This course will explore of how the contemporary global order in the 21st century has emerged from the historical events, processes and trends of the past 500-plus years. Since 1500, the world has changed dramatically, from several mostly—or entirely—separate and autonomous regions to a single interconnected system of people and societies. We will consider the political, social, economic, and technological developments as well as the intercultural and transregional contacts and interactions that helped create these changes.

This upper-level course will focus on a specific theme or topic in history, chosen by the instructor, announced in the subtitle, and developed in the syllabus. The topics of this course will vary, but the course number will remain the same, so be sure not to repeat the same topic.

In the midst of the Second World War, under the auspices of the National Socialist regime in Germany, Germans along with their allies and collaborators murdered roughly six million European Jews and countless numbers of other “undesirables, including homosexuals, Slavic peoples, and gypsies. This much is incontrovertible, but only in subsequent decades did this series of events become known as the Holocaust. In this course we will cover not only the historical context and potential causes of the Holocaust—from the long history of European anti-Jewish and antisemitic violence to the specifics of National Socialist racial ideology—and the events themselves—the persecution, ghettoization and eventually extermination of Jewish communities across occupied Europe—but also consider the long afterlife of this historical fact. Why (and how) has the Holocaust become a critical episode in both European and global history? How have the books and films released in the years after 1945 influenced our collective consciousness of that period of European history? Why have the most notable location of mass murder, the camp at Auschwitz in southern Poland, a memorial in the center of the German capital of Berlin, and a museum dedicated to the Holocaust in Washington, DC, become major tourist destinations? How have our contemporary understandings of genocide and human rights emerged from this series of events? Why are there still thousands of people invested in denying that these events ever happened?