WOH 2040: CONTEMPORARY WORLD HISTORY

This course will examine the major political, social and economic, as well as intellectual and diplomatic developments of thenineteenth and twentieth century. Emphasis will be placed upon the impact of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution , the emergence of the national states, the  two world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Cold War, the emergence of Communist China, and the rise of the Third World. We will also concentrate on the decline of Communism in Europe and the major problems of the post-Cold War world. Following a chronological order, we will look, each week, at the questions and problems that occupy historians of the nineteenth and twentieth century in their attempts to understand the world developments, and  some of the primary sources from which they draw their analysis.
 

Jerry H. Bentley and Herbert F. Ziegler. Traditions & Encounters. A Global Perspective on the Past, volume C: "From 1750 to the Present". Boston, etc.: McGraw Hill, 2007.
 

In compliance with Santa Fe Community College policy and equal access laws, I am available to discuss appropriate academic classroom accomodations that you may require as a student with a disability. you must be registered with the Disabilities Resource Center (DRC) in S-112 for disability verification and determination of reasonable academic accomodations. Since I cannot help you if you do not know the kind of help you require, requests for accomodations need to be made well in advance of receiving any service. I strongly suggest that you discuss this with me during the first week of the semester so that appropriate arrangements can be made.

The basis for evaluation of performance will be two exams and four quizzes. The exams and quizes will be in multiple-choice and,  identification format.  Make-up  exams will be given only for very serious reasons. There is no make-up for the quizzes. The following point system will be used in determining the final grade:

                                                                                                                               Exam I: 30 points
                                                                                                                               Exam II: 30 points
                                                                                                                               Quizes: 5 points each (8x5)

                                                                                                                               Total: 100 points

         Impotant dates:

          January 12: Last day to drop with no record and receive a refund for Spring Term
          March 26: Last day to withdraw and recieve a W for Spring Term

           Quizes: January  16, 30
                        February 13, 27
                        March 6, 20
                        April 3, 17

January 7, 9, 12: Introduction
                Enlightenment

January 14, 16, 21:  French Revolution
January 19: Martin Luther King Jr. Day - no classes

  January 23, 26, 28:  Nationalism and the other "isms"[read pp. 881-888]

• The Declaration of Independence
• The Declaration of Independence
• The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens
• Olympe de Gouges, Declaration of Rights of Women
• Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto
• Charles Baudelaire, What is Romanticism?

  January 30, February 2, 4, 6: The Revolution of 1848
                                   The Making of Italy
                                   The Making of Germany 
 

• visit the web site "Views on the [Irish] Famine"
• documents of the 1848 revolution in France
• documents of the 1848-1849 revolution in Hungary    
  
• King Victor Emanuel's address to the Parliament
• documents of the German unification process
• the Austrian Constitution of 1867

  February 9, 11, 13, 16: Imperialism: the French Empire, the British Empire, the German Empire, Russian Empire
                                 Fin de siecle society.

• Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State
• Rudyard Kipling, The White Man's Burden
• Edward Morel, The Black Man's Burden
• Commodore Matthew Perry, When We Landed in Japan
• Tadayoshi Sakurai, The Attack upon Port Arthur (1905)
• Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
• Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams
• Friedrich Nietzsche, Parable of the Madman

  February 18, 20: The beginning of the twentieth century. The world on the verge of war
                     The Great War [read pp. 888-8]
                     The US intervention and the Paris Peace Conference [read pp. 902-909]  

• Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
• Woodrow Wilson, The Fourteen Points
• the Treaty of Versailles (1919)
• Captain Manfred Freiherr von Richtofen, Air Warfare

  February 23, 25 : Revolution in Russia [read pp. 900-902]
 
        Vladimir Ilich Lenin, What is to be done?

• see also a brief presentation of the Bolsheviks
• Joseph Stalin on industrialization
• Pravda on collectivization
• the Great Purges in Soviet textbooks

  February 27: Exam I 
               
  March 2: The age of anxiety: developments in art and science [read pp. 911-918]
                         The global depression [read pp. 918-924]
March 4, 6:  Totalitarian societies: Communist Russia [read: pp. 924-927]
                   Totalitarian societies: Fascist Italy

• Benito Mussolini on fascism

                   Totalitarian societies: Nazi Germany [read: pp. 928-931]

• Adolf Hitler, speech of 1921 and excerpts from the Mein Kampf
• Adolf Hitler, Reichstag Speech (1938)
• see also a series of Nazi laws on hereditary health, citizenship, and German blood

March 9 - 14: Spring Break 

 March 16, 18:  Struggles for national identity in Asia [read: pp. 932-939
                 World War II. The global origins [read: pp. 941-946]

• the Munich Pact
• the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact
• Adolf Hitler, the Obersalzberg Speech
• Viacheslav Molotov, broadcast speech on the invasion of the Soviet Union
• New York Times on the Nanking massacre
• documents on the attack on Pearl Harbour

   March 20: Total war [read: pp. 946-951]
                 Soviet Russia and US in the war [read: pp. 951-955]
                 Life during wartime. The Final solution [read: pp. 957-964]


March 23, 25, 27: Peace or war? Postwar settlements and the origins of the Cold War  [read: pp. 964-970]

•  Truman Doctrine
• the Yalta Conference
• Winston Churchill, the Iron Curtain Speech

                  A Bipolar World. The Cold War world [read: pp. 973-980]

• the NATO Treaty
• the Warsaw Pact
• Andrei Gromyko on the US intervention in Korea
• Nikita Khrushchev, secret speech at the closed session of the Twentieth Congress of the Party (1956)
• documents on the Hungarian Revolution (1956)
• Nikita Khrushchev on Cuban crisis
• the Declaration of the Romanian Workers' Party on the Sino-Soviet dispute (1964)
• the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

       March 30, April 1, 3: Confrontation in Korea and Cuba [read pp. 980-991]
              Cold War societies [read: pp. 986-991]
              Independence in South, Southeast, and Southwest Asia [read: pp. 991-999]
      April 6, 8 Decolonization in Africa [read: pp. 999-1004]
      April 10:  Crisis in the contemporary world: De Gaulle and Tito  [read: pp. 1009-1018]
    
      April 13, 15: Crisis in contemporary world: the Hungarian challenge (1956), the Prague Spring (1968), and the Soviet-Chinese rift
      April 17:  Politics in Latin America [read pp. 1019-1026].
      April 20, 22: The end of the Cold War [read pp. 1041-1051]

• see series of photographs of the Romanian "revolution" of 1989
• visit the web site of the Berlin Wall

April 24: Exam II