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425 Second Option for Tier III assignment...

This is a Tier III course, which brings with it a substantial, as in 5-7 page, writing assignment. For option #2, what you will do is this: first, assume you are a professional researcher. You have been asked to do a profile of a city that’s not New York or Budapest and will be of interest to businesspeople preparing to live and do business overseas. You will proceed this way: Choose a city that interests you. If you’ve always been interested in London, for example, this is your chance to get to know it better, a lot better, for CREDIT. Second, start reading about your city. If there is a “biography,” a contemporary portrait of a city like Alastair Horne’s Seven Ages of Paris, read it. Then begin a search for related articles and books. You will be doing the bulk of your reading from newspapers and magazines, most likely, such as the Guardian UK or Le Figaro for a city like Paris, or the International Herald Tribune, or Time or National Geographic. Travel books and magazines(the Lonely Planet guides are excellent) can be of help too. Lots of cities have websites, and you should consult those. You’ll be expected to read 2-3 articles per week(or book chapters, if you’re working on a book) about your city or events in it, writing and filing away a summary of each article as you go along(for a total of about l6-20 summaries). In mid-April, you will stop reading and prepare to write the profile based on your findings. Everyone needs to keep track of his/her reading, documenting it all along, establishing a “paper trail,” so to speak. Once you are prepared to write the profile, you should do three things: one, give your businessperson an idea of how history and/or geography has shaped this city. New York is New York in part because of its geography; what major factor(s) made London/Paris/Brussels/Rio/Cape Town/Chennai what it is today? Secondly, what is a/the major preoccupation of this city at this point in time? One obvious example is London, shaken as it has been by terrorist incidents and plots. Finally, what should a foreigner know about this city’s business climate? What kinds of initiatives and proposals would have the best chance of succeeding? How is the cost of living? Finally, hand in the paper, your summaries and articles(your paper trail, in other words)sometime just before Dead Week.

425 Tier III option one(ta da!)

425 assignment option one: Review essay. In this option, you will read 3-5 books about a city of your choice, then write what we call a review essay. In a review essay, you discuss the approach each author took to the city in question, describe how he/she wrote about it, and then identify the strengths and weaknesses of the book(this is subjective and your call as reviewer). You can see a sample in the New York Review of Books(nybooks.com)…the writers there review several books at a time on a common theme and kind of pioneered the genre. The caveat on this one is that you need to choose a city on which lots of people have written books, for example London, Paris, Jerusalem, Prague. I don’t want anyone doing New York, because we will have covered it well, but you can do Paris, because there are so many good recent books on it. You might want to run by me the city you choose, since I can tell you whether it’s doable or not in terms of how much good, interesting English-language material you will find.

Books for History courses

I am still trying to figure out how to get the syllabus to everybody, since this blog site turns all formatted text into ground meat, but here are the readings for the course, available in e-form or hard copy from Amazon, Powells or probably Barnes and Noble: Europe between the Wars, Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth, Mary Lovell, Sisters, and Erik Larsen, In the Garden of Beasts. City in History: E.B. White, Here is New York, David von Drehle, Triangle: The Fire that Changed America, and Frederick Brown, For the Soul of France: Culture Wars in the Age of Dreyfus. The early birds can get these books through WSU libraries, too. Now to figure out syllabus distribution...

