Explain similarities and differences in how governments used a variety of methods to conduct war.

• ​​World War I was the first total war. Governments used a variety of strategies, including political propaganda, art, media, and intensified forms of nationalism, to mobilize populations (both in the home countries and the colonies) for the purpose of waging war.
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• New military technology led to increased levels of wartime casualties.

Austro-Hungarian troops on the mountainous ​Italian Front

German East African soliders 

The Great War in 1914-1915

The Great War in 1916-1918

​In January 1919, communists tried to seize power in Germany during the failed Spartacist Uprising.

1919 illustration of the stab-in-the-back myth, a dangerous right-wing conspiracy theory that blamed Germany's defeat in World War I on Jews, liberals, socialists, and communists, and contributed to the rise of the Nazi Party.

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey (1923-1938) transformed Turkey into a progressive, secular, industrial nation.

• ​​The West dominated the global political order at the beginning of the 20th century, but both land-based and maritime empires gave way to new states by the century’s end.
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• The older, land-based Ottoman, Russian, and Qing empires collapsed due to a combination of internal and external factors. These changes in Russia eventually led to communist revolution.

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Article: The Chinese Revolution of 1911: Failure or Success?

Article: The War After the War: 7 Revolutions Caused By World War One

Japanese propaganda poster depicting a samurai triumphing over Allied navy ships with the Axis Power flags of Germany, Japan, and Italy fluttering in the background.

• ​​​The causes of World War II included the unsustainable peace settlement after World War I, the global economic crisis engendered by the Great Depression, continued imperialist aspirations, and especially the rise to power of fascist and totalitarian regimes that resulted in the aggressive militarism of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler. 
• ​​​​World War II was a total war. Governments used a variety of strategies, including political propaganda, art, media, and intensified forms of nationalism, to mobilize populations (both in the home countries and the colonies or former colonies) for the purpose of waging war. Governments used ideologies, including fascism and communism to mobilize all of their state’s resources for war and, in the case of totalitarian states, to repress basic freedoms and dominate many aspects of daily life during the course of the conflicts and beyond.
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• New military technology and new tactics, including the atomic bomb, fire-bombing, and the waging of “total war” led to increased levels of wartime casualties.

The Sowers (1942) by Thomas Hart Benton portrays the barbarity of fascism.