Thomas Guglielmo

George Washington University

Thomas A. Guglielmo is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University. He has a PhD in History from the University of Michigan. His first book, White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago (Oxford, 2003), won the Organization of American Historians' Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Society of American Historians' Allan Nevins Prize. He is presently completing a second book titled Divisions: The Untold History of Racism and Resistance in America's World War II Military (forthcoming with Oxford University Press, 2021). His research has been supported by Stanford University’s Research Institute for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity and by Harvard University’s Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History. He currently serves as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer. His article, “A Martial Freedom Movement: Black GIs' Political Struggles during World War II,” appeared in the Journal of American History in March 2018.

Syllabus

World War II in History & Memory

 

This course examines Americans’ World War II experiences and how those experiences have been studied, debated, understood, and “remembered”—officially, culturally, and personally. It focuses on six overlapping topics—GIs, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japanese American internment, African Americans, the Holocaust, and women. By the end of the course, students should be able to:

  • Think carefully, creatively, and critically about World War II – and about history more generally;

  • Analyze and synthesize a diverse range of source material;

  • Improve their writing through practice and revision.