Nikita's Blog

This year we have studied various topics concerning America and Europe during the 1910’s, 1920’s,and 1930’s in chronological order. We have mainly covered the time periods of events that happened in America and USA between World War I and World War II. While Europe was struggled with their own problems such as the creating of and after response to the Treaty of Versailles to structuring the League of Nation, while America faced the struggles enforcing the
Prohibition and the Wall Street Crash, resulting in the Great Depression.

Firstly, America and Europe both attempted to improve living and working conditions of both their inhabitants through differed methods. In the 1920s, America set up The Prohibition urged by groups such as the Anti-Saloon League in an attempt to help family life. Europe took a different approach through the League of Nations, which tried to improve living and working conditions of people worldwide. Both had their share of failures but statistics also reflect some success. Such as the League freed 200,000 prisoners and 400,000 slaves and blacklisted four Swiss drug companies. The Prohibition on the other hand, brought down national alcohol consumption rate by 30% in the early 1920s.

Our units also contrasted heavily based on the response they got by the public and those affected. For example, the Treaty of Versailles was taken badly by Germans, and even some Americans, which prompted them to go against the League of Nations. Americans took other units we studied positively as they benefited the economy and their lives during The Depression. The New Deal received a very enthusiastic response by the majority of Americans and helped lower the unemployment rate by a considerable amount. Other ways our units heavily contrasted was we studied time periods that had a vast different in economy and financial flourishment. We studied the 1920s and the large consumer sales, which helped, boost industries and helped the economy. Contrastingly, we also studied the Wall Street Crash that was accompanied by the Great Depression, which set the whole country into a large financial recession thus impacting Europe through the lack of American loans being sent to Europe.

In conclusion, the units we studied showed the various ups and downs of the early 20h century and how they affected the lives of people. We studied in depth, how various attempts to help people and countries co-operate succeeded or failed. Connections between failures such as the Treaty of Versailles leading to particular failures in the League because the Treaty led to neither Germany nor the USA joining being a major weakness were also made. In conclusion, this year we have studied very interesting units in chronological order, which enabled us to understand how the turn of events affected events that were to come.