This course will examine World War II in a global context, but with an emphasis on the American experience. As fewer and fewer of our students know someone who served in the war, rethinking ways to teach it has become ever more important. This course will conclude with an examination of how the war created our world today, with a special focus on its impact on Russia, China, Europe, and the United States. We are still living with the world the war created and its legacy in many of the world’s conflicts, including Korea, Ukraine, the Middle East, and Taiwan. This course can, therefore, help place today’s wars in a historical context.
Poster “United/United Nations Fight for Freedom,” United States Office of War Information, Division of Public Inquiries, 1943. (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC09520.30)
You may attend Professor Neiberg’s book talk on When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Relationship, regardless of which symposium course you select. Symposium participants who attend the optional book talks earn additional PD credit.
Winston Churchill, Harry Truman, and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference in Germany, July 1945. (The Gilder Lehrman Institute, GLC04457)
Michael S. Neiberg is a professor of history and chair of War Studies at the United States Army War College. His published work specializes in the First and Second World Wars in global context. His Potsdam: The End of World War II and the Remaking of Europe (Basic Books, 2015) won the Harry Truman Prize. The Wall Street Journal named his Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press, 2011) one of the five best books ever written about that war. His latest book is When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Relationship (Harvard University Press, 2021), which won a 2022 Society for Military History Distinguished Book Prize. In 2017 he was awarded the Médaille d’Or du Rayonnement Culturel from La Renaissance Française, an organization founded by French president Raymond Poincaré in 1915 to keep French culture alive during the First World War.
Ron Nash serves as a senior education fellow/master teacher at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, where he works on developing history units related to Teaching Literacy through History. He taught high school history and special education in New Jersey for thirty-five years. He has received several grants including the Teaching American History Grant and an Anti-Defamation League Grant. Ron also has an extensive military career. He worked as a military planner in the US Army Civil Affairs Corps, where he was involved in several projects to include Operation Enduring Freedom-Trans Sahara and Operation Iraqi Freedom. When he retired from teaching in 2007, he returned to the 353 Civil Affairs Command as a Department of the Army civilian.