10 Grade World History Essay

Social Change After World War I

Radio was an early example of mass media, linking people over long distances. Here, an invalid woman uses radio to keep in touch with events in the outside world.

The catastrophe of World War I shattered the sense of optimism that had grown in the West since the Enlightenment. Despair gripped survivors on both sides as they added up the staggering costs of the war. Europeans mourned a generation of young men who had been lost on the battlefields.

Many people talked about a “return to normalcy,” to life as it had been before 1914. But rebellious young people rejected the moral values and rules of the Victorian Age and chased after excitement. Gertrude Stein, an American writer living in Paris, called them the “lost generation.” Others saw them as immoral pleasure-seekers.

The Roaring Twenties During the 1920s, new technologies helped create a mass culture shared by millions in the world’s developed countries. Affordable cars, improved telephones, and new forms of media such as motion pictures and radio brought people around the world closer together than ever before.

Duke Ellington was a composer, pianist, and bandleader. He referred to his music as “American Music” rather than “jazz.” His career spanned the 1920s to the 1970s.

In the 1920s, many radios tuned into the new sounds of jazz. In fact, the decade in the West is often called the Jazz Age. African American musicians combined Western harmonies with African rhythms to create jazz. Jazz musicians, like trumpeter Louis Armstrong and pianist Duke Ellington, took simple melodies and improvised endless subtle variations in rhythm and beat.

Throughout the 1920s, the popularity of jazz moved from the United States to Europe. Europeans embraced American popular culture, with its greater freedom and willingness to experiment. The nightclub and jazz were symbols of that freedom. Jazz came to embody the universal themes of creativity and self-expression.

Much of today’s popular music has been influenced by jazz. It has transcended the “Roaring Twenties” American culture to become an international musical language.

After the war, rebellious young people, disillusioned by the war, rejected the moral values and rules of the Victorian Age and chased after excitement. During the Jazz Age, this rebellion was exemplified by a new type of liberated young woman called the  flapper.  The first flappers were American, but their European sisters soon adopted the fashion. Flappers rejected old ways in favor of new, exciting freedoms.

The Flapper awoke from her lethargy (tiredness) … bobbed her hair, put on her choicest pair of earrings and a great deal of audacity (boldness) and rouge and went into battle. She flirted because it was fun to flirt and … refused to be bored chiefly because she wasn’t boring … Mothers disapproved of their sons taking the Flapper to dances, to teas, to swim, and most of all to heart.

—Zelda Fitzgerald, flapper and wife of author F. Scott Fitzgerald

New fashions, including shorter hairstyles and hemlines, were popularized by the flappers in the 1920s.

Women’s Progress Flappers were highly visible, but they were a small minority. Most women saw mixed progress in the postwar period. During the war, women had held a wide range of jobs. Although most women left those jobs when the war ended, their war work helped them win the vote in many Western countries, such as Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States. A few women were elected to public office, such as Texas governor  Miriam Ferguson  or Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman to serve in the British Parliament.

By the 1920s, labor-saving devices had become common in middle class homes. Washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and canned foods lightened the burden of household chores. Some women then sought work outside the home or did volunteer work to help the less fortunate.

Amelia Earhart was an American aviation pioneer and author. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. She was also an avid supporter of women’s rights.

In the new atmosphere of emancipation, women sought higher education and pursued careers in many areas—from sports to the arts. Women golfers, tennis players, swimmers, and pilots set new records.

Women worked as newspaper reporters, published bestselling novels, and won recognition as artists. Most professions, though, were still dominated by men. Women doing the same work as men earned much less.

Diverse Reactions to the Jazz Age Not everyone approved of the freewheeling lifestyle of the Jazz Age. In 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States ushered in  Prohibition,  which banned the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages. Temperance reformers had long sought the amendment to stop alcohol abuse. It was later repealed in part because it had spurred the growth of organized crime, which supplied illegal alcohol to speakeasies, or illegal bars.

In New York City, Prohibition agents pour barrels of illegal liquor down a manhole following a raid.

In the United States in the early 1900s, a Christian fundamentalist movement swept rural areas. Fundamentalists support traditional Christian beliefs. Popular fundamentalist preachers traveled around the country holding inspirational revival meetings. Some used the new technology of radio to spread their message.

1. SOLVE PROBLEMS What problem was Prohibition intended to solve? How well did it succeed?

Scientific Discoveries

Even before World War I, new ideas and scientific discoveries were challenging long-held ideas about the nature of the world and even of people. Like the war, science helped feed a sense of uncertainty that flowed through Western culture.

Marie Curie won two Nobel prizes, one in physics and one in chemistry, for her groundbreaking research on radioactivity. She died in 1934 from leukemia caused by exposure to radiation.

Curie Experiments with Radioactivity The ancient Greeks were the first to propose that all matter is composed of tiny, indivisible atoms. Over the centuries, most scientists came to accept this idea. But discoveries made in the early 1900s showed that the atom was more complex than anyone suspected.

