Department of History
The OhioStateUniversity
History 512.05 Europe Since 1950Prof. Carole Fink
Tuesday/Thursday 1:30-3:18 P.M.Dulles 214 Wednesday 3:30 – 5:00 P.M.
Page 60
SPRING 2006
Introduction.
This is an upper-level lecture, discussion, and writing course designed for History majors and Graduate students who will have the opportunity to analyze primary texts and do an individual work of research.
The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the history of European society, culture, politics, and international relations from the end of World War II, to the end of the Cold War and up to the present. The topics we will cover include the Cold War division of Europe; the dismantling of colonial empires; economic recovery and the "Great Boom" of the 1950s; the impact of 1968; detente and the "new Cold War" of the 1980s; the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe; and Europe's quest for a new identity since 1991.
A.Course Requirements
- Attendance at every class and group meeting. Absence may be granted only for serious medical or personal reasons. Grade will be lowered for lack of attendance.
- Thorough completion of reading assignments.
- Active class participation (5-10%)
- Group participation (5%)
- Mid-term and final examination (45%)
- Report (5-10%)
- Paper (40%)
The professor and TA reserve the right to consider improvement when determining final grades.
B.Additional Information
No extensions will be granted, either for papers or exams
Graduating seniors will have to make special arrangements
There will be no eating or drinking in class.
C. Grading Policies
“A” essays and exams will include an excellent introductory and concluding paragraphs presenting and evaluating your thesis. The body of the paper will contain a well written, original, and a well-organized presentation (either thematic or chronological) to support your thesis.
“B” essays and exams contain the above but not meet the highest standards of prose, originality, or organization.
“C” essays and exams are acceptable but lack distinction in all the three categories.
“D” and “E” essays exams lack a viable thesis, adequate information, and coherent narrative.
D. Academic Misconduct
It is the responsibility of the Committee on Academic Misconduct to investigate or establish procedures for the investigation of all reported cases of student academic misconduct. The term academic misconduct includes all forms of student academic misconduct wherever committed; this is illustrated by, but not limited to, cases of plagiarism and dishonest practices in connection with examinations and papers. According to Faculty Rule 3335-5-487 all instances of misconduct will be reported. For further information, see the Code of Student Conduct:
For a discussion of plagiarism, see:
For a direct link to the OSUWritingCenter:
E. Disability Services
Students with disabilities that have been certified by the Office for Disability Services should inform the instructor as soon as possible. The Office for Disability Services is located in 150 Pomerene Hall, 1760 Neil Avenue, Telephone: 292-3307, TDD 292-0901;
F.Enrollment
All students must be officially enrolled in the course by the end of the second full week of the quarter. No requests to add the course will be approved by the Chair of the History Department after that time. Enrolling officially and on time is solely the responsibility of the student.
G. Texts (available at the Bookstore)
William Hitchcock, The Struggle for Europe (abbreviated as H)
George Orwell, 1984
Plus 1 of the following:
Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved
H.Syllabus: (subject to change)
WeekDateSubject Assignment
13/28Introduction
3/30Europe in the PresentH, Ch. 16, Map
Report topics due
24/4The Cold WarH, Intro, Ch. 1
Paper topics due 4/6 The Cold War H, Chs. 2-4
34/11First Group MeetingPresentation of topics
4/13Orwell’s Europe1984
44/18Boom at Home; H, Chs. 5-6
Retrenchment Abroad
4/20No class
54/25Mid Term Examination
4/27Second Group MeetingProgress Report
65/2Changing tidesH, Chs. 7
5/4The SixtiesH, Chs. 8-9
75/9Things ChangeH, Chs. 10-11
5/11H, Ch. 12
85/16Voices of DissentHavel or Levi
5/18Third Group Meeting
95/23The European RevolutionsH, Ch. 13
5/25Post-Communist ViolenceH, Ch. 14
105/30Europe and its DiscontentsH Ch. 15
6/1ConclusionsPapers due
Afterword
6/6(1:30 PM) Final examination
Written Work:
There will be two exams (one mid-term and one final). There will also be three individual projects
1-page report on Orwell, due April 13
2-page report on either Levi or Havel, due May 16
10-12 page term paper, due June 1
a. Reports. The two reports will consist of a brief analysis of a chosen subject (See attached sheet)
b. Paper. An essay in one of the following historical categories: Biography; Diplomacy; Culture; War and Domestic Violence; Social History (See attached sheet).
