2020 Syllabus (for 2021 see the Canvas page)

World Wars I & II Digital Histories, HSTCMP 202 / Fall 2020

** Note this is the 2020 syllabus, current students please see the syllabus on Canvas **

 

What is a “world war”? What is imperialism and how did its history spin together with the trajectories of the two world wars? How did war alter societies and technologies forever? Is there such a thing as a “good” war? Are civilians properly targets of  warfare? How are the histories of the wars histories of racialization, gender, and sexuality? What is a “concentration camp” and is it ethical and/or practical to use camps for political or military control in wartime? How did the wars shape the world that survived them, from the fate of communism to the character of international law to the Cold War to decolonization?

This is a lecture course on World Wars I and II with a twist: three workshops in digital humanities and data skills form the spine of this course. These workshops begin in lecture, and students complete online modules at home (these modules are being prepped in Summer 2020 with support from the Simpson Center Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship). The aim of these workshops and the final project is to teach students to transfer their skills as historians – critically evaluating different kinds of information and sources – to the realm of digital work and data science.

This is a mini-version of the syllabus. More detail is on our Course Canvas site.

Books to buy:

  • Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, any edition, e-book or otherwise. 
  • Gerhard L. Weinberg, World War II: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014).
  • George Takei, They Called Us Enemy (Top Shelf, 2019).

Books available as ebooks at UW Library: 

  • John H Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History (London: Routledge, 2004).
  • Ruth Kluger, Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (Feminist Press, 2001).

Other readings:

Additional assigned readings are linked on Canvas.

Assignments:

There is an assignment due every week (except the first half-week) in this class. All assignments get turned in on Canvas under Assignments.

They fall into three categories:

Digital History Workshop Assignments, which teach DH skills. There are three of these workshops throughout the quarter. Detailed information for each workshop can be found on this website! You will turn in your written reflections on Canvas and they will be graded on a scale of 1-10.

Online Mini-Quizzes, which assess your understanding of the World Wars and other course themes. These quizzes will be completed on Canvas, and will ask 1-3 questions that could be short essays, primary source analysis, or identifications. The breakout rooms in our Zoom meetings will prepare you for these assignments, which will be graded on a scale of 1-10.

The Final DH Project/Project Proposal, which asks you to use your new DH skills to ask and answer a historical question related to our course content. Your initial proposal will try out a very short and basic version of a digital project in one of these two areas: (a) a data science project (data visualization or analysis) or b) a public-facing digital project. The project must explain some aspect of the history of the world wars to the public and must draw on at least one primary source and one secondary source from the course to put their research in context. More info on Canvas.

  • 30% Digital History Workshop Assignments  (3)
  • 30% Online Mini-Quizzes (5)
  • 5% Digital Project Proposal
  • 35% Final Digital Project (groups optional)

Schedule:

Week 1

Thursday, October 1 – Intro. What are the Digital Humanities? What is Military History?

  • Nothing to read.
Week 2

Tuesday October 6 – Camps Pt. 1 in the Empires of 1900

  • John H Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History (London: Routledge, 2004), Chapter 1 “The Origins of War, 1871-1914” (pages 1-36).
  • Winston Churchill, The River War Vol. II: An Historical Account of the Re-Conquest of the Soudan (London: Longmans, Green, & Co., 1899) pages 155-164, 198-200, 219-227
  • Maja Lynn, “Mapping the Herero and Nama Genocide, 1904-1907,” ARCGIS Storymaps 

— In addition to our textbook, use these optional resources to follow along on our study of WWI. The 1914-1918 Online Timeline has links at each event on their timeline which take you to detailed articles written by leading scholars:

Thursday October 8 – 1914, The Great War Begins / Digital Workshop 1: What is Data? What are the Digital Humanities? 

  • Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History, Chapter 2 “1914: The ‘Big Show” Opens’” (pages 37-72)
  • Three short accounts of the beginning of the war, from Charles Walter Barton/Julian Grenfell/Franz Blumenfeld. PDF.
  • Chapters 1 (“Hello, Reader”) and Chapter 2 (“Hello, World”), in Meredith Broussard, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018). Whole book available as a UW Library ebook.
  • Roy Rosenzweig, Clio Wired: The Future of the Past in the Digital Age (NY: Columbia University Press, 2011) — Becoming Digital.
Week 3

Tuesday October 13 – Soldiers

  • David Olusoga, Chapter 1: ‘Weltkrieg’ A New Concept: The World’s War,” in The World’s War (London: Head of Zeus, 2014).
  • All Quiet on the Western Front (AQWF) (CH 1-3)
  • Two Pamphlets (one German, one French) Concerning African American Troops on the Western Front. PDF.
  • Readings about colonial troops and laborers in Europe:
    • Students with last names A-M only, read: selections from A Chief is a Chief by the People: An Autobiography of Stimela Jason Jingoes 
      (London, OUP 1975). PDF.  
    • Students with last names N-Z only, read: Chapter 5 “To Meet Death Far Away: The Senegalese in the Trenches ,” in Joe Lunn, Memoirs of the Maelstrom: A Senegalese Oral History of the First WW (Portsmouth NH: Heinemann 1999). PDF.