The Polish-born French scientist  Marie Curie  and others experimented with an atomic process called radioactivity. They found that the atoms of certain elements, such as radium and uranium, spontaneously release charged particles. As scientists studied radioactivity further, they discovered that it can change atoms of one element into atoms of another. Such findings proved that atoms are not solid and indivisible.

Einstein Proposes the Theory of Relativity In 1905 and 1916, the German-born physicist  Albert Einstein  introduced his theories of relativity. Einstein argued that measurements of space and time are not absolute but are determined by many factors, including the relative position of the observer. Einstein’s ideas raised questions about Newtonian science, which compared the universe to a machine operating according to absolute laws.

Albert Einstein received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics and is well known for his mass-energy formula. Einstein fled Germany and became an American citizen in 1940.

In the postwar years, many scientists came to accept the theories of relativity. To the general public, however, Einstein’s ideas were difficult to understand. They seemed to further reinforce the unsettling sense of a universe whirling beyond the understanding of human reason.

In 1934, building on Curie’s and Einstein’s theories, Italian physicist Enrico Fermi and other scientists around the world discovered atomic fission, or the splitting of the nuclei of atoms in two. This splitting produces a huge burst of energy. In the 1940s, Fermi (now an American), along with fellow American physicists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller, would use this discovery to create the devastating atomic bomb.

Fleming Discovers Penicillin In 1928, the Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming made a different type of scientific discovery. One day, he picked up a discarded laboratory dish that he had used to grow bacteria. The dish had grown some mold, which had killed the bacteria. Fleming called this nontoxic mold “penicillin.” Fleming’s penicillin was the first antibiotic, or medicine used to kill micro-organisms such as bacteria. Later scientists developed a wide range of antibiotics.

Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud founded the field of psychoanalysis. In his later years, Freud used psychoanalysis to interpret religion and culture.

Freud Analyzes the Mind The Austrian physician Sigmund Freud (froyd) also challenged faith in reason. He suggested that the subconscious mind drives much of human behavior. Freud said that learned social values such as morality and reason help people to repress, or check, powerful urges. But an individual feels constant tension between repressed drives and social training. This tension, argued Freud, may cause psychological or physical illness.

Freud pioneered  psychoanalysis,  a method of studying how the mind works and treating mental disorders. Although many of his theories have been discredited, Freud’s ideas have had an extraordinary impact far beyond medicine. They strongly influenced the art and literature of the postwar West.

1. IDENTIFY PATTERNS How did scientific discoveries in the 1920s change people’s views of the world?

Literature Reflects New Perspectives

In the 1920s, war novels, poetry, plays, and memoirs flowed off the presses. Novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front by German author Erich Remarque exposed the grim horrors faced by soldiers in World War I. Other writers heaped scorn on the leaders who took them into war. Their realistic works stripped away any romantic notions about the glories of warfare and reflected a powerful disgust with war that influenced an entire generation.

F. Scott Fitzerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby is a portrait of the Jazz Age and Roaring Twenties. It emphasizes the glittering but empty life of parties and excess.

The Lost Generation To many postwar writers, the war symbolized the moral breakdown of Western civilization. In 1922, the English poet T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land. This long poem portrays the modern world as spiritually empty and barren.

In The Sun Also Rises, the American novelist Ernest Hemingway shows the rootless wanderings of young people who lack deep convictions. “I did not care what it was all about,” says the narrator. “All I wanted to know was how to live in it.” In The Great Gatsby, American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald exposed the emptiness of the 1920s world of flappers and parties.

American poet Gertrude Stein considered herself, her writer friends, and young people part of a “lost generation.” They had become adults during or right after World War I and were disillusioned by the upheaval of the war and its aftermath.

Irish novelist James Joyce was well known for his experimental literary forms and explorations of inner life. One of his most highly acclaimed works is the novel Ulysses, published in 1922.

Literature Explores the Inner Mind As Freud’s ideas became popular, many writers began to explore the inner workings of the mind. Some experimented with stream of consciousness. In this technique, a writer appears to present a character’s random thoughts and feelings without imposing any logic or order. In the novel Mrs. Dalloway,British novelist Virginia Woolf used stream of consciousness to explore the thoughts of people going through the ordinary actions of their everyday lives. In Finnegans Wake,the Irish novelist James Joyce explored the inner mind of a hero who remains sound asleep throughout the novel.

The Harlem Resaissance was an African American cultural awakening expressed through the creative arts, literature, music, and theatre. Aaron Douglas, a prominent Harlem Renaissance artist, painted this panel in 1934 as part of a series called “Aspects of Negro Life.”

The Harlem Renaissance A more optimistic literary movement arose in the United States during the 1920s. The  Harlem Renaissance  was an African American cultural awakening. It began in Harlem, a neighborhood in New York City that was home to many African Americans. African American writers and artists expressed their pride in their unique culture.

