Order 797113: Modern Patterns in World History

Primary'Source:'World'War'II' Primary sources are sources that were produced during, and are thus nearest to, some historical event or period in question. Historians usually work with texts, including books, letters, newspapers, diaries and other documents. But primary sources may also include coins, paintings, photographs, maps, and monuments that were produced during an historical event or period in question. Primary sources are important because they provide first-hand accounts of how contemporaries lived and how those contemporaries understood and represented historical events. Historians use primary sources to reconstruct the past. But historians do not merely recount or re-present what is found in primary sources. Instead, they analyze and interpret primary sources within their appropriate context(s) and synthesize them with other sources of information to produce an historical narrative or a “story” about the past.

Munich'Conference'

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This image shows the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, the German dictator Adolf Hitler and his translator, Paul Otto Schmidt, and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at the 1938 Munich Conference. The conference was held in response to Adolf Hitler’s demands to annex German-speaking regions of Czechoslovakia. At the end of the conference, Hitler and his allies had won every concession that they had demanded from Chamberlain, who was determined to avoid war at any cost. Indeed, Chamberlain declared that after the meeting he had forged an agreement that would guarantee “peace for our time”. Besides being sorely mistaken, Chamberlain and the Munich Conference may have actually paved the way for Hitler and his allies to invade additional territories in Europe. The conference became associated with the policy of “appeasement”, or giving in to the demands of Hitler, Mussolini, and their allies. The European powers pursued this policy because they hoped to avoid another global conflict like the First World War. But in the end the policy of appeasement only bolstered figures like Hitler to act more brazenly on the expectation that no one would stand in their way.

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