American Wars and the 20th Century World (1900-1990)

This course explores the history of American military power from the Spanish-American War to the end of the 1980s, focusing on the social, cultural, racial, and human rights aspects of the U.S. military and soldiering in the 20th century. This course will only lightly discuss military strategy and tactic, and instead focus on the broader array of issues which stem from American wars. The course will cover topics such as American military occupations, the desegregation of the Armed Forces, military justice and war crimes, and the rise (and fall) of human rights in American imaginations of war. We will be concerned with questions such as the relationship of the military to state-building in the U.S. and abroad, war as a state-making and race-making mechanism, and the importance of human rights and justice within imaginations of American military power. This course seeks to understand how war and peace shaped the history of the United States in the twentieth century, and the role of grassroots actors in defining the nature of war.