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War & Violence

Description: War and violence have been mainstays of human history. Students examine how various societies throughout history have experienced, conducted, and remembered military conflict, mass killing, and genocide. How has the conduct of war changed over time? What are the human, emotional, and cultural consequences of war? When and why do societies resort to armed conflict?

Courses:

• Core:
• HIST 5351: Early Medieval Europe
• HIST 5355: Holocaust & Genocide
• HIST 5363: Seminar in Military History
• HIST 5364: Seminar in War & Violence
• HIST 5367: World War II
• HIST 5373: US Civil War
• HIST 5383: United States Diplomatic History
• HIST 5392: The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1922
• HIST 5393: European Diplomatic History
• Elective
• HIST 5333: Pre-Modern World History
• HIST 5336: Pre-Modern European History
• HIST 5352: High and Late Medieval Europe
• HIST 5365: Film and War in America
• HIST 5366: The Reconstruction Era
• HIST 5371: Revolutionary America
• HIST 5374: Seminar in the History of American South

Animating Questions:

The following animating questions are provided to 1) give an overview of general ideas that animate the field, and 2) demonstrate examples of the type of questions students may wish to address in their portfolio’s synthetic essay.

• As one historian has written, “[r]itual can mostly easily be understood as a performed restatement of cosmology, broadly defined as including man’s relations with man and with the environment, as well as with the supernatural.” How might violence during the Middle Ages be understood as having served this purpose?
• What was violence v. what was not violence, legitimate v. illegitimate violence, sinful v. just violence – how did these things get defined and redefined in medieval Europe?
• On the one hand, Christ preached the Sermon on the Mount and a message of nonviolence, and on the other, medieval knights—Christians—understood leading a martial life characterized by violence as an act of religiosity and piety. How did this happen? How did Christian soldiers reconcile their obligation to kill the enemy with the stain of mortal sin caused by the act of homicide?”
• The Crusades have been defined as penitential war-pilgrimages. Explain what this means and how the Latin Christian Church viewed the violence being committed by Crusaders.
• Explain the difference between systemic violence and cataclysmic violence as it occurred among majority and minority groups in Europe during the Middle Ages.
• The late middle ages was an age of unrest. The numerous peasant rebellions across Europe were a reason for this. Why did peasant rebellions (or even, according to some, attempts at revolution) occur and how did peasants justify the violence they committed?
• How has warfare contributed to or undermined nation- and state-building?
• How do states transition into and out of warfare? How are distinctions between civilians and combatants created and maintained and what happens to them postwar?
• What motivates people to take part in armed conflicts? To remain outside them? To kill?
• How useful is theory for understanding warfare and violence? What concepts are shared? Alternately, when is comparison controversial?
• How does military history operate alongside or distinctly from other approaches—social history, economic history, etc? What sources do historians of war and violence privilege?

Readings Bibliography:

This is a non-comprehensive bibliography provided so that students can gain a sense of the type of work that represents this field.

• Alexievich, Svetlana.  The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II.  New York: Random House, 2017.
• Arendt, Hannah.  Origins of Totalitarianism.  Harvest Books, 1973.
• Armitage, David. Civil Wars: A History in Ideas. New York: Knopf, 2017.
• Bachrach, David S. Religion and the Conduct of War, c. 300-1215. Boydell Press, 2003.
• Bartov, Omer. Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich. New York: Oxford Paperbacks, 1992.
• Blight, David. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001.
• Bourke, Joanna. Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War. New York: Reaktion Books, 1999.
• ​Bourke, Joanna. Rape: Sex, Violence, History. London: Counterpoint, 2009.
• Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200-1000. Tenth Anniversary, Revised Edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013.
• Brown, Warren. Violence in Medieval Europe. Longman, 2010.
• Browning, Christopher.  Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 2017. 
• Browning, Judith. and Timothy Silver. An Environmental History of the Civil War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
• Burleigh, Michael.  Moral Combat:  Good and Evil in World War II.  New York:  Harper
• Perennial, 2012.
• Clark, Christopher. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. New York: Harper Perennial, 2014.
• Cohen, Deborah. The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
• Citino, Robert. "Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction." AHR 112, no. 4 (2007): 1070-1090.
• Dawson, Christopher. The Making of Europe: An Introduction to the History of European Unity. The Catholic University Press of America, 2003.
• Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
• Dudziak, Mary. War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
• Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. New York: Knopf, 2008.
• Fletcher, Richard. The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. 
• Fong, Tobie Meyer. What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in Nineteenth Century China. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2013.
• Freedman, Paul. Images of the Medieval Peasant. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1999. 
• Fritz, Stephen G. Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995.
• Gerlach, Christian. Extremely Violent Societies: Mass Violence in the Twentieth-Century World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Gerwarth, Robert. Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.
• Grossman, Dave. On Killing. Boston: Back Bay Books, 2009.
• Halsall, Guy. ed. Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2002. 
• Hull, Isabel. Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practice of War in Imperial Germany. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005.
• Hynes, Samuel. The Soldiers' Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. New York: Penguin, 1998.
• Jackson, Peter. The Mongols and the West: 1221-1410.  2^nd Taylor and Francis, 2018.
• Kaeuper, Richard W. Holy Warriors: The Religious Ideology of Chivalry. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
• Keegan, John. The Face of Battle: A Study of Agincourt, Waterloo, and the Somme. New York: Viking Press, 1976.
• Kennedy, Paul. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.
• Lee, Wayne. "Mind and Matter: Cultural Analysis in American Military History." JAH 93 (2007): 1116-1142.
• Lerner, Paul. Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930. Cornell University Press, 2003.
• Mosse, George.  The Fascist Revolution: Toward A General Theory of Fascism.  New York: Howard Fertig, 1999.
• McCurry, Stephanie. Women's War: Fighting and Surviving the American Civil War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019.
• O'Callaghan, Joseph F. Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.
• Nirenberg, David. Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages – Updated Edition.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015.
• Paxton, Robert O. Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
• Peri, Alexis. The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017.
• Pirenne, Henri. Mohammed and Charlemagne. Dover Publications, 2001. 
• Riley-Smith, Jonathan. The Crusades: A History, 3rd edition.  Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014.
• Shy, John. "History and the History War," Journal of Military History 72, no 4 (2008): 1033-1046.
• Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin.  New York: Basic Books, 2010.
• Winter, Jay and Emmanuel Sivan. eds. War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.