Group Meetings: There will be three group meetings, April 11, April 27, and May 18, to discuss progress in research and writing.
Graduate Students:
Graduate students will write two 5-page reports and a 20-page essay.
Graduating Seniors:
Graduating Seniors will submit their Term paper on May 23 and a Take-Home Examination on Thursday, June 1
Reports
1. One-page essay on George Orwell, 1984, due April 13
Select one of the following topics: biography, language, memory, victims, perpetrators, violence, the “grey zone,” gender, landscape.
2. Two-page essay on one of the following. Due May 16
Books: Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, or Vaclav Havel,The Power of the Powerless
Select one of the following topics: biography, language, memory, victims, perpetrators, violence, the “grey zone,” gender, landscape
Paper
The third written work is to be from 10-12 pages. This will be a short research essay, written in formal scholarly style, with a title page and endnotes, and based on at least 3 primary and 6 secondary sources.
Topic selections are due on Tuesday, April 4. List at least two choices, one from two different groups. The finished work is due in class on June 1.
Five Areas of Topic Selection:
1. Biography:
These will be studies of individuals and their use of power. Using memoirs, speeches, newspaper accounts, photographs, oral history, and film documentaries, you will examine how one of these figures dealt with a major political problem. In a good biography, it is important to a) establish the person’s motivations, actions, and impact; b) deal with the context – personal, social, economic, political, and even global; and c) to assess this leader’s stature in comparison to contemporaries and figures in the past.
Subjects: MacMillan, DeGaulle, Adenauer, Tito, Khrushchev, Gomulka, Gorbachav, Brandt, Schmidt, Kohl, Chirac, Thatcher, Milosevic; Dag Hammerskjöld; John Paul II; Walesa; Le Pen, Aldo Moro, Sakharov, Ceausescu, Brezhnev, Honecker, Tito, Schroeder, Blair,
2. Diplomacy:
Studies of diplomacy are more than “what one clerk wrote to another.” Here, using many of the above sources as well as published state documents, you will examine an important intra-state development in Europe between 1950 to the present the work of the leading actors, discuss the political/international debate, and examine the results. Here too, you will bring in all that is necessary to analyze the topic, including cultural, political, and personal factors as well as diplomatic and strategic considerations.
Subjects: UNRRA, Yalta, Austrian Peace Treaty (1955), NATO, Treaty of Rome, Suez, Potsdam, Marshall Plan, Helsinki, Berlin Wall, Helsinki, Ostpolitik, Europe and the Palestine Question, CSCE (OSCE), European Court of Human Rights, Maastricht, Turkey and the E.U., Vatican II, the Madrid Conference, the Geneva Conference on Indochina, German Unification, Maastricht
3. Culture
This historical study, centering on a specific artist and work of art, will establish that work’s place in a specific political and social environment. After thoroughly examining the work through its image, language, or sound, you will do research on the creator, the context, the reception of the work, and its place in the larger history of its time, either as a reflection or a path breaking construction.
Subjects:
Films: Look Back in Anger; The Tin Drum,The Unbearable Lightness of Being; Uranus, Bicycle Thieves, 400 Blows; When Father Was Away on Business, The Battle of Algiers, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Last Year in Marienbad; Man of Marble
Architecture: Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp; the Berlin Reichstag; Libeskind’s Berlin Jewish Museum; the Pompidou Center; BMW building Munich; Farsta Center, Stockholm; the Mirail, Toulouse, Sussex University, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, Pompidou Center (Paris), “La Défense,” Paris
Literature: Albert Camus, The Plague; Sartre, No Exit; George Konrad, The Case Worker; Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Don’t Die Before You’re Dead; Alexander Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, George Orwell, Animal Farm, Milan Kundera, The Joke, Françoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse, Elsa Morante, History,
Music: Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Kristof Penderecki, Karlheinz Stockhausen
Painting/Sculpture: Alberto Giacometti; Lucien Freud
4. Social History:
Described as “how ordinary people lived the big events,” social history enables us to probe beneath the headlines for less-noticed changes and continuities within societies, specifically how Europeans between 1950 and the present reacted to “modernizing” trends and to the world around them. This is a rewarding challenge for the researcher, enabling you not only to explore newspapers and popular magazines (foreign languages will be a help here), but also to search public opinion polls, government and U.N. economic and social data and unconventional sources, such as tourism guides, advertisements, etc. to indicate the source of innovation; the reception; and the impact.
