Chapter 26 War, Revolution and Reconstruction, 1914-1929

AP FRQ Essays:

• Compare and contrast the extent to which the French Revolution (1789-1799) and the Russian Revolution (1917-1924) changed the status of women. (2004 A)
• Compare and contrast the degree of success of treaties negotiated in Vienna (1814-1815) and Versailles (1919) in achieving European stability. (1999)
• Contrast how a Marxist and a Social Darwinist would account for the differences in the conditions of these two mid-nineteenth-century families. (1999)

Other Potential Essays:

• What were the social, political, and economic effects of World War I?
• To what extent and in what ways did intellectual developments in Europe in the period 1880-1920 undermine confidence in human rationality and in a well-ordered, dependable universe?
• These two pictures suggest technological and urban transformations characteristic of modern Europe.  Using the pictures as a starting point, describe the extent of these changes and their effects on working and middle-class Europeans in the second half of the nineteenth century.  (See Gustave Caillebotte's "Paris, A Rainy Day" and Honore Daumier's "Third-Class Carriage" at ARTCHIVE.)
• Describe and analyze responses to industrialization by the working class between 1850 and 1914.
• "Every successful revolution puts on in time the robes of the tyrant that it deposed." Evaluate this statement with regard to the English Revolution (1640-1660), the French Revolution (1789-1815), and the Russian Revolution (1917-1930).
• In what ways and why did Lenin alter Marxism?
• Compare and contrast the roles of the peasantry and urban workers in the French Revolution with the peasantry and urban workers of the Russian Revolution.
• To what extent and in what ways did Nationalist tension in the Balkans between 1870 and 1914 contribute to the outbreak of the First World War?
• "The tsarist regime fell in 1917 because it had permitted tremendous change and progress in some areas while trying to maintain a political order that had outlived its time." Assess the validity of this statement as an explanation of the abdication of Nicholas II in 1917.
• Discuss and analyze the long-term social and economic trends in the period 1860 to 1917 that prepared the ground for revolution in Russia.
• "1914-1918 marks a turning point in the intellectual and cultural history of Europe."  Defend, refute, or modify this statement with reference to the generation before and the generation after the First World War.
• Analyze and assess the extent to which the First World War accelerated European social change in such areas as work, sex roles, and government involvement in everyday life.
• Write an essay that relates the development of the large conscripted citizen army from its origins in the levee en masse to the emergence of the modern nation-state.
• Analyze the major social, political, and technological changes that took place in European warfare between 1789 and 1918