On June 28, 1914, the Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand was assassinated at Sarajevo. Less than five weeks after his death, the century of peace, which had been interrupted by only eighteen months of open warfare involving major European powers, came abruptly to an end. The searing flames of World War I engulfed the whole of Europe and burned away the last shreds of that complacency which had veiled for all but a few malcontents the forces of die integration which threatened the very existence of Western culture. The October Revolution in Russia, the political and economic collapse of Central Europe, the world-wide depression of the thirties, the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, the brutalities of Buchenwald and Dachau, and, finally, World War II all are but symptoms of a crisis in civilization which continues in the stresses and strains of a poet- war period in which we witness the gradual transformation of the social and economic structures of Western culture, and in which our democratic way of life le pitted against the total militaries of Red * period in which the atom bomb in ghastly reality and to into start terror.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:pacific.edu/oai:scholarlycommons.pacific.edu:uop_etds-4947 |
| Date | 01 January 1950 |
| Creators | Werkmeister, W H |
| Publisher | Scholarly Commons |
| Source Sets | University of the Pacific |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | University of the Pacific Theses and Dissertations |
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