Michael Neiberg
Army War College
Michael S. Neiberg is Professor of History and Chair of War Studies at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. His published work specializes on the First and Second World Wars in global context. The Wall Street Journal named his Dance of the Furies: Europe and the Outbreak of World War I (Harvard University Press) one of the five best books ever written about that war. In October 2016 Oxford University Press published his Path to War, a history of American responses to the Great War in Europe, 1914-1917 and in July 2017 Oxford published his Concise History of the Treaty of Versailles. His most recent book is When France Fell: The Vichy Crisis and the Fate of the Anglo-American Alliance, out in October 2021 from Harvard Press. In 2017 he was awarded the Médaille d'Or du Rayonnement Culturel from La Renaissance Française, an organization founded by French President Raymond Poincaré in 1915 to keep French culture alive during the First World War.
Undergraduate Syllabi
World War I
As we approach the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, scholars are beginning to reassess their ideas. Once dominant images of a senseless war fought with pointless tactics by idiotic generals have yielded to a view of the war as an astonishingly complex series of events that impacted the entire world. This course will study the war in all of its complexity. We will not be looking for simple answers nor will we merely see the First World War as a protracted dress rehearsal for the Second World War. Instead, we will seek to understand why the world went to war in 1914 and why citizens of the most “civilized” nations on earth killed one another at unprecedented rates for four years. I hope that by the end of this course you will share some of my interest in and endless fascination with the “war to end all wars.”
World War II
Oral Historian Studs Terkel famously titled his book on America in the Second World War The Good War. Only Americans see the war in such lofty tones. The war made America a superpower and brought the nation out of a depression, but for the rest of the world, the war brought unprecedented suffering. The best guess is that 50,000,000 people died as a result of the war. For the first time in history the majority of deaths were civilians. This course will look at the global tragedy that was World War II in international and comparative perspective.
Graduate Syllabus
STRATEGY AND STRATEGIC THINKING IN THE FIRST WORLD WAR
Although the United States currently does not envision fighting a total war like the First World War, the conflict of 1914-1918 nevertheless offers numerous strategic lessons. These lessons include the need to adapt strategy to the reality of war when prewar plans fail to meet strategic objectives; the development of global strategy; and the strategic identification of the goals for conflict termination. This course will not be a history of the First World War per se; although a working knowledge of the war and its main events will no doubt prove useful, it is not required.