Homework & Classwork - For Tuesday, read the Overview of the Russian Revolution and answer the assigned questions The questions for the Overview of the Russian Revolution are on the class web page and here. On Wednesday, you will have quiz on the full notes on the Russian Revolution.
Classwork for Friday - Look at the source material below about the Interwar Years and answer the assigned questions.
Biography - Emmeline Pankhurst - Fighting for Women's Right to Vote
Emmeline Pankhurst was born in 1858 England to a family that was involved in liberal and radical politics. She was one of ten children in her family. One of her earliest memories was of her father remarking, “What a pity she wasn’t born a lad.” Pankhurst became interested in the cause of women getting the right to vote after attending a public meeting on the issue when she was 14. In 1878, she married Richard Pankhurst, who was 24 years older but supported her political activism in the Women’s Franchise League (An early organization for winning women the right to vote). Together they had five children before he died in 1898.
After Richard’s death, Pankhurst went to work to support her family by becoming the Registrar of Births and Deaths in Manchester. This brought her into close contact with many working class women and Pankhurst became fully aware of the hard lives of the women in the working class. In 1900, she became part of the School Board for the City of Manchester, through which she saw many of the problems in the working class schools. These experiences convinced Pankhurst that winning the right to vote was the only way for women to improve their conditions.
In 1903, Pankhurst formed the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) as a more radical organization to fight for women’s right to vote. In organizing the WSPU, Pankhurst said the slogan would be “Deeds, not words”. Pankhurst’s oldest daughters were also leaders in the WSPU. The WSPU began by holding “Women’s Parliaments” in London that coincided with the official meetings of Parliament. The WSPU had a strategy of targeting political parties with protests to force them to put issue of women’s voting rights on the Parliamentary agenda. One British Newspaper wrote about one of these meetings using the diminutive term "suffragette" (instead of the standard "suffragist") to describe the more militant members of the WSPU. Pankhurst and her supporters seized upon the term and adopted it to separate themselves from the more moderate groups.
The slogan of “Deeds, not words” began to have meeting in 1908 after a large rally of 500,000 activists in London was ignored by Parliamentary leaders. Following the rally, a group of young WSPU members protested this by throwing rocks and breaking windows in Prime Minister’s house. While Pankhurst did not tell her supporters to do this, she did not object to the tactic of breaking windows. After this, members of the WSPU would engage in more acts of destruction to draw attention to their cause including using a hatchet to carve “Votes for Women” in the Prime Minister’s carriage and even cases of arson.
Pankhurst was arrested the first time in 1908 when she tried to deliver a petition to the Prime Minster in Parliament. At her trial, she famously said, “We are not here because we are law-breakers; we are here in our effort to become law-makers.” She spent six weeks in prison which brought recognition to her cause and made it a useful tool for getting public attention and support. Shortly after being released, she was arrested again after striking a policeman. In total she would be arrested seven more times. Pankhurst and many of the WSPU members who were arrested went on hunger strikes to protest their imprisonment. The prison authorities responded to these protests by force-feeding the women by using steel gags to hold their mouth open and feeding them through a tube. This policy caused public outrage and police began to worry about the health of the WSPU members in prison – especially the fear of the public backlash if a WSPU member should die in prison. The police switched to a policy of “cat and mouse” where they would arrest and then release WSPU members before they became too weak from not eating.
When World War One began the Suffragettes movement was divided about how to respond to the war. Pankhurst considered the treat from Germany greater a more pressing concern and made an agreement with the government for the WSPU to suspend all action during the war. She began to use her influence and spoke for women to support the war effort. She also established a home for war orphans (children born to women whose boy friends were killed in the war) and even adopted four children herself.
In 1918, as the war was ending, British Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act which allowed women over 30 to vote. Instead of joining an existing party, Pankhurst started the Women's Party to act on behalf of issues that concern women. However, she chose not to run for Parliament herself so that one of her daughters could campaign for a seat. Her daughter lost by a close margin and shortly after that the Women’s Party was disolved . Then 1926 she surprised people by joining the Conservative Party and running for Parliament – but was not elected. She died in 1928.
Source # 1 - Video clip on the reasons Suffragettes were regarded as terrorists - click here
Source # 2 - Video clip on the death of Suffragette Emily Davison - click here
Source # 3 - Video describing the impact of the Great Depression on Belgium - click here
Source # 4 - Video on how the Great Depression created political turmoil - click here
Biography - John Maynard Keynes - Economist of the Twentieth Century
John Maynard Keynes was born in 1883 to an academic family in England. His father was a lecturer at the University of Cambridge who supported Keynes’ academic advancements. Keynes attended Eton College where he mixed with many upper class students, who go onto be leaders in the British government. He then went on to study at Cambridge University where he was a top student and studied under the economist Alfred Marshall
In 1905 he passed the civil service exam and began to work in the India Office and he used this position to write a book on the Indian Economy. He left in 1908 to return to Cambridge and became the editor of the University’s economics journal. When World War One broke out in 1914, he rejoined the civil service and began to work as an advisor to the British Treasury in managing the country’s war finances.
In 1919, he was sent to Paris Peace Conference to work on calculating the amount of compensation that Germany would told to pay Britain as war damages. Through this work, Keynes realized that Germany would be unable to pay the reparations demanded by the Allies. He advocated that the war debts of all the countries be reduced so as to help the economies of the warring countries recover from the war. This was opposed by all the Allied governments. In protest, Keynes resigned his position and wrote his book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, in which he wrote, “If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade to nothing.” The book was read around the world and gained Keynes a reputation as a leading economist. However, British officials were not impressed by the book and he did not have another official position in the government again until the Second World War.
During the 1920’s, Keynes worked as an academic economist at Cambridge, investing and making a personal fortune in financial markets and writing articles that were critical of the government’s economic policies. However, as his Russian ballerina wife said, he was “more than just an economist”. During this time he was involved in the Bloomsbury Group of writers and artists, an avid art collector and even a manager of the Cambridge university theater.
The stock market crash in 1929 and Great Depression had a huge impact on Keynes, who lost much of his personal fortune in the crash. The failure of the global economy forced Keynes to rethink many of idea of a self-regulating market that he had learned from Marshall. Keynes began to argue that a capitalist economy was prone to crisis and that the government needed to actively manage the economy. Keynes was criticized by many of his fellow liberal economists for changing his position on the role of government in the economy. He responded to this with, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
Keynes writings drew the attention of American President Franklin Roosevelt who began to correspond with Keynes about the economy. In 1934, Keynes travelled to the United States to meet with Roosevelt about ways to confront the Depression. Then in 1936, Keynes wrote the book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money that presented a fully theory of how the economy works. This book had a huge impact and Keynes’ ideas would go on to become the basis for economic policy in Europe and the United States throughout much of the rest of the twentieth century.
When World War Two began, Keynes returned to work for the British government with trying to figure out how Britain would be able to pay for the war. Then in 1944, as the war was drawing to a close, Keynes lead the British delegation at the Bretton Woods Conference to organize the system for the post-war global economy. Determined to avoid the problems of the Treaty of Versailles, Keynes worked at the conference to establish a globally managed capitalist system could prevent wars and promote peace. Keynes’ work lead to the creation of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and later the World Trade Organization, all of which continue to play a major role in stabilizing the global economic system. After the conference, Keynes remarked that “the brotherhood of man will have become more than a phrase.” Keynes died two years later in 1946.
Source # 5 - Video on Roosevelt and the New Deal - click here
Source # 6 - Video clip from the show Top Gear on the first car with modern controls and steering - click here
TopGear - In search of the first car with... by KarlyBello