Europe between the wars “The time not to become a father is 18 years before a world war.” American essayist E.B. White. I would add, “especially after a first world war.” A whole generation was born during and after the Great War, just in time to fight and die in the second. Talk about bad timing! Introduction: Welcome to the “entre-deux-guerres,” or “between the wars,” the period in European history between the war that was supposed to end all wars, the “World War,” and everyone’s worst nightmare, the outbreak of a second that would eventually be nearly ten times deadlier and bring an iron curtain of division in Europe and Asia. This is a tricky era, because there is a tendency to think, with benefit of hindsight, that the Great War led directly to the Second World War. I don’t personally believe that anything is inevitable, but you can certainly draw some lines of continuity between the two conflicts. We will attempt to do that as we go along. In addition, we’ll have the opportunity to reflect on the relationship between political/economic change and the arts, a rich vein in particular since many describe this time as a “broken world.” Another thought that tends to come up over and over is the viability of democracy vs. the temptations of dictatorship. Almost every nation in Europe had a strongman in place even before Hitler became established. Why is it so difficult to establish and maintain a democracy, as we have had here for 200+ years? And then there is the matter of Hitler and Stalin: what was it about this period that brought forth these monsters and propelled them into positions of power? Here in the US, we got Franklin D. Roosevelt during the great crisis; the Germans and the Russians weren’t so lucky. Course Objectives: I hope that by course’s end, you will be able to identify some of the issues and problems in the postwar that helped bring about the beginning of a second, that you will be able to identify and discuss a couple works of art/music/literature associated with the “interwar” years, that you will appreciate to a greater degree the difficulties of democracy and the temptations of dictatorship in modern societies, and then account(insofar as you can; no one really has a definitive answer)for the rise of the two men most responsible for the wrecking of the l9l9 peace, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. And, for those of you bound for the Foreign Service, and I hope some of you will try for this, how about some reflection on the Versailles peace and how it might have been done differently? Granted, the peacemakers had extraordinarily tough circumstances, but they are not exempt from our criticism. Evaluation: We will write one or two midterms, depending on time(this is a new course, so it’s hard to tell how fast or slow we’ll go), but your main grade will come from your performance in the annual Undergraduate Liberal Arts Symposium. For this course, your assignment is to create an exhibit in a new Museum of the History of 20th-century Europe, to be housed somewhere on the WSU campus. The possibilities are wide-ranging: you could profile an individual and his/her contributions to the interwar period(Hitler and Stalin excepted; as my grad advisor often said, “that’s been done to death.”). Some suggestions: Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Joseph P. Kennedy(US ambassador to Great Britain in the late l930s), John F. Kennedy, Dmitrii Shostakovich, Sergei Prokoviev, Maurice Ravel, George Grosz, Marc Chagall, to name just a few. Or you could focus on a particular event that would help interested laypeople understand this period, for example the Spanish Civil War, the Munich crisis, Kristallnacht(Night of the Broken Glass, Germany, l938). Or you could focus on some aspect of the period that is close to what you are studying, e.g. the effect of the world financial crisis on Hitler’s coming to power, or more generally the rise of dictatorship. Whatever you choose, you will research the topic for most of the term and then present your findings, mount your exhibit, for the Liberal Arts symposium in late April or May. And you will be able to claim on your resume that you were invited to present your research at a prestigious campus-wide event, a plus for your resume. Introduction: The shadow of the Great War The war that took Europe by surprise: the “summer storm.” Industrial-strength slaughter The death of empires A peace to end all peace?! Film: “J’accuse,” Abel Gance The first post-war years “Winners” old and new “Losers” and their bitter pill A new old “loser:” the case of Hungary You say you want a revolution: Soviet Russia Film: “Potemkin,” Sergei Eisenstein The turning of the tide: the rise of dictatorship and the ascendency of “appeasement.” Nazism and Stalinism: the early years The pacifist impulse: “we will carry war…no more.” “The George Washington of Germany” and the European order Films: Triumph of the Will, Olympia)Leni Reifenshtal War dead ahead: from Munich crisis to the breakout of war, l938-39 The Czechoslovak “problem” and “peace in our time” Frenemies: The Soviet-German rapprochement The end of the Versailles treaty and the Hitler-Stalin “new order” “Rain Stops Play,” September 1, l939. Film: The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin

Important announcement!

Folks, I can't be in class tomorrow because I have to be in the hospital with my dad, who is undergoing minor surgery in Portland. He had brain surgery a week ago, and is making progress, but needs one more minor procedure before he can come back here to the eastside and continue his recovery in a rehab facility. You can send me questions by email(brigitf2001@yahoo.com), because it'll be a long day of just sitting, and then you will have your exam on Wednesday. My dad and I both apologize for the disruption...he taught history himself for 35 years.

Here we go again with question #2 for next week's exam: Directions part II: Mystery question. You will answer a general question on Peter Englund’s book The Beauty and the Sorrow, based on the years l9l4 and l9l5. HINT: think about how the individuals profiled in the book help you understand the nature of this conflict. You will not be asked to describe in detail what happened on page 102 or anything like that…