Example

The Gathering Storm: Winston Churchill, Britain, and Nazi Germany on the Road to World War II
Professor Diane Clemens
Tuesday 10:00-12:00, 2303 Dwinelle Hall

Winston Spencer Churchill (1874-1965) was Time Magazine's Man of the Half Century in 1950, in recognition of his crucial role as Britain's great war leader when that nation stood alone against the high tide of Nazi Germany's conquests. His complex and magnificent career reached from the glory days of the British Empire at its height to his last Prime Ministership of a cold war England confronting the Soviet Union in the 50's. Churchill is the only person to have held high government office through the cataclysms of two world wars, taking part in world shaping and world saving decisions. He is also the only politician to have won a Nobel Prize in literature, for his mastery of historical narrative and superb prose style. We will read Volume I of Churchill's World War II memoirs, The Gathering Storm (1948), written at the height of his powers. We will pay special attention to the first half of this work, "From War to War, 1919-1939," and augment these readings with episodes of the excellent BBC-TV dramatic production, "The Wilderness Years," which brings to life Churchill, his supporters, and the political figures who sought to accommodate Hitler's Germany during the 1930's decade when Churchill was out of office. As a Member of Parliament, however, Churchill criticized and warned with all the power of his renowned oratory against the disastrous appeasement policies of the British government even as Hitler's Germany grew in might. Churchill organized about him a group of civil servants, military officers, journalists, and scientists who shared his alarm. Some risked their careers to bring him the essential information on which he based those prophetic warnings. Their undeniable cogency helped, in the end, to restore him to power. Churchill's personal account of this period, with its access to documents, situations, and individuals uniquely available to him, remains an authoritative and gripping description of great powers and persons on the road to war. We will have an opportunity to understand both the man and the years that determined the fateful conflict of World War II. This seminar will meet the first NINE weeks of the semester.

Diane Clemens is a Professor of American Diplomatic History with the Department of History. Her fields and current areas of research include US-Russian Diplomacy, World War II and Early Cold War, Vietnam, and US Multiculturalism. She is currently researching the issues that Native American sovereignty presents to historians of foreign relations. Professor Clemens has written articles and conference papers on the Cold War. Her current publication in progress is titled From War to Cold War: American Policy at the Crossroads, 1944-46. She has continued a life-long project of visiting the battlefields of both World Wars, with travel in the last three years to Gallipoli (Turkey), England (especially the Churchill War Rooms), and Italy (Anzio and the Caserta surrender site).