Unit 6 Vocabulary

Question 1

Triple Alliance

Answer 1

The alliance of Austria, Germany, and Italy. Italy left the alliance when war broke out in 1914 on the
grounds that Austria had launched a war of aggression.

Question 2

Triple Entente

Answer 2

The alliance of Great Britain, France, and Russia prior to and during the First World War.

Question 3

Schlieffen Plan

Answer 3

Failed German plan calling for a lightning attack through neutral Belgium and a quick defeat of France
before turning on Russia.

Question 4

total war

Answer 4

A war in which distinctions between the soldiers on the battlefield and civilians at home are blurred, and
where the government plans and controls economic and social life in order to supply the armies at the
front with supplies and weapons.

Question 5

trench warfare

Answer 5

A type of fighting used in World War I behind rows of trenches, mines, and barbed wire; the cost in lives
was staggering and the gains in territory minimal.

Question 6

February Revolution

Answer 6

Unplanned uprisings accompanied by violent street demonstrations begun in March 1917 (old calendar
February) in Petrograd, Russia, that led to the abdication of the tsar and the establishment of a
provisional government.

Question 7

Petrograd Soviet

Answer 7

A huge, fluctuating mass meeting of two to three thousand workers, soldiers, and socialist intellectuals
modeled on the revolutionary soviets of 1905.

Question 8

Bolsheviks

Answer 8

Lenin’s radical, revolutionary arm of the Russian party of Marxist socialism, which successfully installed a
dictatorial socialist regime in Russia.

Question 9

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk

Answer 9

Peace treaty signed in March 1918 between the Central Powers and Russia that ended Russian
participation in World War I and ceded Russian territories containing a third of the Russian Empire’s
population to the Central Powers.

Question 10

War Communism

Answer 10

The application of centralized state control during the Russian civil war, in which the Bolsheviks seized
grain from peasants, introduced rationing, nationalized all banks and industry, and required everyone to
work.

Question 11

Treaty of Versailles

Answer 11

The 1919 peace settlement that ended war between Germany and the Allied powers.

Question 12

Fourteen Points

Answer 12

Wilson’s 1918 peace proposal calling for open diplomacy, a reduction in armaments, freedom of
commerce and trade, the establishment of the League of Nations, and national self-determination.

Question 13

League of Nations

Answer 13

A permanent international organization, established during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, designed
to protect member states from aggression and avert future wars.

Question 14

national self-determination

Answer 14

The notion that peoples should be able to choose their own national governments through democratic
majority-rule elections and live free from outside interference in nation-states with clearly defined
borders.

Question 15

war guilt clause

Answer 15

An article in the Treaty of Versailles that declared that Germany (with Austria) was solely responsible for
the war and had to pay reparations equal to all civilian damages caused by the fighting.

Question 16

mandate system

Answer 16

The plan to allow Britain and France to administer former Ottoman territories, put into place after the
end of the First World War.

Question 17

Balfour Declaration

Answer 17

A 1917 British statement that declared British support of a National Home for the Jewish People in
Palestine.

Question 18

logical positivism

Answer 18

A philosophy that sees meaning in only those beliefs that can be empirically proven, and that therefore
rejects most of the concerns of traditional philosophy as nonsense.

Question 19

existentialism

Answer 19

A philosophy that stresses the meaninglessness of existence and the importance of the individual in
searching for moral values in an uncertain world.

Question 20

theory of special relativity

Answer 20

Albert Einstein’s theory that time and space are relative to the observer and that only the speed of light
remains constant.

Question 21

id, ego, and superego

Answer 21

Freudian terms to describe the three parts of the self and the basis of human behavior, which Freud saw
as basically irrational.

Question 22

modernism

Answer 22

A label given to the artistic and cultural movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, which were typified by radical experimentation that challenged traditional forms of artistic
expression.

Question 23

functionalism

Answer 23

The principle that buildings, like industrial products, should serve as well as possible the purpose for
which they were made, without excessive ornamentation.

Question 23

Bauhaus

Answer 23

A German interdisciplinary school of fine and applied arts that brought together many leading modern
architects, designers, and theatrical innovators.

Question 24

Dadaism

Answer 24

An artistic movement of the 1920s and 1930s that attacked all accepted standards of art and behavior
and delighted in outrageous conduct.

Question 25

stream-of-consciousness technique

Answer 25

A literary technique, found in works by Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and others, that uses interior
monologue — a character’s thoughts and feelings as they occur — to explore the human psyche.

Question 26

“modern girl”

Answer 26

Somewhat stereotypical image of the modern and independent working woman popular in the 1920s.

Question 27

Dawes Plan

Answer 27

War reparations agreement that reduced Germany’s yearly payments, made payment dependent on
economic prosperity, and granted large U.S. loans to promote recovery.

Question 28

Great Depression

Answer 28

A worldwide economic depression from 1929 through 1939, unique in its severity and duration and with
slow and uneven recovery.

Question 29

Popular Front

Answer 29

A short-lived New Deal–inspired alliance in France led by Léon Blum that encouraged the union
movement and launched a far-reaching program of social reform.