World War I for Kids: A History with 21 Activities
June 28 Treaty of Versailles is signed 1920ſ November 15 League of Nations opens first session of General Assembly
INTRODUCTION ORLD WAR I may have been the most important turning point of the 20th cen tury It was not as large and devastating a con
flict as World War II would be but it did even more to shape the world as it is today It rav aged most of Europe and destroyed four empires while also creating many new nations It triggered the Russian Revolution and laid the bases for Balkan and Middle Eastern conflicts that remain unresolved today Most significant ly perhaps it gave Germany grievances that Adolf Hitler's Nazi movement would exploit in its rise to power and thereby contribute to the Holocaust and World War II Indeed the roots of that later world war are so deeply embedded in the first that the second world war might justly be considered a continuation of World War I World War I also raised the United States to the status of a world power and inspired the creation of the League of Nations the predecessor of the United Nations In addition it fundamentally transformed military combat by introducing weapons of unprece dented destructive power and by taking combat closer to civilian populations than ever before It rev olutionized naval warfare and gave the world aerial warfare Meanwhile the war's impact on the home fronts of the nations involved set in motion vast social changes extending democracy giving more women the vote and helping to liberate women in
the workplace The war began in 1914 with plans based on 19th century military thinking By the time it ended four years later it had become a hightech 20th century war whose advances would influence the way future wars would be fought The most obvious military changes it introduced were in weaponry These included more lethal machine guns longer range and more accurate artillery more powerful battleships deadly poison gases mechanized tanks submarines capable of sinking ships and armed aircraft Each of these innovations forced changes in tactics and strat egy and inspired further advances Change in History CHANGE IS the essence of history and World War I offers a rich workshop for exploring historical change This book's central goals are to explain how the war arose how it differed from earlier wars and how changes brought by large scale warfare can have far reaching effects World War I is important not merely because of the scale of its fighting or the destruction it brought but also because of the sweep ing changes it forced on the world War is always about much more than the purely military matters of weaponry and fighting World War I destroyed trans formed and even created entire nations altering their political systems economies and cultures In studying wars in history what really matters is
