| Glossary term |
Definition |
| The Great Depression | Was a massive global economic recession that ran from 1929 to 1941. Led to massive bank failures, high unemployment, as well as dramatic drops in GDP, industrial production, and stock market share prices. |
| Stock Market Crash, 1929 | The steep fall in the prices of stocks due to widespread financial panic. Caused by stock brokers who called in the loans they had made to stock investors. This caused stock prices to fall, and people lost their entire life savings as banks went bankrupt |
| Tariffs | A tax levied on imports of goods as they cross the border |
| Mohandas Gandhi | The leader of the movement toward Indian independence from Britain who advocated nonviolent methods to effect social change. |
| Civil disobedience | Deliberate, open, and peaceful violation of laws, decrees, regulations, military or police orders, or other governmental directives. |
| Mustafa Kemal Ataturk | (1881-1938) Nationalist leader of Turkey who is responsible for modernizing and westernizing his country after World War I. This enabled Turkey to resist imperialist attempts at takeover by various European powers. |
| Ho Chi Minh | (1890-1969) Vietnamese leader who is responsible for ousting first the French, then the United States from his country. Supported by both communist China and the Soviet Union, he guided Vietnam through decades long warfare to emerge as a communist nation. |
| Totalitarianism | a political system in which the state, or the governing branch of the state, holds absolute authority, not allowing any opposition group. |
| Joseph Stalin | Russian leader who succeeded Lenin as head of the Communist Party and created a totalitarian state by purging all opposition (1879-1953) |
| Five Year Plans | were a series of nation-wide centralized exercises in rapid economic development in the Soviet Union. the plans were created by the Gosplan based on the general guidelines of the Communist Party for economical development |
| Collectivization of Agriculture | an organizational unit in agriculture in which peasants are not paid wages, but rather receive a share of the farm's net output. |
| Kolkhoz | was a form of collective farming in the Soviet Union that existed along with state farms or sovkhozes |
| Great purges | campaigns of repression organized by Stalin in the Soviet Union during the late 1930s amidst fears of treason within the civilian population and armed forces |
| Show trials | a type of public trial in which the judicial authorities have already determined the guilt of the accused. Tends to be retributive rather than correctional justice. |
| Gulags | A system of penal institutions in the Soviet Union. Under Stalin an estimated 10 million were sentenced to forced labour in the camps in the period between 1934 and 1947 alone. These prisoners were suspected of crimes against the State |
| Nazis | Political ideology promoting Germanic racial aspirations and a strong and centrally governed state. From 1933 to 1945 (the "Third Reich") ruled Germany and led her through WWII. |
| Adolph Hitler | Führer of Germany from 1933 to his death. He was leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), better known as the Nazi Party. |
| Paul von Hindenburg | field marshal and Germany’s greatest military hero of World War I, served as president under the Weimar government from 1925 to 1933. He hated the Nazis, but was forced to appoint Hitler as chancellor. |
| Enabling Act | passed by the Reichstag on March 23, 1933. Allowed the Nazis to establish Nazi Germany by providing the government with legislative powers, effectively handing dictatorial powers to the Chancellor Adolf Hitler. |
| Volksgemeinschaft | was an attempt by the German Nazi Party to establish a national community. It could only be achieved by gaining control of all aspects of cultural and social life. Theatre, literature, the press and children's activities were all controlled by the Nazis. |
| Aryans | In Nazi racial theory, a person of pure German "blood." The term "non-Aryan" was used to designate Jews, part-Jews and others of supposedly inferior racial stock. |
| Nuremberg Laws, 1935 | Two anti-Jewish statutes enacted September 1935 during the Nazi party's national convention in Nuremberg, taking away the Jews' civil rights |
| Franklin Delano Roosevelt | 32nd President of the United States; elected four times; instituted New Deal to counter the great depression and led country during World War II (1882-1945) |
| Herbert Hoover | 31st President of the United States; in 1929 the stock market crashed and the economy collapsed and was defeated for reelection by Franklin Roosevelt |
| Hoovervilles | Term describing a series of shanty towns that appeared following the Great Depression in the United States from 1929 through the 1930s and 1940s. These villages were often formed in desolate or unpleasant neighborhoods and were temporary residences of tho |
| The New Deal | President Franklin D. Roosevelt's legislative agenda for rescuing the United States from the Great Depression. |
| Leon Blum | French socialist leader and Prime Minister, was born in Paris, into a middle-class Jewish family. |
| Popular Front | an alliance of left-wing political parties (the Communists, the Socialists and the Radicals), which was in government in France from 1936 to 1938. |
| Virginia Woolf | was a British author and feminist. Between the world wars, was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. |
| George Orwell | Imaginative British writer concerned with social justice (1903-1950) |
| Edwin Hubble | United States astronomer who discovered that (as the universe expands) the speed with which nebulae recede increases with their distance (1889-1953) |
| Werner Heisenberg | was a celebrated German physicist and Nobel laureate, was the head of Nazi Germany's nuclear energy program. |
| “indeterminacy principle” | the theory that it is impossible to measure both energy and time (or position and momentum) completely accurately at the same time, discovered by Werner Heisenberg |
| Karl Barth | was a Swiss Christian theologian, and one of the leading thinkers in the neo-orthodox movement. |
| Rape of Nanking | refers to what many historians recognize as widespread atrocities committed by the Japanese army in and around Nanking (now Nanjing), China, after the capital's fall to Japanese in 1937. |
