This seminar is intended both for students with little or no background in European history from 1870 to the beginning of World War II as well as for those students seeking a greater understanding of the events that shaped the rest of the 20th Century and today’s world.

For most Americans, it’s the “forgotten war.” (That may be changing due to two highly acclaimed recent films (“All Quiet on the Western Front” and “1917”) and the 2018 incredibly moving and technologically state-of-the art documentary (“They Shall Not Grow Old”). The class will view major segments from the latter.

Few events in history have taken so many lives and had such far-reaching consequences. Six-thousand men lost their lives every day over the four years of fighting. The war also created the conditions that led to the Russian Revolution of 1917, the ensuing 1918-1921 civil war and victory of Soviet Communism, and the emergence of the U.S. as a major world power.

The seminar will examine the causes of WWI, the pivotal battles, the controversial 1919 Paris Peace Conference, and the decisions taken by emperors and key political and military leaders, including Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, and Vladimir Lenin. New military technology—machine guns, airplanes, tanks, submarines, poison gas, flamethrowers, artillery—significantly influenced offensive and defensive plans.

The peace treaties redrew the map of Europe and the Middle East, but instead of being “the war to end all wars” World War I sowed the seeds of future conflict, the most consequential being Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, challenges from the Soviet Union, and another tragic world war from 1939-1945. One historian has summed up World War I by concluding that “it was nothing less than the greatest error of modern history.”

The seminar will also examine several legacies and lessons of the war: first, by posing the question–did WWI sow the seeds of Nazism, Hitler, the Soviet Union, WWII, and the Holocaust?; and second, by tracing to their WWI origins the current Ukrainian-Russian and Israeli-Palestinian wars, Isis (“The Islamic State”) terrorism, most recently in Moscow, and the formation of the Chinese Communist party.