These were less deliberate, but still horrific. The war also brought about the detention of civilian populations like Japanese Americans in the US and Italians in Britain, even in these most democratic of the Allied powers. It created millions of refugees, who still had no home or way to get home at the end of the war. Furthermore, when the war ended in 1945, it was not clear the fighting was really over. The two countries who came out of the war the strongest—the United States and the Soviet Union—were deeply suspicious of each other.

Once again, as in 1914, world leaders in 1945 met to try to resolve these problems and prevent similar conflicts in the future. They wondered, unsure, whether they could do better than the previous generation of leaders. Things looked pretty bleak. What would happen next? No spoilers, but there’s a reason the next unit is not called “World Peace Achieved!”

Trevor Getz is a professor of African and world history at San Francisco State University. He has been the author or editor of 11 books, including the award-winning graphic history Abina and the Important Men, and has coproduced several prize-winning documentaries. Trevor is also the author of A Primer for Teaching African History, which explores questions about how we should teach the history of Africa in high school and university classes.