| Lebensraum | (from the German for "living space") is an idea that was used to justify the expansionist politics of Nazi Germany. |
| Rome-Berlin Axis | The European Powers whom in World War II opposed the Allies. |
| The Spanish Civil War | lasted from July 17, 1936 to April 1, 1939, was a conflict in which the Francoists or Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco, defeated the Republicans or Loyalists of the Second Spanish Republic |
| General Francisco Franco | Generalísimo Francisco Franco, was dictator of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975 |
| Kurt von Schuschnigg | was an Austrian politician who in 1934 succeeded the assassinated Engelbert Dollfuss as dictator of Austria, as leader of the regime often called Austrofascism. In 1938, he was imprisoned by Nazi Germany in the Anschluss. |
| Anschluss | The annexation of Austria to Germany |
| Appeasement | Giving in to the demands of aggressive powers to avoid war, as long as those demands appear reasonable. Such a policy was pursued by Britain and France in dealing with Germany in the latter half of the 1930s. |
| Sudetenland | a strategically important region of Czechoslovakia. The Skoda Works, a huge armament facility, were situated there. It had over 2.5 million speaking German inhabitants, and according to the Versailles treaty’s rule of National Self Determination, should b |
| Neville Chamberlain | British statesman who as Prime Minister pursued a policy of appeasement toward fascist Germany (1869-1940) |
| Edouard Daladier | was a French politician, and Prime Minister of France at the start of the Second World War. |
| Munich Agreement, 1938 | was an agreement regarding the Sudetenland Crisis between the major powers of Europe after a conference held in Munich in Germany in 1938 and concluded on September 29. |
| Nazi-Soviet Non-aggression pact | pact between the two, agreeing to avoid war or armed conflict between them even if they find themselves fighting third countries, or even if one is fighting allies of the other. |
| Blitzkrieg | German for 'lightning war'. A military strategy used by the Germans at the beginning of World War II to achieve victory through a series of quick offensives, especially in Belgium, Holland and France. |
| Vichy France | French regime set up in collaboration with the Germans following the fall of France in 1940 - headed by Marshal Petain and based in the city of Vichy it governed the southern half of France until its dissolution in 1944 |
| Henri Philippe Petain | was a French soldier and leader of Vichy France. He became a French hero because of his military leadership in World War I, yet he was tried and imprisoned for treason in his old age because of his collaboration with the Germans in World War II. |
| Charles de Gaulle | French general and statesman who became very popular during World War II as the leader of the Free French forces in exile (1890-1970) |
| Luftwaffe | the German airforce |
| Ultra | was the name used by the British for intelligence resulting from decryption of German communications in World War II. The term eventually became the standard designation in both Britain and the United States for all intelligence from high-level cryptanaly |
| Radar | A system for detecting the direction, range, or prescence of aircraft, ships, and other objects, by sending out pulses of high frequency electromagnetic waves |
| Battle of Britain | the prolonged bombardment of British cities by the German Luftwaffe during World War II and the aerial combat that accompanied it |
| Operation Sealion | was a World War II German plan to invade Britain. It was never carried out. |
| Blitz | A style of combat used by German panzer division "armored division". Concentrated and massed formation of tanks moved into country with amazing speed and destructive power. |
| Operation Barbarossa | was the German codename for Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union during World War II that commenced on June 22, 1941. |
| Bombing of Pearl Harbour | American naval base in Hawaii; attacked by Japanese in December 1941 and crippled America's fleet in the Pacific and caused entry of United States into World War II. |
| Battle of Midway | The United States Navy defeated a Japanese attack against Midway Atoll, marking a turning point in the war in the Pacific theatre. |
| Island hopping | Island hopping refers to crossing an ocean by a series of shorter journeys between islands, as opposed to a single journey directly across the orefers to crossing an ocean by a series of shorter journeys between islands, as opposed to a single journey dir |
| SS | It was the military wing of the Nazi party, which served as Hitler's personal bodyguard and provided guards for concentration camps, also raised élite combat formations for the field armies. |
| Holocaust | Genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s; about six million Jewish men, women, and children were put to death in Nazi concentration camps. |
| Final Solution | The Nazi plan for the physical destruction of all of Europe's Jewish population. |
| Stalingrad | was a major turning point in World War II, and is considered the bloodiest battle in human history and arguably one of the greatest come-backs in military history. |
| Operation Overlord | The Codename for the D-Day Battle of Normandy, was fought in 1944 between the German forces occupying Western Europe and the invading Allied forces. Remains the largest sea borne invasion in history |
| General Dwight D. Eisenhower | American soldier and politician, was the 34th President of the United States (1953–1961) and supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, with the rank of General of the Army. |
| Eva Braun | the German mistress of Adolf Hitler (1910-1945) |
| Guadalcanal | was one of the most important battles of World War II. The assault on the Japanese-occupied island of Guadalcanal by the Allied navies and 16,000 United States troops on 7 August, 1942, was the first offensive by US land forces in the Pacific Campaign |
| Kamikaze | The "Divine Wind" which saved Japan from the Mongol invaders . During World War II the name was applied to Japan's suicide bombers. |
Biology Lab Midterm
