Describe the conditions of trench warfare and new military technology on the Western Front, and explain the Armenian Genocide as part of the war's human costs.
Germany's Schlieffen Plan called for a fast knockout of France before turning to fight Russia, but Allied forces stopped the German advance near the Marne River in September 1914, and both sides then dug defensive trenches that would barely move for years. Between these opposing trench lines lay "no man's land," a shell-blasted strip of ground crossed by barbed wire and machine-gun fire. The scale of loss for so little ground gained was staggering: the Battle of Verdun (1916) produced roughly 700,000 combined casualties, and the Battle of the Somme (1916) produced roughly 1 million combined casualties, including about 57,000 British casualties on its first day alone. New technology made this slaughter possible: machine guns cut down advancing soldiers by the thousands, poison gas was used on a large scale for the first time at Ypres in 1915, tanks appeared on the battlefield in 1916, and airplanes and submarines extended the war into the sky and beneath the sea. At home, "total war" meant entire economies mobilized for the war effort, and women took on factory and public roles in unprecedented numbers, changing expectations that would carry into the postwar world.
Amid this war, the Ottoman government, under the leadership of the "Young Turk" Committee of Union and Progress, carried out the systematic deportation and killing of its Armenian population beginning in 1915, accusing Armenians of disloyalty and collaboration with Russia. Armenian civilians were forced on death marches into the Syrian desert and massacred in large numbers; historians estimate between 1 and 1.5 million Armenians died between 1915 and the early 1920s. The American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau, documented the killings as they happened, but no legal word yet existed for this kind of organized destruction of a people. That word, "genocide," was not coined until 1944, by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin, who pointed specifically to the Armenian case -- alongside the still-unfolding Holocaust -- when he argued the world needed a name and a law for this particular crime.
Mastery looks like: They can cite specific casualty evidence for the Western Front's stalemate and explain the Armenian Genocide's perpetrator, timeframe, and death toll, including the later coining of the word "genocide."
Common stumbles: Describing WWI's trenches only in vague terms ("it was brutal") without citing real evidence, or omitting the Armenian Genocide from the war's human costs entirely.