Mexican Revolution Questions of the Day # 4 Daniel W. Blackmon IB HL History Coral Gables Sr. High.
World War I Selected Topics Daniel W. Blackmon IB HL History Coral Gables Sr. High School.
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Transcript of World War I Selected Topics Daniel W. Blackmon IB HL History Coral Gables Sr. High School.
Technological Innovations
• Bolt-action, magazine fed rifle
• Smokeless powder
• Machine gun (Maxim gun)
• Barbed Wire
• Quick firing artillery (French 75)
• Poison gas (chlorine, phosgene, mustard)
• Flame throwers
• Submarine (Lusitania)
• Airplane (Zeppelin, Gotha)
Underlying Technologies
• Railroads
• Telegraphs
• Telephone
• Metallurgy
• Chemicals (nitrogen based explosives)
• Canning
Organization of the State
• The Nation-State
• Conscript armies (levee en masse)
• Taxing powers
• Centralized bureaucracies
• Economic, physical, moral mobilization of the entire nation
The Home Front
• Political: Strengthening of the central government
• Economic: Economic controls, rationing
• Social: Women enter work force, receive voting rights in Great Britain and U.S.
• Intellectual: Mobilization of public opinion via propaganda and censorship
Home Front: Germany
• Burgfriede• The Kaiser offers a cessation of class and
party hostility: "I do not know parties any longer, I know only Germans."
• A "state of siege" is declared, which gave military commanders virtually untrammeled power to suppress activities detrimental to the war effort.
• This included
• the suspension of many civil rights,
• complete censorship of all publications, and
• any measures necessary for internal security and control of associations.
• Walter Rathenau, the Jewish head of Germany's largest electrical firm, is the chief organizer of the integration of the German economy with the war effort.
• Wages rose with the war, but were outstripped by price increases as a result of wartime shortages.
• Women enter the industrial work force (from approx. 1.4 million to 2.2 million), composing 37.8% of Krupps by war's end.
• Juveniles were increasingly employed, Sunday's rest, and the ten-hour day were abandoned.
• Juveniles' wages were necessary in many families to make up for the loss of real wages.
• The wages paid women and juveniles were dramatically lower than for men.
• The Law of Auxiliary Patriotic Service did provide gains for war economy workers while also regulating the movement from job to job.
• Workers councils were introduced for businesses with 50 workers or more.
• These councils were to act as intermediaries for questions regarding wages, hours, working conditions, and welfare arrangements.
• Ludendorff's policies were ruthless and totalitarian in nature. In a move that presages the Nazis, he deports 400,000 Belgian workers for forced labor in German war industries.
• By the end of 1916, the blockade is causing very severe problems in Germany--1916-17 is Germany's Turnip Winter. The potato crop that harvest was half pre-war levels.
• With an official normal intake of 2,250 calories, rationing provided only 1,350 calories in early 1916, and only 1,000 calories during the Turnip Winter--a starvation diet for those who could not afford the black market.
• An estimated 750,000 Germans starved to death.
• In addition, the surviving population was weakened for the Influenza Epidemic of 1918, which killed more people than the war itself--6,000,000 in India alone.
• The epidemic moved from east to west, and struck Germany before it reached the Allies.
• France declares Union sacrée• The initial effect was the institution of
virtual martial law, which was ruthlessly applied by a French officer corps with strong monarchist, clericalist connections (such as Foch, Castelnau and d'Esperey).
• Leading politicians such as Malvy and Caillaux were arrested. Lists of subversives were compiled.
• Censorship becomes very severe even in France, with its history of freedom of the press.
The Home Front: Great Britain
• Great Britain begins to abandon its "business as usual" attitudes by 1915.
• In December, 1915, Lloyd George pushes through the Defense of the Realm Act which organized corporatist war boards to coordinate manufacturing, transport, and supply.
The Home Front: The United States
• The US, even with the idealistic Progressive Woodrow Wilson as President, adopts policies at variance with traditional principles.
• As a war-time president, Wilson, the advocate of the New Freedom, looks more like Theodore Roosevelt and the New Nationalism of Herbert Croly.
• War Industries Board, run by Bernard Baruch, "ran a kindergarten for 1920s interventionism and the New Deal, which in turn inspired the New Frontier and the Great Society."
The Locomotive of History
• Political COT
• Economic COT
• Social COT
• Intellectual COT
• Aesthetic COT
Political
• The Russian Revolution
• Collapse of Austro-Hungarian Empire
• Collapse of German Empire
• Impoverishment of France and Great Britain
• Impact on Colonies
• Entry of U.S. into European affairs