Describe Japanese militarism in Manchuria and China, Stalin's Great Purge and the Holodomor, and the failure of appeasement, and define totalitarianism's shared features across four regimes.
In Japan, a militarist faction increasingly dominated a weak civilian government through the 1930s. In 1931, Japanese officers staged the Mukden Incident as a pretext to invade Manchuria, setting up a puppet state; the League of Nations condemned the invasion but took no real enforcement action, and Japan simply withdrew from the League in 1933, exposing the League's fatal lack of teeth. Japan's full-scale invasion of China in 1937 brought the Nanjing Massacre that December and January, in which Japanese forces killed an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 or more Chinese civilians and prisoners of war in an occupied city -- a documented atrocity taught honestly, the same way this course treats every other hard-history topic.
Meanwhile in the Soviet Union, Stalin's forced collectivization of agriculture caused a famine that killed millions, especially devastating in Ukraine, where it is known as the Holodomor (1932-1933); his Great Purge (1936-1938) then used show trials, mass executions, and sentences to Gulag labor camps to eliminate millions of real and imagined political enemies, including much of the old Bolshevik leadership and military officer corps. Faced with rising aggression from Germany, Italy, and Japan, Britain and France pursued appeasement, hoping each demand would be the last: they did nothing when Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936, watched the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) become a "dress rehearsal" for a wider war as Hitler and Mussolini backed Franco's Nationalists, accepted Germany's 1938 annexation of Austria, and finally, at the Munich Agreement of September 1938, let Hitler annex Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland in exchange for a promise of "peace in our time" -- a promise Hitler broke within six months by seizing the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Mastery looks like: They can name a specific atrocity connected to each of at least two totalitarian regimes, and define totalitarianism's shared features clearly enough to explain why very different ideologies can produce a similar method of ruling.
Common stumbles: Treating "totalitarian" as a synonym for one specific ideology (like communism alone or fascism alone), rather than recognizing it as a shared method of ruling found across regimes with different stated goals.