Thursday October 15 – Civilians & Home Fronts

  • AQWF (CH 7-8)
  • Introduction & part of Chapter 7 “Civilians Behind the Wire,” (p. 203-219) of Tammy Proctor, Civilians in a World at War 1914-1918 (New York: NYU Press, 2010). Whole book available online at UW Library if you are interested. 
  • Archival accounts by WWI nurses:
      • PDF for students with last names A-M on Canvas.
      • PDF for students with last names N-Z on Canvas.
Week 4

Tuesday October 20 – 1915 & The Armenian Genocide

  • Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History, Chapter 3 “1915: An Insignificant Year?” (pages 73-123)
  • AQWF (CH 4-6)
  • Two short documents on the Armenian Genocide. (Leslie Davis, U. S. Consul, “Report on Armenian Genocide,” 1915 & Viscount Bryce (British), “Report on Atrocities Against Armenians,” 1915). PDF.
  • Selections from the Hague Conventions of 1907. PDF.
  • Wilfred Owen, “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920). If you are interested, watch the analysis video from Dr. Santanu Das  at the top of this British Library page on Owen’s poem, or read his analysis below the video. We will discuss Owen’s poem in class.

Thursday October 22 – 1916, The Turning Point? / Digital Workshop 2: Analyzing and Visualizing Historical Data

Week 5

Tuesday October 27 – 1917, The Russian Revolution, America Joins the War

  • Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History, Chapter 5 “1917: Climax” (pages 179-237)
  • AQWF (Ch 9-10)
  • Chapter 8 “Civil War and Revolution,” in Tammy Proctor, Civilians in a World At War 1914-1918 (pages 239-266). 
  • Selected pages from Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), pages 8-15, 36-46,  bottom of 160-164.

Thursday October 29 – 1918, The Day(s) the War Ended…

  • Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History, Chapter 6 “1918: Denouement” (pages 238-285) 
  • Finish AQWF (Ch 11-12) and come ready to discuss the whole book
  • Listen to Nancy Bristow (author of American Pandemic and leading expert on the 1918-19 flu pandemic) give a lecture on June 2, 2020 for the UW History Department “Pandemic Then (And Now): Covid-19 Through the Lens of the 1918 Influenza Crisis.” (1 hour, starts at about 5 mins in).
      • Come prepared to talk about the 7 parallels Bristow draws between the 1918 flu pandemic and Covid-19. What is the influence of WWI on each of these 7 parallels? 
      • Be sure to listen to the Q&A at the end for more on WWI.
Week 6

Tuesday November 3 – Interwar & Democracy and Fascism Face off in Spain!

  • John H Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History, Chapter 6 “The Postwar World: A ‘Peace to End Peace?”” (pages 286-323)
  • Letter from “S.” to Magnus Hirschfeld and the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, 1915

Thursday November 5 – Digital Workshop Three: Digital Public History

Listen and compare the content, narrative styles, and goals of these podcasts. Take good notes and come ready to talk about them. All three links will take you to podcast transcripts and a link to play the podcasts. You can also find them, especially the RadioLab episode, “on Spotify, Stitcher, in the Apple App Store, or wherever you get your podcasts.” 

Week 7

Tuesday November 10 – The Second World War, Japanese Invasion of China through German Invasion of Poland to Japan’s Surrender, a Quick Overview 

  • Weinberg, World War II: A Very Short Introduction (you have to buy this one), page 1 through 10 (stop at the section heading “Germany after WWI and the rise of Hitler,” we’re skipping that) plus pages 12 – 65.
  • Kort, Chapter 3, “The Pacific War,” The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (1998)

Thursday November 12 – The German-Soviet War and the Turning Point at Stalingrad

  • Karl Fuchs, “A German Soldier’s Letters from France,” 1940. PDF.
  • Weinberg, World War II: A Very Short Introduction  66-125 (finish the book for today)
Week 8

Tuesday November 17 – Japan’s Empire /Discussing the Final Digital Project 

*Please note that all of these readings are very troubling and contain graphic descriptions of violence, including kids dying horribly, suicide, and the desecration of dead bodies. If you need to skip all or parts of them that’s OK.

  • Selections from Cook and Cook, Japan at War. Cook and Cook’s classic book is a collection of oral histories of people about the Pacific War. PDF.
  • E.B. Sledge, With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa (Oxford, 1981), excerpt. PDF.

Thursday November 19 – Night Witches, Rubble Frauen, and Hamsters: Women and the Second World War 

Week 9

Tuesday November 24 –  No Class, Holiday Week

  • Start George Takei, They Called Us Enemy. Finish this book by Dec. 1

Thursday November 26 – Thanksgiving/No Class

Week 10

Tuesday, December 1 – Camps II Part I (Includes Holocaust)

  • George Takei, They Called Us Enemy (whole book for today!)

Thursday December 3 – Camps II Part II (Includes Holocaust)

Week 11

Tuesday, December 8 – The Tech of WWII: The Computer, The Long-Range Bomber, and the Nuclear Bomb

  • Kort, ed. Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb, Chapter 4 on the decision to drop the bomb
  • Kort, Chapter 5 on the Japanese regime in the end phase of the war. Optional: Explore more of the Kort ebook, especially the section on key questions and the documents he includes (I’d say especially the documents from within the Japanese government).
  • Sheldon Garon, “On the Transnational Destruction of Cities: What Japan and the United States Learned from the Bombing of Britain and Germany in the Second World War,” Past and Present 247 (1) (2020), 235-271. 

Thursday, December 10 – 1945, the Zero Hour (?) & the World the Wars Made: War Crimes Trials — Did the Ethics of War & Foreign Affairs Change? The Cold War. Decolonization.

  • No reading