Wilson's Fourteen Points

On January 8, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson delievered a speech entitled Fourteen Points, in which he address key points that he believed would end the war and provide lasting peace. Some of those points included:

• No more secret treaties
• Self determination
• A League of Nations should be set up to guarantee the political and territorial
         independence of all states.
• Belgium should be independent like before the war

Although Wilson desperately wanted the Allies to see the logic behind his Fourteen Points, they ultimately stirred up more conflict among the Allies then he intended. In the end it was only the last point, which called for the creation of the League of Nations, that was adapted and put into the Treaty of Versailles as a provision.  And even the League of Nations was eventually done away with during World War II when the United Nations was formed. 
The most important of Wilson's Fourteen Points was indeed the creation of the League of Nations.  After all what better way to establish and keep peace then to have an organization in which all of the major countries in the world can come together.  This organization would allow the leaders of certain countries come together and discuss major issues and sort problems out, rather than rushing into a long drawn war.

Political Cartoon from WWI

In this cartoon we see Kaiser Wilhelm II trying to disguise a snake as the dove of peace. As the referance to the snake as a symbol of evil goes all the way back to the biblical story of Adam and Eve, in which the serpent is really the devil in disguise, it is evident that the cartoonist wants to present Germany's actions to the public in the most severe fashion. The detailling of Kaiser Wilhelm II has also been exagerated so that he appears as a comedic bumbling old man. Through this image the cartoonist is telling us that Germany has shown the world so many lies and forms of trickery, that why shouldn't their offer of peace just be another one of their lies.  Yet we should be able to recognize the act as another form of trickery, and not be fooled by their offer.  This comic really interested me, because it was different then many of the other comics I looked at. The idea of the snake being hiden inside a dove's costume seems to fit the anti-German nature of the war.  It was also interesting to see the German's attempting a peace offering, when in actuality they had little to do with establishing peace after the war, being that they were not even allowed to defend themselves when the Treaty of Versailles was written.

Women in America During WWI

During World War I because so many men were joining the military and going to Central Europe to fight. This caused a problem for the government who could not find replacements for the factory, office, and shopkeeper positions that these men had formerly occupied.  In desperation they turned to women to fill the positions.  Soon women were building tanks, plowing fields, and running hospitals.  It was also the women who made sure that supplies were being manufactured and sent to the troops, such as food, clothing, and weapons. Women were the driving force that kept business moving while the male population was no longer there to do so, if not for women business could have stopped and troops would not have been properly equipted.  Although most women were forced to give up their newfound jobs once the war had ended and the men had returned, there was no denying that women were more than capable of performing laborous jobs. Labels like homemaker and childbearer, were no longer the only jobs associeted with women.

Armenian Genocide

The Armenian Genocide began April 24, 1915 when the Turkish government arrested an estimated 250 Armenian people in Constantinople, and inprisoned them in two holding centers outside of Ankara. This began the deportation, expropriation, torture, starvation, abduction, and massacre of the entire Armenian population. Deportation was the forced march of the Armenian population out of Armenia and into the desert of Syria, where it was intended that a majority would die of starvation and dehydration. Others were massacred throughout the regions of the Ottoman Empire, regardless of their age or gender.  The purpose of this genocide was ethnic cleansing.  Prior to the genocide itself the authorities of the Ottoman Empire had used different forms of propaganda to show the Armenian population as a threat to the empire. The Turks believed that by wiping out the Armenian population, they could then create a new empire made entirely of a Turkic population. 
This event was truely horrifying, to think that these people were massacred and tortured merely because they were not of the Turkic population.  In many ways this genocide is similar to the more widely know Holocaust, in which millions of Jews were forced on death marchs and killed using an means neccessary.  However, unlike the Holocaust which is widely studied and acknowledged, the Armenian genocide is still denied by many countries, who feel that it is wrongly named.  It's almost unfathomable that a country could kill millions of their own people and then step back and deny what they did.