10.8 Students analyze the causes and consequences of World War II. 

1. 1.  Compare the German, Italian, and Japanese drives for empire in the 1930s, including the 1937 Rape of Nanking and other atrocities in China and the Stalin-Hitler Pact of 1939.

2. 2.  Understand the role of appeasement, nonintervention (isolationism), and the domestic distractions in Europe and the United States prior to the outbreak of World War II.

3. 3. Identify and locate the Allied and Axis powers on a map and discuss the major turning points of the war, the principal theaters of conflict, key strategic decisions, and the resulting war conferences and political resolutions, with emphasis on the importance of geographic factors.

4. 4.  Describe the political, diplomatic, and military leaders during the war (e.g., Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Emperor Hirohito, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower).

6. 6.  Discuss the human costs of the war, with particular attention to the civilian and military losses in Russia, Germany, Britain, United States, China and Japan.