Humanity's Darkest Hour: The World Wars and the Twentieth Century

3 units

Was the twentieth century humanity's darkest hour? How have two immensely lethal world wars continued to affect us today? This era included the two world wars; fascism, Nazism and communism; postwar recovery and the Cold War, and the loss of empire. Yet it also witnessed women gaining the right to vote in many countries, the emergence of the civil rights movement, and decolonization. We will pay significant attention to the ways in which ideologies, nationalisms, and the quest for human rights appreciably shaped the lives of people living during an era of total war, competing political systems, and decolonization, focusing on what Eric Hobsbawm called the short twentieth century, 1914-1991.