USM Open Source History Text: The World at War: World History 1914-1945Main MenuIntroduction: A Mural as WindowOn Diego Rivera's Detroit IndustryThe World Around 1914, Part I: the Journey of Young GandhiThe World Around 1914, Part II: The Era of Nationalism and Imperialism (1848-1914)The First World WarThe Long Russian Revolution (1917 – 1929)The Decline of the West? Europe from 1919 – 1929A New Middle East: The Rise of the Middle East State SystemChina Between Qing Collapse and WWIILatin America Between Boom and Bust (1911-1929)Africa Under Colonial Rule: Politics and Race from 1914‐1939The United States from The First World War to the Great DepressionThe Great DepressionThree Varieties of Radicalism in the 1930s: Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, and Imperial JapanThree Responses to Modernity: Ho Chi Minh, Ibn Saud, and Getulio VargasThe Second World WarSeth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c
A Nation's Military
12017-06-09T10:59:22-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929c192374plain2020-08-23T03:41:56-07:00Seth Rogoff5f001fc099cd635507b143be056702764af6929cLike the educational system, the military encouraged loyalty and identification with the nation. The first explosion of an “army of the people” came during the French Revolution and the subsequent Napoleonic Wars when the army of volunteers and conscripts fighting for the ideals of the French Nation overwhelmed the combined might of the conservative, monarchical powers until it stalled out in the frozen landscape of a Russian winter in the deadly year 1812. By the late nineteenth century, the power of the citizen soldier was coming of age again. Germany, France, Italy, Belgium, and Austria-Hungary all adopted a policy of conscription in the years following the revolutions of 1848. Soldiers were taught to fight, not as before for the king or empire, but for the glory of the nation, for Germany, France, Italy, etc. and the abstract ideals (cultures or histories) these nations embodied. Groups like the Boy Scouts, founded by Robert Baden-Powell, sought to blend youth education with military culture, reinforcing the twin engines of the era, imperialism and nationalism, through a idealized (and highly romantic) view of imperial conflict, exploration, and war.
