History 150 H

World History, since 1500

Spring Semester 2007

This painting by Pablo Picasso is in many ways a symbol of much of "what went wrong" in the 20th century.  When the Spanish Civil war began in 1936 between those who wanted a Republic and those who saw Fascism as the political system the world needed, Picasso devoted his artistic talents to a struggle against the Spanish fascist leader General Francisco Franco.  Franco was supported by the Nazi government in Germany while the Republicans found support from socialist and communist volunteers from the Soviet Union and even some from the United States.   Picasso produced this painting to be part of the Spanish part of the Paris World's Fair in 1937.  He had been outraged by the world's first bombardment from the air of civilians [though as we know, it was not to be the last] conducted by German pilots fighting on behalf of Franco, and it is said, trying out new bombing methods which they would  later use elsewhere in Europe.  Their target was the town of Guernica in Spain's Basque region in the north, a town with no military value.  The victims of the bombing and strafing were hundreds of men, women and childen, only civilians.


As Marilyn Stokstad writes in her Art History (New York, Henry Abrams, 1999, p. 1090): "Picasso's depiction of this incident is a stark, surrealistic nightmare focusing on the victims.  Expressively distorted women, one with her dead child, wail at the carnage.  Above a fallen, broken warrior is a screaming horse, symbolizing the suffering republic.  To our left is a bull, thought to symbolize either Franco or Spain.  An electric light and a woman holding a lantern suggest Picasso's desire to reveal the event in all its horror.  The work is in black and white, however, like the newspaper photos that also publicized the atrocity."


Syllabus

Alan Fisher
108 Morrill Hall
hrs: by appointment only
email: fishera@msu.edu

During the 1990s the term globalization entered the vocabulary of politicians, journalists, scholars, and others who commented on the increasingly tight connections linking the world's lands and peoples. By the late 20th century, global transportation and communication networks had become more intricate than ever before, and they supported voluminous trade and systematic interaction among peoples throughout the world. Global links brought problems as well as opportunities: pollution, environmental change, ethnic tensions, political conflicts, and weapons of mass destruction loomed as potential threats to all peoples. Yet even though they are more prominent today than ever before, global interactions and global problems are not new features of world history. To the contrary, there is a long historical context for contemporary globalization, and many believe that only in the light of past experience is it possible to understand the contemporary world.

Obviously there have been billions of separate events and developments, and individual actions and activities, which together have produced world history in the past five centuries. In a single course, let alone in a single life, it is impossible to examine even a fraction of these. It is necessary to organize them in themes and broad subjects and topics in order to begin to make sense of the global past, which is the prelude to our present. In turn, it is always important to recognize that our present will soon become someone else's past.  One needs only think of a recent event - say, the mid-term election November 2006 - to realize what I mean.  Each vote was the product of particular attitudes, created in a myriad of different ways.  Each non-vote, likewise represented a set of attitudes too.  One needs to group these small events [votes] together to make sense of them.  From one perspective, the official count in each state or district or town is an "objective" grouping and the meaning might be considered "objectively" accessible to an historian.  But we know there are many ways to group this information, these "facts" and there are quite different ways to interpret them.  How much more complicated, more difficult, to do this for events from last year, last decade, last century, 500 years ago!!!  Yet it is important to try, and that is what we are going to do in this course, together.

In this course, we will begin the process of this organization of the many pasts into an understandable past. It will be a challenging, interesting, and I hope enjoyable exercise. In the process, we will focus on careful reading and thinking about important subjects. You will have many opportunities for analytical writing - both individually and in groups. The assignments will be on this WWW syllabus as will be some of the readings. Below you will find the reading and writing schedule for this course, information about the grading system that I use, and other information. I encourage you to check this syllabus regularly as I will be updating it from time to time [not changing the assignments or their due dates, however]. I will be evaluating your writing assignments for the most part on email; thus it is important that you keep your mailbox 'thinned out' so that there will be room for messages.

           Required Books 

          Schedule of Assignments

Chronologies