California's standards for 10th-grade modern world history are strong—but it's the "framework" that is really clear, specific, and content rich. This is a common problem: even when states have documents that flesh out the standards, they rarely do a good job of publicizing them or making them easily accessible. In California, a teacher must know to look online for the "curriculum frameworks" instead of the "content standards." It is within the "curriculum frameworks" that the course is explained through an essay, excerpted below, that clearly lays out what topics teachers should cover. The essay also provides suggestions for how to approach key themes and concepts, what points to emphasize, and what materials would enhance students' understanding. Also excerpted below are the corresponding standards, though in some places—especially regarding Nazi Germany—the frameworks and standards are somewhat different. We find it striking how much more difficult it would be to teach this course using only the standards. Even though these standards have some content, much detail and almost all coherence are lost when the essay is broken into a numbered list. *

–Editors

Excerpt from the Framework for Grade Ten—World History, Culture, and Geography: The Modern World

World War I and Its Consequences

The growth of nationalism, imperialism, and militarism provides the backdrop for consideration of World War I, which permanently changed the map of Europe and deeply affected the rest of the world. Students should understand the political conditions that led to the outbreak of the war in Europe. Caused in large measure by nationalism, the war stimulated even greater nationalist impulses by dissolving old empires, unleashing irredentist movements, and promoting the spirit of selfdetermination. Within the context of human rights and genocide, students should learn of the Ottoman government's planned mass deportation and systematic annihilation of the Armenian population in 1915. Students should also examine the reactions of other governments, including that of the United States, and world opinion during and after the Armenian genocide. They should examine the effects of the genocide on the remaining Armenian people, who were deprived of their historic homeland, and the ways in which it became a prototype of subsequent genocides.

Through novels, poems, posters, and videotapes, students should gain an understanding of prewar European culture; of the meaning of total war (targeting civilian populations); of malicious wartime propaganda and false reports of German atrocities; of the opposition to the war in the United States; and of the disillusion that followed the war, including the sense of a world lost, despair over the destruction of a generation of young men, and loss of idealism when the world turned out not to be "safe for democracy" after all. In studying the significant consequences of the war, students should understand the importance of Woodrow Wilson's abortive campaign for the League of Nations; the rise of isolationism in the United States; the punitive terms of the peace imposed on Germany; the Russian Revolution and the national revolutions that resulted in the establishment of independent democratic republics such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine; the Balfour Declaration (significant in the eventual creation of Israel); the role of women in the war efforts and the effect women's involvement had on social attitudes; the cultural changes after the war (for example, the "lost generation" of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and others); the impact of Freudian psychology; and the changes wrought by new technology, such as the automobile, radio, and telephone.

Totalitarianism in the Modern World

The aftermath of World War I planted the seeds for another world conflict a generation later. The study of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia will illustrate the methods used by a totalitarian state to extinguish political freedom and to amass total control of a society and its politics within a single party and under a single leader. Special attention should be devoted to the destruction of human rights by these two dictatorships. The Holocaust and the famine in Ukraine should receive close attention. This unit offers rich opportunities for analyzing relationships among history, political ideology, governmental structure, economics, cultural traditions, and geography and observing the ways that art and literature can reflect and comment on social conditions.

Nazi Germany

The rise of Hitler should be examined in relation to Germany's postwar economic crisis; the collapse of the Weimar Republic; and Hitler's successful appeal to racism and what the historian Fritz Stern called "the politics of cultural despair." German art, music, and literature (for example, George Grosz and Bertolt Brecht) will deepen students' understanding of this era.

Hitler's policy of pursuing racial purity and its transformation into the Final Solution and the Holocaust should receive close attention. To place Hitler's claim to Aryan superiority in perspective, students should examine the highly developed Jewish culture of central Europe that produced a great number of artists such as Marc Chagall, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg, and Franz Kafka; scientists such as Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud; and scholars such as Edmund Husserl and Rudolph Lipschitz.

