World War II

Catalog description

Explores the causes, conduct and consequences of World War II. When did World War II start? How was it fought, and what did that mean for soldiers, the homefront and millions of civilians in Japanese or German occupied regions? What did the world that emerged in its wake look like? The course explores these fundamental questions with an emphasis on multiple explanations of the causes of the war in Asia and Europe and the contingency of Allied victory. Explores the war as both a total and a global war in which perceptions of race, class and gender shaped the experience of combatants and noncombatants, many of whom died in indiscriminate bombing campaigns. Racial ideologies also led to the brutalization of soldiers, which in turn fueled the violence against civilians, as exemplified by the Holocaust and Japanese war crimes. Finally, the course turns to the global order emerging after the war and the different narratives that emerged from it.