History 740: Total
War and Beyond
Prof. Jackson
San Francisco State University Fall 2002
Monday 4:10-7:00 p.m. Science 268
Office hours: Monday, Wednesday, 2:10-3:30 p.m. Science 224
Phone: (415) 338-6184 e-mail address: JACKSONC@SFSU.EDU
web page: http://bss.sfsu.edu/jacksonc
Wars have usually been viewed as turning-points in history, but how has warfare itself changed over time? How has technology affected the conduct of warfare? Is it possible to do away with warfare as we know it? Europe, following the Napoleonic Wars, saw relatively few wars, which were largely conducted by professional armies against one another. The first half of the 20th century saw wars conducted by massive conscript armies against entire populations, while the second half of the century has seen warfare change once again under the influence of atomic weapons. The seminar will investigate the evolution of political violence in the 20th century, including both world wars as well as the cold war, guerilla warfare and terrorism. Through cooperative class discussions, intensive research, and class presentations, the students will not only help to teach themselves, but learn to teach others of this central aspect of the human condition.
The topics listed below without assigned reading are meant to be suggestions, and the readings listed are by no means exhaustive, but merely a starting-point for research into the topic.
Each student will be responsible for two brief book reviews (each worth 15%, due October 7th and November 4th) as well as one research paper and class presentation (worth 70%). Your first review should be on a book directly related to your research topic, the second review should be on another subject (chosen either from the recommended readings listed below, or by agreement with the instructor). An outline and annotated bibliography of the term paper is due two weeks before the term paper is due. (The outline and bibliography are due November 25th; the term paper is due December 9th.) For book review form, see the following guidelines.
Books:
Karl von Clausewitz: On War (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).
Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism (Oxford, 1999).
Archer Jones: The Art of War in the Western World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989; Illinois University Press, 1987).
John Keegan: The Face of Battle (New York: Vintage, 1977).
John Keegan: A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage, 1993).
Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986; orig. pub. 1943, 1971).
Sessions I & II (9/9, 9/16): Principles, Causes and Meanings of War
Readings: Thucydides: The Melian Dialogue (Photocopies)
Clausewitz: On War Book I, chaps I-VIII; Book 3, chaps I-XVIII; Book 4, chaps I-IV.
John Keegan: The Face of Battle, chapter 1.
John Keegan: History of Warfare, entire.
Options:
Raymond Aron, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War, Trans. Christine Booker and Norman Stone (New York: Touchstone, 1986; orig. pub. 1976).
Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).
Brian Bond, The Pursuit of Victory: From Napoleon to Saddam Hussein
Session III (9/23): "Limited" War
Archer Jones, The Art of War in the Western World, Introduction, chapter 5.
Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy, chap. 4.
Robert S. Quimby, The Background of Napoleonic Warfare (New York: 1957).
Christopher Duffy, The Army of Frederick the Great (New York: 1974).
David Chandler, The Art of Warfare in the Age of Marlborough (New York: 1976).
Session IV (9/30): The Napoleonic Revolution in Warfare
Archer Jones, chapters 6, 7.
John Keegan, Face of Battle, chapter 3.
Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy, chap.5.
David Chandler, The Campaigns of Napoleon (London, 1966).
Michael Glover, The Napoleonic Wars (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1978).
Jacques Godechot, La Grande Nation (Paris: Aubier, 1956).
Rory Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (Yale)
Session V (10/7): World War I
Archer Jones, chapter 8.
John Keegan, chapter 4.
Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy, chaps.17, 18.
John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999).
Marc Ferro, The Great War, 1914-1918, Trans.Nicole Stone (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973; orig. pub. 1969).
Gerd Hardach, The First World War, 1914-1918 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
B.H. Liddell Hart, The Real War, 1914-1918 (Little, Brown)
C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War, 1914-1918, 2nd ed. (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1934).
Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994).
Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War: Explaining World War I (New York: Basic Books, 2000)
Sessions VI & VII (10/14, 10/21): World War II
Archer Jones, chapters 9, 10.
Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy, chaps.19-23.
Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (New York: Norton, 1996).
Alan Milward, War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).
Alfred Mierzejewski, Collapse of the German War Economy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
Denis Richards, The Hardest Victory: RAF Bomber Command in the Second World War
Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, 2002)
Richard Overy, War and Economy in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage, 1987).
Session VIII (10/28): Presentations, Evolution of Modern Strategy
Options
Martin van Creveld: Command in War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Martin van Creveld, Fighting Power: German and US Army Performance, 1939-1945 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1982).
