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The Outbreak of World War I
Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip -
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World Conflict
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A New Kind of War
The United States was a formal participant in World War I from April 6, 1917 until the war's end in November 1918. -
The Collapse of Empires
The Fourteen Points was a speech given by United States President Woodrow Wilson to a joint session of Congress on January 8, 1918. The address was intended to assure the country that the Great War was being fought for a moral cause and for postwar peace in Europe. -
Collapse of the Ottoman Empire
On October 13, 1918, the Ottoman Empire signed a treaty with the British ending World War I in the Middle East. -
Collapse of Germany
The emperor, Frederick William Victor Albert stepped down from power. Germany became a democracy, often referred to as the Weimar Republic. -
Treaty of Versailles
One of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. -
Weakness in Germany's Government
Weimar Republic faced numerous problems, including hyperinflation, political extremists,and hostility from the victors of World War I, who tried twice to restructure Germany's reparations payments through the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan. -
The Rise of Nazi Party
There was an advertisement in an anti-Semitic newspaper in Munich and at Hitler's insistence, moved the public meeting to a beer cellar that would hold about a hundred. Hitler astounded everyone with a highly emotional, at times near hysterical manner of speech making. By his astounding speeches, he would win people over and by the end of 1920 he had about three thousnad members in his Nazi Party. -
League of Nations
Was an intergovernmental organization founded as a result of the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War. It was the first permanent international organization whose principal mission was to maintain world peace -
The Creation of Mein Kampf
While in prison, Hitler wrote volume one of Mein Kampf (My Struggle) This work detailed Hitler's radical ideas of German nationalism, antisemitism, and anti-Bolshevism. Linked with Social Darwinism, the human struggle that said that might makes right, Hitler's book became the ideological base for the Nazi Party's racist beliefs and murderous practices. -
Cold War
a sustained state of political and military tension between the powers of the Western world, led by the United States and its NATO allies, and the communist world, led by the Soviet Union. This began after the success of their temporary wartime alliance against Nazi Germany, leaving the USSR and the US as two superpowers with profound economic and political differences.