Marie Louise Roberts
United States Military Academy
Andrew Preston is a Professor of American history and fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge. He served as president of the Society for the History of Foreign Relations in 2020-21. His publications include Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy, which won the 2013 Charles Taylor Prize, and The War Council: McGeorge Bundy, the NSC, and Vietnam and Nixon in the World: U.S. Foreign Relations, 1969–1977. He is currently working on a book on the idea of “national security” in American history and co-editing (with Lien-Hang Nguyen) Vol. 2 of the forthcoming 3-volume Cambridge History of the Vietnam War. With Beth Bailey, he co-edits a book series with Cambridge University Press, "Military, War, and Society in Modern American History." Preston was educated at the University of Toronto, the London School of Economics, and Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge University.
Undergraduate Syllabi
The Second World War
The Second World War is arguably the most important global event in the twentieth century. It brought nearly the entire world into its vortex of violence, hatred and industrial killing. It was a racial war begun by Germany and Japan in their quests for dominance. It was also a total war which demanded complete loyalty to the state and which consumed the natural, material and human resources of combatant nations. This course will explore these three themes of violence, racism and total war during the years 1939-1945. Lectures, screenings and readings will emphasize the war as a turning point in global politics; the role of leaders such as Hitler, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin and Charles de Gaulle, the lived experience of war and occupation for soldiers, civilians, and prisoners, and the execution of Nazi genocide and Japanese atrocities. During weekly screenings of popular films, students will come to distinguish “popular” from “historical” memory of the Second World War, and gain critical distance on how the war has been remembered personally, officially, and in American culture. This is a 4 credit course which meets as a group for 4 hours per week and carries the expectation that you will spend an average of 2 hours outside of class for every hour in the classroom. In other words, in addition to class time, plan to allot an average of 8 hours per week for reading, writing, preparing for discussions, and/or studying for quizzes and exams for this class.
Gender, Sex, and War in the European Twentieth Century
War has its own unwritten rules. One is that war is fought for women not by them. Another dictates that sexual violence is permissible in times of conquest. We will explore how such imperatives shaped the experience of the two world wars in Europe. Some questions we will ask are: What happens when the industrialization of war enables women to fight in combat roles? How do the lives of women change with the disappearance of a “homefront” in the Second World War? What challenges did women face when participating in resistance movements? Why are prostitution and rape more common in large-scale wars? How and why does the possession of women’s bodies mark spheres of power in the male contest for territory? To answer these questions, we will probe memoirs, diaries, and oral histories as well as historical narratives.