Listed in: European Studies, as EUST-130 | History, as HIST-130
Ellen R. Boucher (Section 01)
(Offered as HIST 130 [EU/TE] and EUST 130) The image of the First World War is so iconic that it can be evoked through a handful of tropes: trenches, machine guns, mud, “going over the top,” crossing “no man’s land.” Yet in many ways this is a partial vision, one that focuses myopically on the experiences of European soldiers who occupied a few hundred miles of trenches in northern France. Why is it that a conflict as unprecedented in its size and complexity as “the Great War” has been reduced in our minds to this very limited scale? This course both explores the role of World War I in our cultural imagination and aims to create a broader, messier, and more complicated portrait of the history. It will examine the conflict on multiple fronts, studying the perspectives of both European and non-European soldiers and civilians, and analyze the war’s role in shaping the twentieth century. Two class meetings per week.
Limited to 40 students. Fall semester. Professor Boucher.
How to handle overenrollment: Preference to History majors, European Studies majors, seniors, juniors, and so on.
Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Close analysis of historical evidence, which may include written documents, images, music, films, or statistics from the historical period under study. Exploration of scholarly, methodological, and theoretical debates about historical topics. Extensive reading, varying forms of written work, and intensive in-class discussions.
Section 01
M 12:30 PM - 1:50 PM CHAP 201
W 12:30 PM - 1:50 PM CHAP 201
| ISBN | Title | Publisher | Author(s) | Comment | Book Store | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| WWI: A Short History | Malden: Wiley Blackwell, 2018 | Tammy Proctor | Amherst Books | TBD | ||
| White War, Black Soldiers: Two African Accounts of World War I, ed. George Robb, trans. Nancy Erber and William Peniston | Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2021 | Bakary Diallo & Lamine Senghor | Amherst Books | TBD | ||
| Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World | New York: Hachette, 2017 | Laura Spinney | Amherst Books | TBD | ||
| The World of Prostitution in Late Imperial Austria | Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017 | Nancy Wingfield | TBD | |||
| Aftershocks: Politics and Trauma in Britain, 1918-1931 | London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009 | Susan Kingsley Kent | TBD | |||
| Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of National Consciousness | Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004 | Richard Smith, Jamaican | TBD | |||
| Home Fires Burning: Food, Politics, and Everyday Life in World War I Berlin | Chapel Hill, UNC Press, 2000 | Belinda Davis | TBD | |||
| The Resistance Network: The Armenian Genocide and Humanitarianism in Ottoman Syria, 1915–1918 | East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2021 | Khatchig Mouradian | TBD | |||
| Violent Intermediaries: African Soldiers, Conquest, and Everyday Colonialism in German East Africa | Athens: Ohio State University, 2014 | Michelle Moyd | TBD | |||
| Wounded: A New History of the Western Front in WWI | Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016 | Emily Mayhew | TBD | |||
| The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921 | Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020 | Radhika Singha | TBD |
These books are available locally at Amherst Books.