Western Front
A line of trenches and fortifications in World War I that stretched without break from Switzerland to the North Sea. Scene of most of the fighting between Germany, on the one hand, and France and Britian on the other.
Faisal
(1885-1933) Arab prince, leader of the Arab Revolt in World War I. The British made him king of Iraq in 1921, and he reigned under British protection until 1933
Theodore Herzl
(1860-1904) Austrian journalist and founder of the Zionist movement urging the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.
Balfour Declaration
Statement issued by Britian's Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour in 1917 favoring the establishment of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine.
Bolsheviks
Radical Marxist political party founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1903. Under Lenin's leadership, they seized power in November 1917 during the Russian Revolution.
Vladimir Lenin
(1870-1924) Leader of the Bolshevik (later Communist) Party. He lived in exile in Switzerland until 1917, then returned to lead the Bolsheviks to victory during the Russian Revolution and the civil war that followed.
Woodrow Wilson
(1856-1924) President and the leading figure at the Paris Peace Conference of 1913. He was unable to persuade the U.S. Congress to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or join the League of Nations.
League of Nations
International organization founded in 1919 to promote world peace and cooperation but greatly weakened by the refusal of the U.S. to join. Ineffectual in stopping aggresion by Italy, Japan, and Germany and was superseded by the UN.
Treaty of Versailles
(1919) The treaty imposed on Germany by France, Great Britian, the United States, and other Allied Powers after World War I. It demanded Germany dismantle its military and give up some lands to Poland. Resented by Germans.
New Economic Policy
Policy proclaimed by Lenin in 1924 to encourage the revival of Soviet economy by allowing small private enterprise. Stalin ended the N.E.P. in 1928 and replaced it with the Five Year Plan.
Sun Yat-sen
(1867-1925) Chinese nationalist revolutionary, founder and leader of the Guomindang until his death. He attempted to create a liberal democratic political movement in China but was stopped by military leaders.
Yuan Shikai
(1859-1916) Chinese general and the first president of the Chinese Republic. He stood in the way of the democratic movement led by Sun Yat-sen.
Guomindang
Nationalist political party founded on democratic principals by Sun Yat-sen in 1913. After 1925, the party was headed by Chiang Kai-shek, who turned it into an increasingly authoritarian movement.
mandate system
Allocation of former German colonies and Ottoman possessions to the victorious powers after World War I, to be administered under the League of Nations supervision.
Max Planck
(1858-1947) German physicist who developed quantum theory and was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1918.
Albert Einstein
(1879-1955) German physicist who developed the theory of relativity, which states that time, space, and mass are relative to each other and not fixed