European History, 1918-1989

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Europe s so called short twentieth century bookended by the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a complex and confusing age for many who lived through it. To attempt to make sense of it, this module is structured around three major hinge points 1919, 1945 and 1989. We begin with the uneasy and violent peace of 1919 when nation states superseded empires on large parts of the European continent, and as new modes of politics Lenin s Communists and Mussolini s fascists mobilized Europeans. Looking at interwar Europe 1919 39 we learn that the later slide into an age of dictatorships in the 1930s was not inevitable. Choices and events such as the Spanish Civil War mattered. World War II forms the crux of the European twentieth century with its bombed cities, occupations, resistance movements and genocide it gave way to a brutal peace and the eclipse of European world domination. A new conflict the Cold War tied Europe s fate to American and Soviet blocs. Europe s twentieth century was not all misery, however, and we also consider the transnational moments of stabilization such as post 1950 Western European democratic age of prosperity and European integration. Politics could involve social change in attitudes to family and sexuality, for example, in the aftermath of 1968 as well as economics and elections. From Norway to Greece and from Germany to the Soviet Union, ordinary Europeans experienced an age of extremes and genocide but could also betimes be part of a resilient Europe however they imagined it that emerged out of ashes as historian Konrad Jarausch subtitled his study of the century.