LFU:online

1. Students will gain a solid understanding of the American experience in WWII—why it was fought, how it was won, and what it means today—from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941to the end of the war with the dropping of the Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. They will learn that Allies defeated the Axis powers and their authoritarian ideologies that threatened Allied nations and the military, diplomatic goals, strategies and decisive battles that America waged against the Japanese and Nazi war machines. They will also gain knowledge of the existential struggles between forces of freedom and democracy against the forces of fascist and totalitarian regimes that have defined much of the history of the world for the last three centuries through WWII to the present. They will learn how leadership in espionage operations, codebreaking, new military technologies, and America’s Arsenal of Democracy shaped the strategies and outcome of battles, the war, and its postwar legacy and lessons.

2. Students will learn to analyze the different visions of victory of the Axis and Allied powers and how Americas’ vision of freedom and liberty prevailed in the post war world for 80 years. They will also learn how to differentiate the relationships between documentary and artifactual evidence of military and government leaders who shaped the course of the war with global results for victors and vanquished alike. Students will understand the moral, genocidal and diplomatic consequences of the most destructive war in human history. Grand strategy and battles will be enriched by personal accounts of citizen soldiers and war correspondents as well as the historic sites that add the personal stories to the larger conflict.

3. Students will gain skills to evaluate different national perspectives how war is remembered by victors, victims and vanquished nations in the course and by visits to historic World War II sites of memory and to museums that reflect on actions of combatants, civilian bystanders as well as collaborators and resisters in and around Austria and Central Europe. Students will also debate historical examples and issues of race, morality and power colored the conflict before, during and after World War II.

Students in this course will understand the war through the lens of the American experience but look at World War II from a global perspective: the intricate international diplomacy and strategic planning of the principal combatants; the war’s major military campaigns and battles, its impact on the involved societies and economies, its brutal effect on victims, its difficult choices of appeasement/collaboration or resistance, as well as the postwar “mastering” of the war’s harsh memories.