Among its best known figures was the poet and playwright Langston Hughes. In his poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Hughes reflects on the rivers associated with the African and African-American experience from the Euphrates, Congo, and Nile to the Mississippi. Novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston studied African American folklore and traditions.

1. COMPARE POINTS OF VIEW How did postwar authors show disillusionment with prewar institutions?

Modern Art and Architecture

Henri Matisse’s expressive use of color and his frequent focus on domestic subjects can be seen in The Goldfish Bowl, painted in the winter of 1921–1922.

In the early 1900s, many Western artists rejected traditional styles. Instead of trying to reproduce the real world, they explored other dimensions of color, line, and shape. Painters like Henri Matisse (ma tees) utilized bold, wild strokes of color and odd distortions to produce works of strong emotion. He and fellow artists outraged the public and were dubbed fauves (fohv), or wild beasts, by critics.

Painters Embrace Revolutionary Trends Before World War I, the Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque (brak) created a revolutionary new style called cubism. Cubists painted three-dimensional objects as complex patterns of angles and planes. By redefining objects into separate shapes, they offered a new view of reality.

Later, the Russian Vasily Kandinsky and the Swiss Paul Klee moved even further away from representing reality. They created a new style of  abstract art,  composed only of lines, colors, and shapes, sometimes with no recognizable subject matter at all.

Pablo Picasso, one of the most important artists of the 20th century, co-developed the movement known as Cubism. He painted Woman Sitting in an Armchair in 1920.

During and after the war, the dada movement burst onto the Paris art world.  Dada  was a European art movement that rejected traditional artistic values by producing works that seemed like absurd nonsense. Dada was a revolt against civilization. Paintings and sculptures by Jean Arp and Max Ernst were intended to shock and disturb viewers. Some Dadaists created works made of objects they found abandoned or thrown away.

Cubism and dada both helped to inspire  surrealism,  a movement that attempted to portray the workings of the unconscious mind. Surrealism rejected rational thought, which had produced the horrors of World War I, in favor of irrational or unconscious ideas. The Spanish surrealist Salvador Dali used images of melting clocks and burning giraffes to suggest the chaotic dream state described by Freud.

Architecture Reflects a New World Architects, too, rejected classical traditions and developed new styles to match a new urban, industrialized world. The famous Bauhaus school in Germany influenced architecture by blending science and technology with design. Bauhaus buildings used glass, steel, and concrete but very little ornamentation.

Fallingwater, a Pennsylvania home designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright, incorporates nature into its design. It appears to hover over a tranquil waterfall.

The American architect Frank Lloyd Wright reflected the Bauhaus belief that the function of a building should determine its form. He used materials and forms that fit a building’s environment. He believed that “a building should grace its environment rather than disgrace it.” One of Wright’s most famous designs is Fallingwater, a house in Pennsylvania built on a waterfall. The structure works in harmony with the surrounding environment, as Wright intended.

1. IDENTIFY CAUSE AND EFFECT What effect did World War I have on artistic movements in the 1920s?

Postwar Politics in the West

As nations recovered from the war, people began to feel hope rising out of their disillusionment. But soon, the “lost generation” would face a new crisis that would revive many old problems and spark new conflicts.

The major outcomes of the Paris Peace Conference were five peace treaties ending World War I, including the Treaty of Versailles with Germany, and the creation of the League of Nations.

In 1919, the three Western democracies—Britain, France, and the United States—appeared powerful. They had ruled the Paris Peace Conference and boosted hopes for democracy among the new nations of Eastern Europe. Beneath the surface, however, postwar Europe faced grave problems. To make matters worse, many members of the younger generation who might have become the next great leaders had been killed in the war.

At first, the most pressing issues were finding jobs for returning veterans and rebuilding war-ravaged lands like France and Belgium. Economic problems fed social unrest and made radical ideas more popular. The Russian Revolution unleashed fears of the spread of communism. Some people saw socialism as the answer to economic hardships. Others embraced nationalist political movements.

Political Parties Clash in Britain In Britain during the 1920s, the Labour party surpassed the Liberal party in strength. The Labour party gained support among workers by promoting a gradual move toward socialism. The Liberal party passed some social legislation, but it traditionally represented middle-class business interests. As the Liberal party faltered, the middle class began to back the Conservative party, joining the upper class, professionals, and farmers. With this support, the Conservative party held power during much of 1920s. After a massive strike of over three million workers in 1926, Conservatives passed legislation limiting the power of workers to strike.

Irish Independence at Last Britain still faced the “Irish question.” In 1914, Parliament passed a home-rule bill that was shelved when the war began. Militant Irish nationalists, however, were unwilling to wait any longer. On Easter 1916, a small group launched a revolt against British rule. Although the Easter Rising was quickly suppressed, it stirred wider support for the Irish cause.