World history please help?

Question

please can anyone help me with the following questions?

-What are 2 ways technology impacted American popular culture in the post-World War I era?

-What are 2 factors that led to the growth of nationalist militarism in Japan during the 1930s?

-How did Hitler use the cause of German unity as justification for territorial expansion?

-Summarize the changes in the Soviet leadership and Soviet policy toward the West during the postwar.

Answer 1

   The post WW 1 era saw the rise of the silent movies(and into the 1930s the talkies), and the radio as an entertainment medium. This meant people were now able to get information much faster than they used to. Events could be relayed minutes after they occurred, and to most of the nation at the same time. With movies, people went from home-bound entertainment or strictly sporting events to gathering in theaters on Saturdays, or on Friday evenings. Even during the depression, when money was hard to come by, people would scrape up the change to get into a theater, where they could forget about the harshness of life for a day.(Back then you could stay in the theater all day if you wanted; they showed newsreels, cartons, serial episodes, and the main features over and over).

   One factor was the need of Japanese industry to gain raw resources. Those resources were hard to come by, and the Japanese military looked to imperialist conquest to gain them. Having moved from a fuedal nation to a world power in less than 80 years, Japan had seen how the European powers had used colonialism to build their empires. Japan wanted their share of that.

   Also, while the shogunate system had ended in the previous century, Japanese history has generally seen the Emperor as a symbolic head of government, not as an actual ruler. So it was natural for the military to look to consider themselves the natural ruling elite. And the best way to ensure that was to make sure there was a need for the military. So economic and cultural pressures combined to bring about the rise of the military rule of Japan.

   Hitler made repeated claims that his only interest was in "reuniting" ethnic German populations that had been cut off from the main body of Germany after World War 1. So through the 1930s he made a series of demands, claiming certain territory in the name of that re-uniting. This extended even to the entire country of Austria, for which a referendum had been made to justify German intervention. In each case, the British and French elected to negotiate someone else's property away rather than risking a new war. Only after the invasion of Poland, which was a blatent act of aggresion unrelated to "German unification", did the allies finally conceed that war was needed.