B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian, 1991; orig. pub. 1929, 1954).
B.H. Liddell Hart, The German Generals Speak Out (New York: Quill, 1979; orig. pub. 1948)
Jehuda L. Wallach, The Dogma of the Battle of Annihilation (Greenwood, 1986).
Session IX (11/4): Presentations, War as Experience, Memory
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford, 1975).
Paul Fussell, Wartime (New York: Oxford, 1989).
Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front
Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (London, Chatto & Windus, 1929).
Ernst Jünger, The Battle as Inner Experience
Guy Sajer, The Forgotten Soldier (Brassey's, 1990; orig. pub. 1971).
Eugenio Corti, Few Returned: Twenty-Eight Days on the Russian Front, Winter 1942-1943
Mario Rigoni Stern, The Sergeant in the Snow
Richard Gabriel, The Painful Field: The Psychiatric Dimension of Modern War (Greenwood, 1988).
John Ellis, Eye-Deep in Hell (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).
George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).
Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: 1995)
Philipp Witkop, ed. German Students’ War Letters, trans. A.F.Wedd (Pennsylvania, 2002).
Stephen Fritz, Frontsoldaten: The German Soldier in World War II (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995).
Richard Holmes, Acts of War: The Behavior of Men in Battle
David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Little Brown, 1995).
Ben Shephard, A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century (HUP, 2001)
Session X (11/11): Presentations, Warfare and Propaganda
Z.A.B. Zeman, Nazi Propaganda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964).
Oron J. Hale, The Captive Press in the Third Reich (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).
Edward Boehm, Behind Enemy Lines: World War II Allied/Axis Propaganda (Wellfleet, 1989).
Michael Balfour, Propaganda in War, 1939-1945 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979).
David Welch, Propaganda and the German Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983).
David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Jay W. Baird, The Mythical World of Nazi War propaganda (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1974).
Robert Herzstein, The War that Hitler Won (New York: Putnam, 1978).
Horst J.P. Bermeier and Rainer E. Lotz, Hitler’s Airwaves: The Inside Story of Nazi Radio Broadcasting and Propaganda Swing (Yale UP, 1997).
Session XI (11/18): Presentations, Genocide
Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship, chapters 1, 5, 8.
Lucy Dawidowicz: The War Against the Jews.
Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the "Final Solution," (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews.
Leo Kuper, Genocide (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981).
Michael Marrus, The Holocaust in History (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1987).
(NAL Dutton, )
Yehuda Bauer, The Holocaust in Historical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1978), Introduction, chapter 2.
Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide (New Haven: Yale, 1990).
Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons, and Israel W. Charny, eds., Century of Genocide (New York: Garland, 1997).
Session XII (11/25): Presentations, The Cold War, Nuclear War
Archer Jones, chapters 11, 12.
Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy, chaps. 25, 26.
Options
Martin J. Sherwin, A World Destroyed (New York: Vintage, 1977).
Michael Mandelbaum, The Nuclear Revolution: Politics Before and After Hiroshima (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Alastair Buchan, War in Modern Society (London: 1966)
Bernard Brodie, Strategy in the Missile Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959).
John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday (New York: Basic Books, 1989).
Charles S. Maier, ed., The Origins of the Cold War and Contemporary Europe (New York: New Viewpoints, 1978), chapters 1, 4, 5.
Louis J. Halle, The Cold War as History (New York: Harper, 1967).
Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945 (New York: Pantheon, 1968).
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 2nd ed. (New York: Dell, 1972; orig. pub. 1959).
Session XIII (12/2): Presentations, Guerilla War
Peter Paret, ed., Makers of Modern Strategy, chap. 27.
Options
Walter Laqueur, ed., The Guerrilla Reader: A Historical Anthology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1977).
Walter Laqueur, Guerrilla: A Historical and Critical Study (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).
Carl Leiden and Karl M. Schmitt, The Politics of Violence: Revolution in the Modern World (Englewood Cliffs, 1968).
Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-Keeping (Archon, 1975).
Bard E. O’Neill, Insurgency and Terrorism: Inside Modern Revolutionary Warfare (Brassey’s, 1990).
Session XIV (12/9): Terrorism
Walter Laqueur, The New Terrorism, entire.
Options
Peter Merkl, ed. Political Violence and Terror (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).
Michael Stohl, ed. The Politics of Terrorism, 2nd ed. (New York: Marcel Dekker, 1983).
Franklin L. Ford,
Political Murder: From Tyrannicide
to Terrorism (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1985).
David C. Rapoport and Yonah Alexander, The Morality of Terrorism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).