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Thematic & chronological approach to conflicts in the region 20th & 21st centuries: Balkan Wars, WWI, WWII, Yugoslav wars, & current Russo-Ukrainian War. Ways women in E. Europe involved in and affected by wars; comparison with women in W. Europe in the two world wars. Examines women during war as members of military services, underground movements, workers, volunteers, mothers of soldiers, subjects and supporters of war aims and propaganda, activists in peace movements, and objects of wartime destruction, dislocation, and sexual violation.

(Graduate students, enroll in 327B. Undergraduate students, enroll in 227B.) This colloquium investigates the processes of buying, making, and selling goods and services in Cold War Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. We will familiarize ourselves with a variety of approaches to writing the history of economic life and discuss to what extent they are applicable to state socialist systems. Our focus will not be on theories of socialism but on empirically grounded studies that allow for insights into how the system operated in practice and interacted with capitalism. We will, among others, explore the following questions: What was the role of the state in the economies east and west of the Iron Curtain? Are socialism and capitalism two incompatible systems? How did women experience and shape economic life after the Second World War? What had a greater impact on the economies of the region: Cold War politics or globalization?

Until recently history has been comparatively quiet about the experience of World War I in the east. Far from being a peripheral theater of war, however, the experiences of war on the Eastern Front were central to shaping the 20th century. Not only was the first shot of the war fired in the east, it was also the site of the most dramatic political revolution. Using scholarly texts, literature and film, this course combines political, military, cultural and social approaches to introduce the causes, conduct and consequences of World War I with a focus on the experiences of soldiers and civilians on the Eastern Front. Topics include: the war of movement, occupation, extreme violence against civilians, the Armenian genocide, population exchanges, the Russian Revolution and civil war, and the disintegration of empires and rise of nation-states.