Interwar Years

The Interwar Years

A Senseless War

• Old WWI battlefields became national historical preservation areas

  • Monuments

  • Mass Graveyards where thousands of unnamed people are buried

• Most nations who participated created a “tomb of the unknown soldier” to remind them of the senselessness of war

• The violence of the last war made people of the generation (especially veterans) accustomed to violence, and were therefore thought that this might embody the new way of life.

A Fragile Hope for Peace

• America refused to join the league of nations (which it proposed!) and then they withdrew from European affairs

• Russia had gone communist and had strained relations with the nations who had not backed them in their revolution

• World was in an unstable place, and because of industrialism and the growth of world trade in the last century, nations around the world are more interconnected (a ripple effect).  

  • One of the downsides of globalization

• Countries reacted to this in different ways (NOT all in Europe)