World History in the Age of the World Wars (1914 - 1945)
Above we see the “North Panel” of Mexican painter Diego Rivera’s Detroit Industry, a series of murals he created in 1932 and 1933 to depict the industrial world of the Ford Motor Company. Rivera, as you can see, clearly sympathizes with the plight of the modern worker and depicts modern labor as both heroic and dehumanizing, calling on a familiar motif of the age—the subterranean nature of industrial labor. The laborers are quite gloriously portrayed. At one with each other and the machines, they appear strong, muscular and hardworking. Above the industrial scene we see images of traditional society and the natural world. The painting does well to capture many themes of our course: the rapid development of science and technology, industrialization, changes in the nature of work, the radicalization of politics both on the right and left, the tension between human traditions and modernization, and collective action.
This course provides a survey of key military, political, social, and cultural developments in world history beginning with the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and ending with the allied victory in 1945 and the beginnings of the Cold War. The course examines, among other topics, extremism in Russia, Germany and Japan, the Indian independence movement, westernization and reaction in the Middle East, the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in China, and European and American imperialism. Important social and political concepts like colonialism, nationalism, westernization, communism and fascism will be explored in their historical contexts.
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- The Age of World War Seth Rogoff