The War Between the Wars:

U.S. History, 1919-1941

 

“Historians strive constantly to improve our collective understanding of the past through a complex process of critical dialogue—with each other, with the wider public, and with the historical record—in which we explore former lives and worlds in search of answers to the most compelling questions of our own time and place.”

                                                AHA Statement on Standards of Professional Conduct

 

“It is my belief that while they have stirred discontent in our midst, while they have caused irritating strikes, and while they have infected our social ideas with the disease of their own minds and their unclean morals we can get rid of them and not until we have done so shall we have removed the menace of Bolshevism for good.”

                                               A. Mitchell Palmer, “The Case Against the ‘Reds’,” Forum 63  (1920)

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“When it is all over, the thing I am going to be proudest of are the people all over America, public officials, volunteers, paid workers, thousands of people of all political and religious faiths who joined in this enterprise of taking care of people in need. “

                                               Harry Hopkins,Address on federal relief (September 19, 1936)

 

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

                                                George Santayana, The Life of Reason (1905)

 

Course Description:

 

From heady pleasure to political repression; from a major crash and the long slog towards economic rebirth in another war, this course will follow the trajectory of the United States from the end of World War I, “the war to end all wars,” (1919) to the bombing of Pearl Harbor (1941): the events that make up the war between the wars. Special emphasis will be placed on how so much of what we will be learning in this class is history on replay. Among the “battles” we will cover are the Palmer Raids, the cases of Sacco & Vanzetti, and the State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes. 

 

Thanks to the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his New Deal, we will spend time with the young men of the Civilian Conservation Corps, in the Dust Bowl, and in the programs of the Works Progress Administration. We will watch Congress destroy the Federal Arts Programs, as the first ever Social Security checks are paid. And we won’t forget that real wars have begun across the oceans on both sides of the United States; wars we will be forced to join in 1941.