Spring 2023 | TR | 9:30 – 10:45AM | Professor Alexis Peri
Spring 2023 – Alexis Peri
| Day | Start | Stop | Bld | Room |
| TR | 9:30 PM | 10:45 PM |
Analyzes how soldiers and civilians experienced WWI and WWII, which brutally penetrated their everyday lives and affected their bodies, vocabularies, and world-views. Major sources include combat accounts, diaries, letters, songs, material culture, food, and more. This course cannot be taken for credit in addition to the course entitled “Intimate Histories of War” that was previously numbered CAS HI 279. BU Hub Areas (Effective Fall 2018): Aesthetic Exploration, Historical Consciousness, Creativity/Innovation.
Additional Course Materials:
Expanded Course Description:
When faced with the prospect of total destruction, how do human beings respond? What strategies do they devise in order to survive? What thoughts haunt the mind as they stare down the prospect of death? In this course, we take a deep dive into what has been called the quintessential experience of the twentieth century: the experience of total war. We investigate the ordeals of WWI and WWII and their lasting effects on the bodies, thoughts, and worldviews of Europe’s men, women, and children. And we will examine the massive effect that these wars have had on numerous aspects of life today—from military tactics, to our vocabularies, foodways, international law, political philosophy, and art.
Course Themes:
• total war, genocide, atrocity, modernism and postmodernism as frameworks for WWI and WWII
• the experiences of soldiers fighting on land, in the air, and at sea
• the particular ways that ethnic minorities, women, and children were immersed in and brutalized by war
• breakthroughs in art, science, cuisine, and philosophy, which emerged from war
Selected Readings:
• Shahen Derderian, Death March: An Armenian Survivor’s Memoir of the Genocide of 1915
• The Diary of David Sierakowiak: Five Notebooks from the Lodz Ghetto
• Stolen Voices: Young People’s Diaries, from World War I to Iraq
• Behind the Lines: The Oral History of Special Operations in World War II
Instructors:
