WHAP National Review Unit 7

[Music] Welcome back to this AP World History Review for the big upcoming AP World History Test. This is all about Unit 7, which is about global conflicts at the beginning of 20th century. And that's a broad term and it covers a lot. It covers everything from the collapse of empires in the beginnings of nation states. Big two world wars, World War I and World War II. And then the Great Depression and also we have to talk about mass atrocities in genocide. So let's get going because this is 10 minutes of history. You got a lot to do and not much time to do it in. [Music] So we'll start off with the collapse of empires, the movement from empires to nation states. And there are three big ones we got to talk about. The Ottomans, the Russians, and the Qing China Empire. The Ottomans have been collapsing for some time. In the 1860s it was the Crimean War, where the Ottomans fought alongside the British and the French against the Russians. But it really demonstrated the Ottomans overall weakness. After the war was done, the young Ottomans and then what became the young Turks hoped to modernize and secularize the Ottoman Empire. Instead, they allied with the Germans and World War I and lost and then disappeared forever. In Russia, the big problems fuelism. They also, for them, the Crimean War, they lost pretty big time and when they did, they wanted to try to modernize by ending feudalism. But it didn't really work out. And then after that, the Russians lost in a major war with the Japanese, and it was called the Russo-Japanese War. The Russians are entered World War I with Russia, but that only made matters worse. And an anger against this. There was rebellion against the Tsar and the formation of a socialist transitional government. But in the midst of all that insecurity, the Bolshevik Communist Party took over, killed the Tsar and his family, informed Soviet communism. Last up is Qing China. Qing China was the last major dynasty for China. They were unable to modernize and industrialize. And because of that, they lost, for example, in the Sino-Japanese War in the 1890s. A man named Sunyat Sen tried to make a transition from Qing China over into more democratic socialist form of government. But that only led to a fight between Mao Zedong and Chen Kai-shak, two of his students. Mao Zedong wanted communism. Chen Kai-shak wanted to move over into more of a capitalist state, but he ran a dictatorial government that lost him power and support. During World War II, Mao protected farmers, and those farmers eventually joined his side in creating the Chinese Communist state in 1949. [Music] This leads us into the big World Wars, first off with World War I. World War I was really sort of a byproduct of the late 1800s. It's like we hadn't gotten that out of that century. Things like imperialism, nationalism, and new technologies like the Catalan gun and U-boat warfare led to major alliances that hoped to deter each other, which the two big ones, the triple alliance and the triple entente. Instead, due to the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, those alliances got triggered and then Germany invaded into France through Belgium. And that got Britain into the war. Now in the midst of all that, what ended up happening was a stalemate into trench warfare and devastation for the next four years is over 10 million Europeans lost their lives. [Music] [Music] Once World War I was over, then roaring 20s took over and there was amazing economic expansion. But really that was based upon stock market expansion and over speculation through the use of credit, like buying on the margin and just using credit to buy up goods. That eventually led to a collapse of the global economy and two main governments arose to try to deal with that. Fascism and communism. [Music] Well, we kind of know that communism didn't grab the inspiration of most of the countries of this time period, but fascism unfortunately did. Hitler was able to reduce unemployment in his country all the way down to 2% or lower. And that gave people the sense that maybe he was on to something. Of course, what was so horrible about what he was doing was he was using nationalism and he was using an attack on Jewish people internally in order to rise up his own popularity. All this eventually led to his invagions of country and what we call total warfare, in which countries like Germany and other countries use propaganda technology and civilians in industrialized centers to fight the next major global war, World War II. Now because civilians were building up this wartime production, carpet bombing was used by everybody, Germany, Carpet Bomb, Britain, Britain to Germany, and also within Japan at this time. That led to major consequences of mass atrocities. Over 500,000 people lost their lives in Japan alone due to carpet bombing. Industrialized warfare allowed for the destruction of major cities and major civilian populations. But of course we know at the end of the war would really demonstrate this industrial development, and that is the use of the atomic bombs used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 in order to end the war. But unfortunately we cannot leave this time period without talking about probably one of the worst, but also very unique aspects of the 20th century. That was the development of genocide. We always say that humans in humanity to other human beings is pretty common throughout all of our history. That's pretty true. But there's something unique to the 20th century when all of a sudden there were attempts to eradicate whole populations based upon their identity. That was something we hadn't seen before. There are some big examples I want to bring up with this. The first one is the Armenian genocide. The Armenian genocide happened during World War I. When the young Turks who were under threat saw Armenians within the country as a threat because they believed they had allied themselves with their enemies, the Russians, because of a shared Orthodox Christianity background. What the Armenians ended up having happened to them was that they were forced into exile outside of the country, but as they were doing this horrible atrocities were done to them. For example, oftentimes many of them were put into caves and the caves were smoked out or basically a fire started at the beginning of the cave and then of course suffocating the people within. By the time it was done two million Armenians had lost their lives. The young Turks used this as an opportunity to try to make the Armenians into the internal enemy that would allow them to unite against the Russians. Of course the model example that everybody looks to how horrible genocide was is what happened to the Jewish Holocaust. The end of World War I, Germans felt humiliated by that defeat and that's what Edoch Hitler played on. He played on both their nationalism and their fears. When the Great Depression hit that even allowed him to go even further. The Great Depression allowed him to number one, stigmatize the Jewish people based upon stereotypes that had long been a part of European culture about Jewish ties to conspiracy use over finances and banks. But then on top of that too it allowed him to create the strong central government solution. He used the Jewish people in order to create an internal threat and that allowed him then to play up his ability to solve the problem. What's interesting and what's important about what Hitler did though was how systematic he was. He first began by stereotyping Jewish people, he then isolated them to Jewish ghettos and then eventually tried to eliminate them during World War II in what was known as the Jewish final solution. Of course by the end of this six million Jewish people lost their lives. The other big examples that were wandered in massacred to places in the 1990s and 1990s in Rwanda, there were two groups, the Tutsi and the Hutu. The Tutsi had been put in charge by the Belgians who had imperialized the country back in the 1950s. The Hutu held grievances against this in the 1990s when they had their independence. Hutu's targeted Tutsis claiming that they were the cockroaches of the country and then they attempted to eliminate all of them including their children. This too played off of this growing nationalism of the 20th century. So what are our big takeaways from these global conflicts? Number one, the huge change that took place between old empires into new nation states. Number two, world wars, two of them fought over the major issues of the 1800s that hadn't been solved yet in parallelism, technology and national identity. And last off, this all led into a unique mass atrocities. Mass atrocities everywhere from the use of technology, the use of carpet bombing, the use of the atomic bomb and of course the worst of all of them genocide, which people were targeted on the police of nationalism and the use of technology for complete eradication. That began the 20th century and of course that will then lead us into the attempted solutions afterwards. I'll see you in the next unit.