10.8 Students analyze the causes and consequences of World War II.
1. Compare the German, Italian, and Japanese drives for empire in the 1930s,
including the 1937 Rape of nanking, other atrocities in China, and the Stalin-
Hitler Pact of 1939.
2. Understand the role of appesement, nonintervention (isolationism), and
the domestic distractions in Europe and the United States prior to the
outbreak of World War II.
3. Identify and locate the Allied and Axis powers on a map and discuss the
major turning points of the war, the principal theaters of conflict, key
strategic decisions, and the resulting war conferences and political
resolutions, with emphasis on the importance of geographic factors.
4. Describe the political, diplomatic, and military leaders during the war
(e.g., Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Emperor Hirohito, Adolf
Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight
Eisenhower).
5. Analyze the Nazi policy of pursuing racial purity, especially against the
European Jews; its transformation into the Final Solution; and the Holocaust
that resulted in the murder of six million Jewish civilians.
6. Discuss the human costs of the war, with particular attention to the
civilian and military losses in Russia, German, Britain, the United States,
China, and Japan.
