HIST Exam 3

Fashoda Incident

Disagreements between the French and the British over land claims in North Africa led to a standoff between armies of the two nations at the Sudanese town of Fashoda. The crisis was solved diplomatically. France ceded southern Sudan to Britain in exchange for a stop to further expansion by the British.

Robert Owen

A wealthy industrialist turned reformer, he bought a large cotton factory at New Lanark in Scotland and proceeded to organize the mill and the surrounding town according to the principles of cooperation rather than those of profitability.

Pan-African Conference

1900 assembly in London that sought to draw attention to the sovereignty of African people and their mistreatment by colonial powers.

Charles Fourier

A Frenchman, he tried to organize utopian communities based on the abolition of the wage system, the division of work according to people's natural inclinations, the complete equality of the sexes, and collectively organized child care and household labor.

Battle of the Marne

A major battle of the First World War in September 1914, which halted the German invasion of France and led to protracted trench warfare on the Western Front

Syndicalists

A nineteenthcentury political movement that embraced a strategy of strikes and sabotage by workers. Their hope was that a general strike of all workers would bring down the capitalist state and replace it with workers' syndicates or trade associations. Their refusal to participate in politics limited their ability to command a wide influence.

Zionism

A political movement dating to the end of the nineteenth century holding that the Jewish people constitute a nation and are entitled to a national homeland. Zionists rejected a policy of Jewish assimilation and advocated the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine

Chartrists

A workingclass movement in Britain that called for reform of the British political system during the 1840s. They were supporters of the "People's Charter," which had six demands: universal white male suffrage, secret ballots, an end to property qualifications as a condition of public office, annual parliamentary elections, salaries for members of the House of Commons, and equal electoral districts.

Russian Revolution of 1905

After Russia's defeat in the RussoJapanese War, Russians began clamoring for political reforms. Protests grew over the course of 1905, and the autocracy lost control of entire towns and regions as workers went on strike, soldiers mutinied, and peasants revolted. Forced to yield, Tsar Nicholas II issued the October Manifesto, which pledged individual liberties and provided for the election of a parliament (called the Duma). The most radical of the revolutionary groups were put down with force, and the pace of political change remained very slow in the aftermath of the revolution

Provisional Government

After the collapse of the Russian monarchy, leaders in the Duma organized this government and hoped to establish a democratic system under constitutional rule. They also refused to concede military defeat, and it was impossible to institute domestic reforms and fight a war at the same time. As conditions worsened, the Bolsheviks gained support. In October 1917, they attacked the provisional government and seized control.

Utopian Socialists

An ordering of society placing emphasis on the principles of cooperation rather than those of profitability.

Civilizing Mission

An argument made by Europeans to justify colonial expansion in the nineteenth century. Supporters of this idea believed that Europeans had a duty to impose western ideas of economic and political progress on the indigenous peoples they ruled over in their colonies. In practice, the colonial powers often found that ambitious plans to impose European practices on colonial subjects led to unrest that threatened the stability of colonial rule, and by the early twentieth century most colonial powers were more cautious in their plans for political or cultural transformation

Carbonari

An underground organization that opposed the Concert of Europe's restoration of monarchies. They held influence in southern Europe during the 1820s, especially in Italy.

Anti-Semitism

AntiSemitism refers to hostility toward Jewish people. Religious forms of antiSemitism have a long history in Europe, but in the nineteenth century antiSemitism emerged as a potent ideology for mobilizing new constituencies in the era of mass politics. Playing on popular conspiracy theories about alleged Jewish influence in society, antiSemites effectively rallied large bodies of supporters in France during the Dreyfus Affair, and then again during the rise of National Socialism in Germany after the First World War. The Holocaust would not have been possible without the acquiescence or cooperation of many thousands of people who shared antiSemitic views.

Franz Ferdinand

Archduke of Austria and heir to the AustroHungarian Empire; his assassination led to the beginning of the First World War.

Berlin Conference

At this conference, the leading colonial powers met and established ground rules for the partition of Africa by European nations. By 1914, 90 percent of African territory was under European control. The Berlin Conference ceded control of the Congo region to a private company run by King Leopold II of Belgium. They agreed to make the Congo valleys open to free trade and commerce, to end the slave trade in the region, and to establish a Congo Free State. In reality, King Leopold II's company established a regime that was so brutal in its treatment of local populations that an international scandal forced the Belgian state to take over the colony in 1908.

Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859)

Austrian foreign minister whose primary goals were to bolster the legitimacy of monarchies and, after the defeat of Napoleon, to prevent another largescale war in Europe. At the Congress of Vienna, he opposed social and political change and wanted to check Russian and French expansion.

Women's Associations

Because European women were excluded from the workings of parliamentary and mass politics, some women formed organizations to press for political and civil rights. Some groups focused on establishing educational opportunities for women while others campaigned energetically for the vote.

Romanticism

Beginning in Germany and England in the late eighteenth century and continuing up to the end of the nineteenth century, Romanticism was a movement in art, music, and literature that countered the rationalism of the Enlightenment by placing greater value on human emotions and the power of nature to stimulate creativity.

East India Company

British charter company created to outperform Portuguese and Spanish traders in the Far East; in the eighteenth century the company became, in effect, the ruler of a large part of India. There was also a Dutch East India Company.

Tsar Alexander II

Central to his program of modernization and reform after the Crimean War was the abolition of serfdom in Russia. Under his 1861 decree, emancipated serfs were now allowed to own their land, ending centuries of bondage.

Boxer Rebellion

Chinese peasant movement that opposed foreign influence, especially that of Christian missionaries; it was finally put down after the Boxers were defeated by a foreign army composed mostly of Japanese, Russian, British, French, and American soldiers.

Boer War

Conflict between British and ethnically European Afrikaners in South Africa, with terrible casualties on both sides

Schlieffen Plan

Devised by German general Alfred von Schlieffen in 1905 to avoid the dilemma of a twofront war against France and Russia. The Schlieffen Plan required that Germany attack France first through Belgium and secure a quick victory before wheeling to the east to meet the slower armies of the Russians on the Eastern Front. The Schlieffen Plan was put into operation on August 2, 1914, at the outset of the First World War

Greek Nationalists

During the Greek war for independence against the Ottoman Empire, sympathy for the Greeks was widespread in Europe. Christians in Europe cast the rebellion as part of an ongoing struggle between Christianity and Islam, whereas secular observers sought to interpret the struggle as one between an ancient preChristian European heritage and the Ottoman Empire. "We are all Greeks," wrote Percy Shelley, the Romantic poet. "Our laws, our literature, our religion, our arts have their roots in Greece.

Somme

During this battle of the First World War, Allied forces attempted to take entrenched German positions from July to midNovember of 1916. Neither side was able to make any real gains despite massive casualties: 500,000 Germans, 400,000 British, and 200,000 French.

Marxists

Followers of the socialist political economist Karl Marx who called for workers everywhere to unite and create an independent political force. Marxists believed that industrialization produced an inevitable struggle between laborers and the class of capitalist property owners, and that this struggle would culminate in a revolution that would abolish private property and establish a society committed to social equality.

John Stuart Mill

English liberal philosopher whose faith in human reason led him to support a broad variety of civic and political freedoms for men and women, including the right to vote and the right to free speech.

Frankfurt Parliament

Failed attempt to create a unified Germany under constitutional principles. In 1849, the assembly offered the crown of the new German nation to Frederick William IV of Prussia, but he refused the offer and suppressed a brief protest. The delegates went home disillusioned.

Bolsheviks

Former members of the Russian Social Democratic Party who advocated the destruction of capitalist political and economic institutions and started the Russian Revolution. In 1918, the Bolsheviks changed their name to the Russian Communist Party. Prominent Bolsheviks included Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin. Leon Trotsky joined the Bolsheviks late but became a prominent leader in the early years of the Russian Revolution.

Social Democratic Party

Founded in 1875, it was the most powerful socialist party in Europe before 1917.

Labour Party

Founded in Britain in 1900, this party represented workers and was based on socialist principles

Karl Marx

German philosopher and economist who believed that a revolution of the working classes would overthrow the capitalist order and create a classless society. Author of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.

Zollverein

In 1834, Prussia started a customs union, which established free trade among the German states and a uniform tariff against the rest of the world. By the 1840s, the union included almost all of the German states except German Austria. It is considered an important precedent for the political unification of Germany, which was completed in 1870 under Prussian leadership.

Edmund Burke

His writings—opposing talk of natural rights and counseling deference to experience, tradition, and history— became a point of reference for nineteenthcentury conservatives.

