History 3071/5071
Summer, 2008
World War II
Mr. Bowling
Books:
John Keegan, The Second World War (New York, 2005).
Daniel
Ford, Flying Tigers:
Claire Chennault and His American Volunteers,
1941-1942
(New York, rev.ed., 2007).
Eugenio
Corti, Few Returned: Twenty-Eight Days on the Russian
Front, Winter
1942-1943 (Columbia, Mo.,
1997).
Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943 (Chicago,
2004).
Ronald
Smelser, The Myth of the Eastern Front: The
Nazi-Soviet War in American Popular
Culture (Cambridge, 2007).
K.
Scott Wong, Americans First; Chinese Americans & the Second World War
(Philadelphia, rev. ed., 2008).
1. Attendance.
2. Readings.
3. Participation.
4. Oral reports (longer for graduate students), for which some
library research time will be provided.
5. Successful completion of two examinations.
General
Statement of Purpose and Plan of Study:
To
many, especially of the older generation, the Second World War is referred to simply
as "the war," "the Big One." At the center of the conflict were its principal
perpetrators: Germany under Hitler and
the Japanese Empire, versus the principal Allies: the United States under Roosevelt, the British Empire under Churchill, and the Soviet Union under Stalin.
The war had such an impact that the next half-century became known as
the "postwar era." Only now,
with the end of the Cold War, have we really begun to emerge from its shadow.
Topically, we shall follow proceed as follows:
background,
beginning with the settlement of the Great War
and
the problems thereby created;
the
accession to power of the expansionist dictators of
Germany
and Japan;
the
outbreak of actual conflict in the Far East and Europe;
the course of the war itself, with greatest attention to the
the outcome;
how the war was experienced domestically and remembered afterwards.