How is it that an era that survivors remembered fondly as the “Golden Age” ended in the death of millions of soldiers in WWI, and even more millions of civilians in WWII? The conventional wisdom is that political failures led to WWI, and that WWI’s vindictive peace set the stage for WWII. There is a certain amount of truth to those explanations, but the reality is more complicated. Both conflicts had their origins in complex, worldwide political, economic and social transformations. This “new normal” created winners and losers, the latter fighting back by reverting to centuries-old, ethnic-racial hatreds, or nationalist populism and, in Europe and the New World, new labor and class-based movements. This course will examine how technology transformed warfare and follow the events that led to WWI. We will analyze the Russian Revolution and the rise of European fascism, particularly the Nazis in Germany. What role did Western appeasement play in Hitler’s decision to go to war? And why 1939 and not the 1940s, as the German military would have preferred? Suggested Reading: Ian Kershaw’s To Hell and Back. Europe, 1914-1949 (Penguin, 2015) is a recent work by one of the foremost scholars of WWII. For only WWII, an excellent book is Richard Owens (with Andrew Wheatcroft), Road to War. The Origins of the Second World War (Penguin, 2000 or Vintage, 2009). Class size limit: Updated to 55.