Central Bucks High School West

Enduring Understandings

Essential Questions

Students Will Be Able to:

1.  Nationalism and propaganda played a role in mobilizing civilian populations in support of their nation’s goals.

2.  Changes in the post-war world created a new world order and new world conflicts.

3.  Industrialization has the capacity for both progress and destruction.

4.  Improvements in technology created a paradox in which there existed the potential for advancement and/or decline.

6.  Global conflict leads to attempts at international cooperation and determining accountability (League of Nations, U.N. Nuremburg Trials).

1.  How can nationalism be a unifying and divisive force?

2.  What are the benefits and costs of science and technology?

3.  Is progress always progress?

Guiding Questions:

1.  Has the availability of new technology allowed for greater and easier taking of civilian life (i.e. genocide)?

2.  Has the ability to more efficiently kill people made us less humane or moral?

3.  Can international diplomatic institutions effectively oppose aggressive nations and achieve lasting peace?

4.  How does the availability of nuclear weapons affect global diplomacy?

5.  How have power structures changed since 1945?

6. Why are certain ethnic groups  targeted for genocide

7.  How did the end of the Cold War change the world’s power structure?

1.  Compare and contrast the nature of warfare from World War I to World War II.

2.  Describe the expansion and decline of the Axis Powers during WWII.

3.  Analyze the causes and nature of the relationships between cooperating nations.

4.  Identify cases of inhumanity during WWII, the reasons for them, and the reaction to them (Holocaust, Nanking, terror bombing, atomic bomb, etc.)

5.  Explain how the relationship of the US and USSR led to the Cold War and shaped policies and events during the Cold War.

6.  Analyze how the end of the Cold War changed the world’s power structure.