Mayterm 2011
Course information | Political Science Faculty | History Faculty | The Great War | The Cold War
The Great War
The twentieth century’s distinctive culture began when the Indian summer of the Victorian age was cut short by the outbreak of the Great War, a war that shattered the moral certainties and political and economic order of the west. The scale of human suffering experienced in trench warfare, the deprivations on the home front and the attacks on civilian populations made the war experience a universal experience for Europeans. In order to understand the war experience more deeply, this course will travel to the battlefields of Ypres, the tunnels of Arras, the trenches of the Somme, and the killing fields of Verdun. We will be introduced to the sheer physicality of the Great War, a war in which traditional strategies of human combat were brutally exposed to the firepower of modern technology. Inside this furnace, western society was transformed.