Gallipoli

In the First World War, a combined force of French, British, Australian and New Zealand troops tried to invade the Gallipoli Peninsula, in the first largescale amphibious attack in history, and seize it from the Turks. After seven months of fighting, the Allies had lost 200,000 soldiers. Defeated, they withdrew

Anarchists

In the nineteenth century, they were a political movement with the aim of establishing smallscale, localized, and selfsufficient democratic communities that could guarantee a maximum of individual sovereignty. Renouncing parties, unions and any form of modern mass organization, the anarchists fell back on the tradition of conspiratorial violence

Giuseppe Garibaldi

Italian revolutionary leader who led the fight to free Sicily and Naples from the Habsburg Empire; the lands were then peaceably annexed by Sardinia to produce a unified Italy.

Italian Invasion of Ethiopia

Italy invaded Ethiopia, which was the last major independent African kingdom. Menelik II, the Ethiopian emperor, soundly defeated them.

Russo-Japanese War

Japanese and Russian expansion collided in Mongolia and Manchuria. Russia was humiliated after the Japanese navy sunk its fleet, which helped provoke a revolt in Russia and led to an Americanbrokered peace treaty.

Magyar Nationalism

Lajos Kossuth led this national movement in the Hungarian region of the Habsburg Empire, calling for national independence for Hungary in 1848. With the support of Russia, the Habsburg army crushed the movement and all other revolutionary activities in the empire. Kossuth fled into exile

Lenin

Leader of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia (1917) and the first leader of the Soviet Union.

Soviets

Local councils elected by workers and soldiers in Russia. Socialists started organizing these councils in 1905, and the Petrograd soviet in the capital emerged as one of the centers of power after the Russian monarchy collapsed in 1917 in the midst of World War I. The soviets became increasingly powerful and pressed for social reform, the redistribution of land, and called for Russian withdrawal from the war effort.

Pan-Slavism

Major nationalist movement that troubled the Habsburg Empire. Slavs included Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, and Bulgarians. Before 1848, panSlavism was primarily a cultural movement united by a general proSlavic sentiment. It was internally divided, however, by the competing claims of different Slavic languages and traditions. PanSlavism inspired the works of the Czech historian and political leader, František Palackyý, author of the History of the Bohemian People, and the Slovak Jan Kollár, whose book Salvy Dcera ("Slava's Daughter") mourned the loss of identity among Slavs in the Germanic world. The movement also influenced the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz, who sought to rekindle Polish nationhood against foreign oppression.

Camillo Benso di Cavour

Prime minister of PiedmontSardinia and founder of the Italian Liberal party; he played a key role in the movement for Italian unification under the Piedmontese king, Victor Emmanuel II.

Napoleon III

Nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III was elected president of the French Second Republic in 1848 and made himself emperor of France in 1852. During his reign (1852-70), he rebuilt the French capital of Paris. Defeated in the FrancePrussian War of 1870, he went into exile.

Jeremy Bentham

One of the most influential British liberals, his major work, The Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789), illustrates how nineteenthcentury liberalism continued the Enlightenment legacy and also transformed it.

Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points

President Woodrow Wilson proposed these points as the foundation on which to build peace in the world after the First World War. They called for an end to secret treaties, "open covenants, openly arrived at," freedom of the seas, the removal of international tariffs, the reduction of arms, the "selfdetermination of peoples," and the establishment of a League of Nations to settle international conflicts.

William Blake

Romantic writer who criticized industrial society and factories. He championed the imagination and poetic vision, seeing both as transcending the limits of the material world.

William Wordswith

Romantic writer whose central themes were nature, simplicity, and feeling. He considered nature to be man's most trustworthy teacher and source of sublime power that nourished the human soul.

Decembrists

Russian army officers who were influenced by events in France and formed secret societies that espoused liberal governance. They were put down by Nicholas I in December 1825.

Adam Smith

Scottish economist and liberal philosopher who proposed that competition between selfinterested individuals led naturally to a healthy economy. He became famous for his influential book, The Wealth of Nations (1776).

Treaty of Versaille

Signed on June 28, 1919, this peace settlement ended the First World War and required Germany to surrender a large part of its most valuable territories and to pay huge reparations to the Allies.

Utilitarianism

Social institutions and laws (an electoral system, for instance, or a tariff) should be measured according to their social usefulness—according to whether they produced the "greatest happiness of the greatest number." If a law passed this test, it could remain on the books; if it failed, it should be jettisoned.

