HIST 127 Europe, 1890 - 1945
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
This course, designed for first and second year students, continues the history of the modern world in Europe from the high point of Empire and world domination at the end of the nineteenth century to collapse and ruin in 1945. The grand societies and rich states which composed the European state system in 1890 destroyed themselves in these fifty-five years. As many as eighty million Russians, Germans, Poles, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Italians and other Europeans died in slave labor camps, and six million Jews were systematically murdered. Europe's flourishing Jewish community east of the Rhine was wiped out. On the 9th of May 1945, the day Nazi Germany surrendered, the once prosperous continent was a gigantic smoking ruin, covered by rubble, pock-marked by craters and full of miserable starving people. This course will try to explain how and why Europe committed suicide in such a horrific way. It will cover Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, the two world wars, the great economic depression and the holocaust. It is not a happy story, but it forms the background to the world in 2000. We need to try to understand these catastrophic years in order to explain our own situation, possibly to learn some modest lessons.
Course Syllabus (PDF)
