First-Year Seminar: The Nuremberg Trials and International Justice

3 units

This course is an exercise in understanding how professional historians and the general public discover and use the past. The main goals of this course are to understand the many different methods and standards applied to the past; to understand how and why each generation changes the past as it seeks to make it usable; and to develop the skills of exposition and argumentation necessary to describe and analyze complex historical issues and to express critical ideas effectively. The subject of this inquiry will be the Nuremberg trials - the innovations and critiques around the law and politics of the trials themselves, as well as the trials' legacies for ideas about international justice in postwar America and the world. Course is for first-year, non-transfer students only.