Study of the Holocaust should focus students' attention on the Nazi party's racist ideology, the suppression of rights and freedoms, and the Final Solution—a systematic policy of extermination of all Jews and other "non-Aryan" peoples. The Holocaust's horror is underscored by the number of people killed, including six million Jews, as well as the Nazis' ruthless utilization of bureaucratic social organization and modern technology to gather, classify, and eradicate their victims. Genocides, such as that perpetrated on the Armenians, already had demonstrated the human capacity for mass murder. The Nazis perfected the social organization of human evil and provided an efficient and frightening model for future despots such as Pol Pot in Cambodia. Students should learn about Krystallnacht; about death camps; and about the Nazi persecution of Gypsies, homosexuals, and others who failed to meet the Aryan ideal. They should analyze the failure of Western governments to offer refuge to those fleeing Nazism. They should discuss abortive revolts such as that which occurred in the Warsaw Ghetto, and they should discuss the moral courage of Christians such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Raoul Wallenberg, who risked their lives to save Jews.

Numerous videotapes and books (for example, The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Wiesel's Night) are available to demonstrate the gruesome reality of the Final Solution. The purpose is not to shock but to engage students in thinking about why one of the world's most civilized nations participated in the systematic murder of millions of innocent people, mainly because of their religious identity.

Stalinist Russia

The Stalin era should be set in the historical context of the czarist regimes with their secret police, censorship, and imprisonment of dissidents. Within this context, students should learn of the many abortive efforts at reform and revolution, the massive underdevelopment of the nation, and the Russian Revolution. Students should examine the Bolshevik overthrow of the Kerensky government and understand the difference between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. They should recognize the roles of Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin; and they should analyze the meaning of communist ideology.

Students should perceive the connection between economic policies, political policies, the absence of a free press, and systematic violations of human rights, including the crushing of workers' strikes. With this background they should examine the forced collectivization of agriculture; the murder of millions of kulaks; the government-created famine in Ukraine that led to the starvation of millions of people; the political purges of party leaders, artists, engineers, and intellectuals; and the show trials of the 1930s.

By analyzing examples of socialist realist art and reading Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, the first antiutopian novel, and Arthur Koestler's classic Darkness at Noon, students will acquire deeper insights into this period.

As a result of these in-depth studies of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, students should understand the nature of totalitarian rule and recognize the danger of concentrating unlimited power in the hands of the central government. They should develop understanding of the importance of a free press, the right to criticize the government without fear of reprisal, an independent judiciary, opposition political parties, free trade unions, and other safeguards of individual rights. This is an appropriate point at which to reflect on the role of the individual when confronted with governmental actions such as the Final Solution and other violations of human rights.

Corresponding Excerpt from the Standards

10.5 Students analyze the causes and course of the First World War.
1. Analyze the arguments for entering into war presented by leaders from all sides of the Great War and the role of political and economic rivalries, ethnic and ideological conflicts, domestic discontent and disorder, and propaganda and nationalism in mobilizing the civilian population in support of "total war."
2. Examine the principal theaters of battle, major turning points, and the importance of geographic factors in military decisions and outcomes (e.g., topography, waterways, distance, climate).
3. Explain how the Russian Revolution and the entry of the United States affected the course and outcome of the war.
4. Understand the nature of the war and its human costs (military and civilian) on all sides of the conflict, including how colonial peoples contributed to the war effort.
5. Discuss human rights violations and genocide, including the Ottoman government's actions against Armenian citizens.

10.6 Students analyze the effects of the First World War.
1. Analyze the aims and negotiating roles of world leaders, the terms and influence of the Treaty of Versailles and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, and the causes and effects of the United States's rejection of the League of Nations on world politics.
2. Describe the effects of the war and resulting peace treaties on population movement, the international economy, and shifts in the geographic and political borders of Europe and the Middle East.
3. Understand the widespread disillusionment with prewar institutions, authorities, and values that resulted in a void that was later filled by totalitarians.
4. Discuss the influence of World War I on literature, art, and intellectual life in the West (e.g., Pablo Picasso, the "lost generation" of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway).

10.7 Students analyze the rise of totalitarian governments after World War I.
1. Understand the causes and consequences of the Russian Revolution, including Lenin's use of totalitarian means to seize and maintain control (e.g., the Gulag).
2. Trace Stalin's rise to power in the Soviet Union and the connection between economic policies, political policies, the absence of a free press, and systematic violations of human rights (e.g., the Terror Famine in Ukraine).
3. Analyze the rise, aggression, and human costs of totalitarian regimes (Fascist and Communist) in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, noting especially their common and dissimilar traits.

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.
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.

*California's history framework is online at www.cde.ca.gov/re/pn/fd/documents/hist-social-sci-frame.pdf.

** Section 10.8 has six standards; only those relevant to the excerpt from the framework are shown.