Subjects: European feminism; the Greens; Amnesty International; Doctors Without Borders; the Red Brigades; FLN; Basques (ETA); Solidarity; Guest workers; McDonald’s; Euro-Disney, Chernobyl, the Volkswagen “Beetle”; the Beatles; multiculturalism; Diary of Ann Frank; the “pill”; Che Guevara and “Third-Worldism”; Glasnost; AIDS; world cup; Europe’s aging population; foreigners from Africa; Islam in Europe; the Concorde; leisure; unemployment insurance; IBM in Europe
5. War, Domestic Violence, Peace Movements
Although Europe has not officially been at war since 1945, there has been considerable violence not only inside the continent but also in its former colonial regions. The essay, based on speeches, public documents, memoirs, and newspaper accounts as well as on maps and specialized studies, should establish the new forms of violence since the end of World War II, how European governments, singly and together have coped with them, and also how individuals have responded.
Subjects: Berlin Airlift (1948) Hungarian Uprising (1956); Suez crisis; Britain in Kenya; Dien Bien Phu; Biafra; Congo; U-2 incident; Sputnik; Cuban Missile Crisis; Munich Olympics 1972; Afghanistan (1979); Wars in Yugoslavia (over Slovenia,Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo); civil war in Nigeria; South Africa/Apartheid; Multilateral Force (MLF), IRA (Irish Republican Army), CND (Committee for Nuclear Disarmament); Warsaw Pact Invasion of Czechoslovakia 1968; terrorism; the new refugee problem
INSTRUCTIONS FOR PAPER
1. Presentation
Have a cover page with your name, class number and name, professor, and the title of your paper.
Double space the text. Footnotes can be at the bottom or in the back.
Add, if useful, and appendix containing names, dates, illustrations, a map, or any other material.
Bibliography should clearly mark primary and secondary sources. Place an asterisk next to the most useful sources.
2. Citations
For footnotes and bibliography: use the Chicago Manual; you can go to the OSU Library Web Site for specific instructions. Be consistent!
3. Structure
Work from a clear outline. The essay must contain a formal introduction and conclusion. Within the text make your points clearly and consistently. Maintain balance between presentation of your major themes and important details.
Do not tell a story. This is a research paper in which you are making a specific argument that needs to be bolstered by the results of your inquiry.
4. Stylistic Issues
Tighten wordy sentences
Bismarck sought assiduously and in every way to make the Kaiser understand the urgent importance of giving Austria-Hungary each and every requested assurance it had urgently demanded.
Remove extraneous words or phrases
The town of New Harmony, located in Indiana, was founded there as a Utopian community.
Avoid needlessly complex sentences
There is another version of this testimony that gives an even richer, more extensive analysis of how things turned out.
Use active verbs
Passive: European urban culture was undermined by a great surge of violence in the 1960s. Active: A great surge of violence undermined European culture in the 1960s.
Use the passive voice only when you wish to emphasize the receiver and minimize the actor, as in: The Chinese dissidents were repressed by the authorities, which feared the threat to public order.
Maintain a consistent point of view
In 1962, the United States launched a drive to extend its influence over Europe. In Bonn, there was little enthusiasm. Washington issued a series of conciliatory statements and sent emissaries to Europe. …
Place words and phrases correctly
There were many portraits of mounted kings on the palace walls.
Combine choppy sentences
The parliament consisted of a broad range of political parties. They fought over the leadership. They refused to address the nation’s problems.
Avoid jargon
For many decades the indigenous body politic of South Africa worked inside the box attempting to get people on the same page and negotiate legal enfranchisement without result.
(For many decades, South Africans negotiated vainly for the right to vote.)
