Coming Back From Fall Break

Posted on by

Wildflowers, mountain, sunI hope you’re enjoying a lovely time away this week, hopefully getting some rest and having some fun, maybe making up any assignments you missed in the first half of the course. I just thought I’d share a word on what is to come after the break.

First, you should be thinking about your research paper topics. I’ve talked to many of you about your ideas. Now that you have a basic framework for the history of Europe from 1890 to 1945 it is time to go deeper into a particular topic. Would you like to know more about the experience of the home front in WW1 Italy? Or the “colonial imagination” in interwar France? Or the Holocaust in Bulgaria? Is there a time or a place you’d like to learn more about? Vienna in 1900? Sweden in the 1930s? Or a topic you want to dive into? The history of ballet? Or rugby? Or international diplomacy? This is your chance to be the historian.

Ultimately what you will need for this assignment is an interesting topic, a guiding research question, one historical monograph, and one primary source (or the equivalent). Full details are on the Research Paper Assignment with Details on the Handouts page. There are also some helpful bibliographies and links to research resources. Do some thinking – and dabble in the research databases – and come to class with your ideas.

While you all are working on your research papers, we will do some reading together to deepen are thinking about this history. First up, starting with discussion on Monday, is the introduction to Sarah Ann Frank’s recent book, Hostages of Empire: Colonial Prisoners of War in Vichy France (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). It brings together some themes we’ve touched on: the crisis of democracy in Vichy France, the history of empire, the experiences of colonial subjects. As you see, I’ll ask you to read the introduction for Monday after break and then one chapter for the following week that you will present to the class with a group of your classmates.

Details are on the schedule (but if anything looks askew please let me know)! See you back in the classroom soon!

W.B. Yeats and “The Second Coming”

Posted on by

picture of W B Yeats

William Butler Yeats? One of the greatest poets of the twentieth century – and a complicated man who had time to dabble in nationalism, eugenics, and fascism before they were unfashionable. He came from the Anglo-Protestant minority in Ireland, but proudly identified as Irish. His poetry was a window on the world of the early 20th century. He died before the Second World War in Europe, in 1939.

You can find a bit of biography here at the Poetry Foundation. Take time to read the full poem, “The Second Coming,” and learn a bit about Yeats and the power of poetry in the face of disaster.

Fin de Siècle or Belle Epoque?

Posted on by

For some, the last decades of the 19th c. were the fin de siècle (the end of the century), a term that could serve as adjective or noun and suggested a civilization in collapse under the pressure of new social developments and political pressures. The Hungarian journalist Max Nordau dubbed the age a time of “degeneration.” For others, especially, in the aftermath of the First World War, the prewar years were the Belle Époque (the good old days), a time of technological marvels, cultural splendors, and a rising standard of living.

We can see echoes of both views in sources from the time. It is simply a question of where to look. Watch film of the Paris Universal Exposition of 1900 – with its palace of electricity, moving sidewalks, and enormous Ferris wheel – for a bright view on the era. Among other things, you will catch glimpses of colonial subjects and colonial expositions that provide a sense for the European view of empire in this period. Jack London provides a contemporary view of the development of European civilization in The People of the Abyss (1902), his account of the working class of London. You can find both sides of the coin in turn-of-the-century Budapest and Vienna. Darker still are accounts of the genocide of the Herero and Namaqua peoples of German Southwest Africa in the first years of the 20th c. (sometimes dubbed the first genocide of the 20th c.) or contemporary accounts of the brutal regime of the Congo Free State.