Dreyfus Affair

The 1894 French scandal surrounding accusations that a Jewish captain, Alfred Dreyfus, sold military secrets to the Germans. Convicted, Dreyfus was sentenced to solitary confinement for life. However, after public outcry, it was revealed that the trial documents were forgeries, and Dreyfus was pardoned after a second trial in 1899. In 1906, he was fully exonerated and reinstated in the army. The affair revealed the depths of popular antiSemitism in France

Young Turks

The 1908 Turkish reformist movement that aimed to modernize the Ottoman Empire, restore parliamentary rule, and depose Sultan Abdul Hamid II

Verdun

This battle between German and French forces lasted for ten months during the First World War. The Germans saw the battle as a chance to break French morale through a war of attrition, and the French believed the battle to be a symbol of France's strength. In the end, over 400,000 lives were lost and the German offensive failed.

Sigmund Freud

The Austrian physician who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis and suggested that human behavior was largely motivated by unconscious and irrational forces

Emancipation of the Serfs

The abolition of serfdom was central to Tsar Alexander II's program of modernization and reform, but it produced a limited amount of change. Former serfs now had legal rights. However, farm land was granted to the village communes instead of to individuals. The land was of poor quality and the former serfs had to pay for it in installments to the village commune.

Concert of Europe

The body of diplomatic agreements designed primarily by Austrian minister Klemens von Metternich between 1814 and 1848 and supported by other European powers until 1914. Its goal was to maintain a balance of power on the Continent and to prevent destabilizing social and political change in Europe.

Tsar Nicholas II

The last Russian tsar, who abdicated the throne in 1917. He and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks on July 17, 1918.

Otto von Bismarck

The prime minister of Prussia and later the first chancellor of a unified Germany, Bismarck was the architect of German unification and helped to consolidate the new nation's economic and military power

Sepoy Mutiny

The uprising began near Delhi, when the military disciplined a regiment of Indian soldiers employed by the British for refusing to use rifle cartridges greased with pork fat—unacceptable to either Hindus or Muslims. Rebels attacked law courts and burned tax rolls, protesting debt and corruption. The mutiny spread through large areas of northwest India before being violently suppressed by British troops.

June Days

The workers of Paris—laborers, journeymen, the unemployed—rose in revolt, building barricades across Paris. For four days, June 23-26, they fought a hopeless battle against armed forces recruited from the provinces. About 3,000 were killed and 12,000 arrested. Many of the prisoners were deported to Algerian labor camps. After this repression, support for the republic among the workers in Paris declined rapidly.

Modernists

There were several different modernist movements in art and literature, but they shared three key characteristics. First, they had a sense that the world had radically changed and that this change should be embraced. Second, they believed that traditional aesthetic values and assumptions about creativity were illsuited to the present. Third, they developed a new conception of what art could do that emphasized expression over representation and insisted on the value of novelty, experimentation, and creative freedom

Anti-Corn Law League

This organization successfully lobbied Parliament to repeal Britain's Corn Laws in 1846. The Corn Laws of 1815 had protected British landowners and farmers from foreign competition by establishing high tariffs, which kept bread prices artificially high for British consumers. The league saw these laws as unfair protection of the aristocracy and pushed for their repeal in the name of free trade.

Louis Philippe

Under his rule, protest movements, in the form of republican societies, proliferated in French cities and rebellions broke out in Paris and Lyon, bringing a harsh repression that resulted in deaths and arrests. The government's refusal to compromise drove even moderates into opposition.

Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution

Variations within a population (such as longer beaks or protective coloring) make certain individual organisms better equipped for survival, increasing their chances of reproducing and passing their advantageous traits to the next generation. As both a scientific explanation and an imaginative metaphor for political and social change, it introduced an unsettling new picture of human biology, behavior, and society.

Spanish American War

War between the United States and Spain in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. It ended with a treaty in which the United States took over the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico; Cuba won partial independence.

Opium Wars

War fought between the British and Qing China to protect British trade in opium; resulted in the ceding of Hong Kong to the British.

Crimean War

War waged by Russia against Great Britain and France. Spurred by Russia's encroachment on Ottoman territories, the conflict revealed Russia's military weakness when Russian forces fell to British and French troops

Mensheviks

Within the Russian Social Democratic Party, the Mensheviks advocated slow changes and a gradual move toward socialism, in contrast with the Bolsheviks, who wanted to push for a proletarian revolution. Mensheviks believed that a proletarian revolution in Russia was premature and that the country needed to complete its capitalist development first.

Lord Byron

Writer and poet whose life helped give the Romantics their reputation as rebels against conformity. He was known for his love affairs, his defense of workingclass movements, and his passionate engagement in politics, which led to his death in the war for Greek independence.