Substitute plain words
Commence (begin), components (parts), endeavor (try), exit (leave), facilitate (help), factor (consideration, cause), finalize (finish) impact (as a verb: affect), indicator (sign), input (advise), optimal (best) parameters (boundaries), prior to (before), prioritize (set priorities), utilize (use), viable (workable)
Bibliography: Europe Since 1950
General Narratives
Tom Buchanan, Europe’s Troubled Peace, 1945-2000 (2006)
Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (1994)
Harold James, Europe Reborn: A History 1914-2000 (2003)
Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (1998)
Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments: Europe in the Twentieth Century (2002)
J. Robert Wegs and Robert Ladrech, Europe since 1945: A Concise History (1996)
National Histories
Peter Clark, Hope and Glory: Britain, 1900-1990 (1997)
David Close, Greece since 1945 (2002)
Rolf Danielsen et al, Norway (1995)
Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland, 1900-2000 (2004)
Mary Fulbrook, The Divided Nation: A History of Germany, 1918-1990 (1992)
Tom Gallagher, Portugal (1983)
Robert Gildea, France Since 1945 (1996)
Paul Ginsborg, A History of Contemporary Italy (1990)
Jean Grugel and Tim Rees, Franco’s Spain (1997)
Geoffrey Hosking, A History of the Soviet Union (1990)
Knud J. V. Jespersen, A History of Denmark (2004)
John Keep, Last of the Empires: A History of the Soviet Union, 1945-1991 (2004)
Kenneth O. Morgan, The People’s Peace: British History, 1945-1989 (2001)
Jonathan Steinberg, Why Switzerland? (1996)
Regions
Geoffrey Swain and Nigel Swain, Eastern Europe since 1945 (2003)
Derek Urwin, A Political History of Western Europe since 1945 (1997)
Themes
Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (2002)
David Hanley, ed., Christian Democracy in Europe(1994)
Piero Ignazi, Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe (2003)
Brian Jenkins and Spyros Sofos, eds., Nation and Identity in Contemporary
Europe(1996)
Donald Sasson, One Hundred Years of Socialism: The West European Left in the
Twentieth Century (1996)
The Economy
Max-Stephan Schulze, ed., Western Europe: Economic and Social Change since
1945 (1999)
Loukas Tsoukalis, The New European Economy (1993)
Culture
Maurice Crouzet, The European Renaissance since 1945 (1970)
Elizabeth Ezra, European Cinema (2004)
Arthur Marwick, The Arts in the West since 1945 (2002)
Cold War
Anthony Carew, Labour under the Marshall Plan (1987)
David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy
During the Cold War (2003)
Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural
Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe
(1989)
Matthew Cullerne Brown, Art Under Stalin (1991)
John Dunbabin, The Cold War: The Great Powers and their Allies
1941-1947 (1994)
John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997)
Francis Heller and John Gillingham, eds., NATO: The Founding of the Atlantic
Alliance and the Integration of Europe (1992)
Michael Hogan, The Marshall Plan (1987)
David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb (1994)
Wilfried Loth, Overcoming the Cold War: A History of Détente, 1950-
1991 (2002)
Geir Lundstad, America, Scandinavia and the Cold War, 1945-1949 (1980)
Vojtech Mastny, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years (1996)
Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement
1945-1963 (1999)
Adam Ulam, Dangerous Relations: The Soviet Union in World Politics (1983)
Postwar Europe, 1945-50
Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann, eds., Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural
And Social History of Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (2003)
David Close, The Origins of the Greek Civil War (1986)
Claire Duchen and Irene Bandhauer Schoffman, eds., When the War was Over:
Women, War, and Peace in Europe, 1940-1956 (2000)
David Ellwood, Rebuilding Europe: Western Europe, America, and Postwar
Reconstruction (1992)
William Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for
Leadership in Europe, 1944-1954 (1998)
Karel Kaplan, The Short March: The Communust Takeover in Czechoslovakia,
1945-1948 (1987)
Padraic Kenney, Rebuilding Poland: Workers and Communists, 1945-1950 (1997)
Alan Kramer, The West German Economy, 1945-1955 (1991)
Alan Milward, The Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1945-1951 (1984)
Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation,
1945-1949 (1995)
Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (1993)
Gareth Pritchard, The Making of the GDR, 1945-1953 (2000)