THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN REVOLUTION, WAR, FASCISM IN EUROPE (1905-1945)

Course Objectives: 

The main aim is to stimulate students to think about the power of ideologies on people, to help them clarify concepts such as fascism, liberalism and communism, and to understand the evolution of the modern liberal democracies of the second half of the 20th century.

During the course, students will learn to work with primary sources, including newspapers, novels and film excerpts, which will be used to illustrate different facets of the period, like war experiences, political struggles, strikes, anti-war movements, gender perspectives, etc.

Course Content:

This course provides a historical overview of the radical developments in Europe in the first half of the 20th century, starting from the Russian Revolution of 1905 to the end of the Second World War. This was the ‘Age of Extremes’, as noted by Hobsbawm, a chaotic period in human history, in which millions of people died in global wars, and mass massacres and genocides were committed. The course will focus on the period’s political struggles and economic crises, the search for alternatives to liberalism from the left and the right, the path to the two World Wars and the socioeconomic and political background/reasons of the evolution of socialism and fascism.