Cluster Programs: The World Wars: Experience, Memorey, Legacy
No events transformed the twentieth century as did the two World Wars. During World War I, from 1914-18, some 15 million people died. National boundaries changed; new governments formed. Shattered amid the battlefields of Europe were illusions of peace and human progress that had sustained the region for forty years. From the ashes of World War I destruction emerged a communist takeover in Russia, and in the Treaty of Versailles that brought an end to the conflict, the Allied Powers sowed the seeds for the rise of fascism and the Second World War by their vindictiveness. Twenty-one years after Germany surrendered, World War II erupted. Pitting nations from five continents against one another, an estimated 60 million people lost their lives during the war. Combat wreaked devastation throughout Europe, Asia, and Northern Africa, revealing a level of depravity and brutality that superseded anything humankind had ever witnessed. World War II also produced a weapon thousands of times more destructive than anything people had known previously.
More than simply warfare and killing, the two World Wars marked critical developments and changes in medicine, science, technology, literature, social sciences, the arts, and society. Many of those advances and shifts affect our lives today. This cluster on the two World Wars offers students an opportunity to study the defining events of twentieth-century global history.
PWAD 350, National and International Security (Core course) [SS]
ENGL 659, War in Twentieth-Century Literature [HM]
HIST 281, The Pacific War [SS]
HIST 373, The United States in World War II [SS]
HIST 262, History of the Holocaust [SS]
RUES 260/POLI 260/PWAD 260/ SOCI 260, Crisis and Change in Russia and Eastern Europe [SS]
SLAV 465/PWAD 465, Literature of Atrocity: Gulag and Holocaust [HM]
The four Divisions of the College of Arts and Sciences, with their abbreviations:
[HM]: Humanities
[FA]: Fine Arts
[SS]: Social and Behavioral Sciences
[NS]: Natural Sciences and Mathematics