Term

Week

Lecture and Seminar Topic

Seminar questions and reading material may be accessed through Moodle (click hereLink opens in a new window).
The following table includes core reading from the course texts.

No teaching but time to start reading!!!

Core reading: Blanning, ed., Introduction; Chap. 1

2

Lecture: Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars

Seminar: Writing the history of war

Core reading: Sheehan, Prologue

Each student must bring the following items to the first seminar:

One issue of a daily newspaper or of a weekly current affairs magazine AND one novel or volume of poetry.

Lecture: The wars of German unification

Seminar: War and the nation-state

Core reading: Sheehan, Chap. 1

Lecture: The birth of industrial warfare

Seminar: The Russo-Japanese war

Core reading: Blanning, ed., Chap. 2

Lecture: Pacifism in the nineteenth century

Seminar: Is war good for business?

Lecture: Colonial warfare

Seminar: War and demographic anxieties

Core reading: Sheehan, Chap. 3

Lecture: The causes of modern wars

Seminar: Explaining the outbreak of WWI

Core reading: Blanning, ed., Chap. 3

Lecture: The First World War and the totalization of warfare

Seminar: How to fight on the Western Front (1914-1918)

Core reading: Sheehan, Chap. 4

Lecture: Home fronts and social mobilization in WWI

Seminar: Gender in wartime

Core reading: Blanning, ed., Chap. 4

Lecture: Warfare and welfare in interwar Europe

Seminar: Remembering the First World War

Core reading: Sheehan, Chap. 5

Lecture: Regulating and preventing war (1899-1939)

Seminar: War and the emergence of international law

Core reading: Blanning, ed., Chap. 5

Lecture: The Spanish Civil War

Seminar: Fascisms and war

Core reading: Blanning, ed., Chap. 6

Lecture: The Second World War: a "thirty years' war"?

Seminar: Economic mobilization

Core reading: Sheehan, Chap. 6

Lecture: War and genocide in Europe (1915-1945)

Seminar: Was the Holocaust an act of war?

Core reading: Blanning, ed., Chap. 8

Lecture: From war to civil wars: resistance, collaboration, and the aftermath of WWII

Seminar: Violence and the transition to peace

Core reading: Sheehan, Chap. 7

Lecture: Cold War

Seminar: The meaning of deterrence

Core reading: Blanning, ed., Chap. 7

Lecture: Pacifism after Auschwitz and Hiroshima

Seminar: The CND in Britain

Core reading: Sheehan, Chap. 8

Lecture: Wars of decolonization

Seminar: The war of Algerian independence

Core reading: Blanning, ed., Chap. 9

Lecture: The dividends of peace

Seminar: The Euromissiles crisis

Core reading: Blanning, ed., Chap. 11

Lecture: Yugoslavia and the return of war in Europe

Seminar: Liberal interventionism in the twenty-first century

Core reading: Sheehan, Chap. 9; Epilogue