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World War Two

World War II (WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War, was a global war that
lasted from 1939 to 1945, although related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority
of the worlds nations including all of the great power eventually forming two opposing
military alliances: the Alien and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and directly
involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. In a state of "total war", the
major participants threw their entire economic, industrial, and scientific capabilities behind the
war effort, erasing the distinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by mass
deaths of civilians, including the holocaust (in which approximately 11 million people were
killed) and the strategic bombing of industrial and popular centers (in which approximately one
million were killed, and which included the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it
resulted in an estimated .50million to 85 million fatalism. These made World War II the deadliest
conflict in human history.

Hitler

Born in Austria in 1889, Adolf Hitler rose to power in German

politics as leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, also known as the
Nazi Party. Hitler was chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and served as
dictator from 1934 to 1945. His policies precipitated World War II and the Holocaust.

Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance was the name given to the cultural, social, and artistic
explosion that took place in Harlem between the end of World War I and the middle

of the 1930s. During this period Harlem was a cultural center, drawing black
writers, artists, musicians, photographers, poets, and scholars.

Dictator:

a ruler with total power over a country, typically one who has

obtained power by force.

Fascism: an authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system

of government and social organization.

Nazi Party: was a political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945
that practiced Nazism.

Pearl Harbor: A major United States naval base in Hawaii that was
attacked without warning by the Japanese air force on December 7, 1941, with great
loss of American lives and ships.

Essay
FDR AND NEW DEAL
The Great Depression in the United States began on October 29, 1929, a day known forever after
as Black Tuesday, when the American stock marketwhich had been roaring steadily upward
for almost a decadecrashed, plunging the country into its most severe economic downturn yet.
Speculators lost their shirts; banks failed; the nations money supply diminished; and companies
went bankrupt and began to fire their workers in droves. Meanwhile, President Herbert Hoover
urged patience and self-reliance: He thought the crisis was just a passing incident in our national
lives that it wasnt the federal governments job to try and resolve. By 1932, one of the bleakest
years of the Great Depression, at least one-quarter of the American workforce was unemployed.
When President Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, he acted swiftly to try and stabilize the
economy and provide jobs and relief to those who were suffering. Over the next eight years, the
government instituted a series of experimental projects and programs, known collectively as the
New Deal that aimed to restore some measure of dignity and prosperity to many Americans.
More than that, Roosevelts New Deal permanently changed the federal governments
relationship to the U.S. populace.

THE ROARING 20S

The 1920s were an age of dramatic social and political change. For the first time,
more Americans lived in cities than on farms. The nations total wealth more than
doubled between 1920 and 1929, and this economic growth swept many Americans
into an affluent but unfamiliar consumer society. People from coast to coast
bought the same goods (thanks to nationwide advertising and the spread of chain
stores), listened to the same music, did the same dances and even used the same
slang! Many Americans were uncomfortable with this new, urban, sometimes racy
mass culture; in fact, for manyeven mostpeople in the United States, the 1920s

brought more conflict than celebration. However, for a small handful of young
people in the nations big cities, the 1920s were roaring indeed.

Harlem Renaissance
The nucleus of the movement included Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, Rudolf Fisher, Wallace
Thurman, Jessie Redmond Faucet, Nella Larsen, Arena Bontemps, Counted Cullen, and Zora
Neale Hurston. An older generation of writers and intellectualsJames Weldon Johnson, Claude
McKay, Alain Locke, and Charles S. Johnsonserved as mentors. The publishing industry, fueled
by whites fascination with the exotic world of Harlem, sought out and published black writers.
With much of the literature focusing on a realistic portrayal of black life, conservative black
critics feared that the depiction of ghetto realism would impede the cause of racial equality. The
intent of the movement, however, was not political but aesthetic. Any benefit a burgeoning black
contribution to literature might have in defraying racial prejudice was secondary to, as Langston
Hughes put it, the expression of our individual dark-skinned selves.