Contemporaries experienced World War I both as an exhilarating revolution and as a terrible revelation. The conflict radically changed social and political life and revealed that modernity was anything but a synonym of progress. We will approach the war from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. First, this will be a course in political and military history, meant to familiarize students with the main coordinates of the conflict in terms of diplomatic, economic, and technological developments. Second, this course will deal with the many meanings historical actors themselves attributed to the conflict and the ways they experienced it from a multitude of class, gender, religious, ideological, and ethnic/racial perspectives. For that, we will look at a variety of cultural artifacts, ranging from literary memoirs to popular and “high” music, and from soldiers’ poetry to their private letters. Finally, the course will probe the relationships between history and memory, assessing the distance between our vision of the war in today’s popular culture and the many visions that competed with each other a century ago. We will sample some of the ways the war has been memorialized, discussing whether a truly detached and objective understanding is possible or even desirable.

Course Requirements:

Two exams and a paper

Intended Audience:

Majors and non-majors, all levels

Class Format:

Lecture and discussion