B1859 - INTERNATIONAL HISTORY

Learning outcomes

The course aims at providing a good knowledge of contemporary political-institutional history, to enable students to read, in a European and non-European context, the great historical changes of contemporaneity, from the French Revolution to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). Students will be able to analyze the connections between internal and foreign policy as well as to understand the most relevant international processes and their interconnection with national histories. The diachronic study of the main events of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries will allow students to acquire basic key interpretations for the analysis of current scenarios.

Course contents

he course explores the major political, economic, and social developments in Europe and the rest of the world from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. The course also considers how they shaped the governance of the international system.

Lectures will

• present the ways in which European countries intersected processes of nation building with imperial expansion in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia;
• explore the causes and consequences of the World Wars, including their repercussions on the international system;
• analyse how Cold War and decolonization after 1945 redefined Europe’s place in the world and shaped new international relations;
• examine how globalization and the end of the Cold War changed the world order and morphed it into today’s system.

Overall, the course aims at familiarising students with the main events and interpretations of contemporary international history, as well as with the multi-layered nature of historical processes. Students will learn to detect how domestic and international events intertwined and influenced one another and shaped the world order and its rules. In so doing, students will discover the variety of approaches historians adopt to inquiry into the past.

TOPICS:

• EUROPEAN EMPIRES, 1870–1945
• FROM THE CONCERT OF EUROPE TO WORLD WAR I
• THE POST-WW I ORDER (VERSAILLES)
• THE COLLAPSE OF THE VERSAILLES ORDER AND WORLD WAR II
• THE END OF EUROPEAN DOMINANCE: THE DAWN OF POST-WW II WORLD ORDER
• THE ONSET OF THE COLD WAR
• THE RISE OF THE THIRD WORLD/GLOBAL SOUTH
• OVERCOMING THE COLD WAR (OR NOT...)
• THE PEOPLE VS. THE COLD WAR
• THE ORIGINS OF CURRENT GLOBALIZATION
• END OF THE COLD WAR AND DAWN OF NEW ORDER

Readings/Bibliography

Textbooks (for ALL students):

• Matthew G. Stanard, European Overseas Empire, 1879–1999: A Short History (Ch. 1 and Ch. 2 only).

• Antony Best, Jussi Hanhimaki, Joseph A. Maiolo, Kirsten E. Schulze, International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond, Routledge, 2014 (Third edition).

 

Monographs (chronological order by subject matter) – *NON-ATTENDING STUDENTS ONLY:

• Woolf, Stuart (ed.), Nationalism in Europe: From 1815 to the Present (London, 1995) (also online) – 215 pp
• Bianchini, Stefano, Eastern Europe and the Challenges of Modernity, 1800-2000 (Abingdon/New York: Routledge 2015) – 251 pp
• Afflerbach, Holger and David Stevenson, An improbable war: the outbreak of World War I and European political culture before 1914 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2012) – eBook 335pp
• Goldstein, Erik, The First World War Peace Settlements, 1919-1925 (Taylor & Francis Group, 2002) – ebook 168pp
• Marks, Sally, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe 1918-1933 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) – 188 pp.
• Housden, Martyn, The League of Nations and the Organisation of Peace (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), 155 pp
• Traverso, Enzo, Fire and blood: the European Civil War, 1914-1945 (London;New York: Verso, 2017) – 293 pp
• Mazower, Mark, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009) – also online – 205 pp
• Craig, Campbell and Sergey S Radchenko, The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War (Yale University Press, 2008), 232 pp. (Also online)
• Harrison, Hope M., Driving the Soviets Up the Wall: Soviet-East German relations, 1953-1961 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005) – (Access online available)
• Bozo, Frédéric; Rey, Marie-Pierre; Ludlow, N. Piers; Rother, Bernd (eds), Visions of the End of the Cold War in Europe, 1945-1990 (New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2012) – also online – 322 pp
• Romano, Angela, From Détente in Europe to European Détente: How the West Shaped the Helsinki CSCE (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009) – 248 pp
• Vonnard, Philippe, Nicola Sbetti, Grégory Quin, Beyond Boycotts. Sport during the cold war in Europe, De Gruyter, 2019. (also online) – 234 pp
• Lundestad, Geir, The United States and Western Europe Since 1945: From Empire by Invitation to Transatlantic Drift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) (Access online avallale)
• Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge, 2005). (also online) 484 pp.

Teaching methods

Lectures (with possibility of students' interaction) and seminars in restricted groups.

 

Note: This course is part in the University's teaching experimentation project.

Assessment methods

All exams are intended to assess students' ability to reflect on historical processes and connections between the events, actors and phenomena studied. So no specific questions, but critical discussion of knowledge.

ATTENDING STUDENTS:

1) Mid-term exam: written exam (during class hours, 21 March).

• Duration: 110 minutes.
• Students will answer two open-ended questions (that they will choose from a given list) about the historical period previously covered by lectures.
• Score: Each answer will be scored between 18/30 and 30/30. The result of the exam will be the average of the two answers.

2) End-term exam:written exam (site to be confirmed; 24 May).

• Duration: to be confirmed.
• Students will choose one question from the given list and write a critical essay. The essay shall consider seminar material as well as knowledge acquired from textbook and lectures.
• Score: the essay will be graded between 18/30 and 30/30.
  

Note (1): Students who fail or refuse ONE ONLY written test will sit an oral examination, during the summer examination session.

• The oral exam will cover the historical period of the failed/rejected written partial exam.
• The oral exam will be graded between 18/30 and 30/30.

Note (2): Students who failed both the mid-term exam and the end-term exam or refuse both grades will have to sit the exam as non-attending students.

 

What to study:

– the two textbooks (only the chapters indicated in Virtuale)

– any other material posted on Virtuale.

NON-ATTENDING STUDENTS:

A single oral examination. The questions are intended to assess the student's

– knowledge of the fundamentals of the subject (as acquired from the textbooks)

– ability to critically discuss the monograph of choice from the provided list.

What to study:

– the two textbooks (see above)

– one monograph freely chosen from the list above (go to the 'Readings/Bibliography' section)

Teaching tools

On the course page on Virtuale students will find:

- the lecture slides

- any videos useful for the topic

- any in-depth study files.

 

Accessibility:

The texts of the material made available are compatible with recommendations to ensure accessibility for those with visual impairments.
Where possible, videos will have subtitles.

Office hours

See the website of Angela Romano

See the website of