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Professor: Alan Fisher

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History 140

History 140 is the first section of a two section course on World History. [more]

History 150

World History since 1500

This painting by Pablo Picasso is in many ways a symbol of much of "what went wrong" in the 20th century. When the Spanish Civil war began in 1936 between those who wanted a Republic and those who saw Fascism as the political system the world needed, Picasso devoted his artistic talents to a struggle against the Spanish fascist leader General Francisco Franco. Franco was supported by the Nazi government in Germany while the Republicans found support from socialist and communist volunteers from the Soviet Union and even some from the United States. Picasso produced this painting to be part of the Spanish exhibits of the Paris World's Fair in 1937. He had been outraged by the world's first bombardment from the air of civilians [though as we know, it was not to be the last] conducted by German pilots fighting on behalf of Franco, and it is said, trying out new bombing methods which they would later use elsewhere in Europe. Their target was the town of Guernica in Spain's Basque region in the north, a town with no military value. The victims of the bombing and strafing were hundreds of men, women and childen, only civilians.

Picasso did not want this painting to reside in Spain so long as Franco and the Spanish fascists were in power; so for most of his later life, the painting was displayed in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Once a new, non-fascist government came to power in Spain, Picasso allowed it to return to Spain where it is now on display in Madrid.

As Marilyn Stokstad writes in her Art History (New York, Henry Abrams, 1999, p. 1090): "Picasso's depiction of this incident is a stark, surrealistic nightmare focusing on the victims. Expressively distorted women, one with her dead child, wail at the carnage. Above a fallen, broken warrior is a screaming horse, symbolizing the suffering republic. To our left is a bull, thought to symbolize either Franco or Spain. An electric light and a woman holding a lantern suggest Picasso's desire to reveal the event in all its horror. The work is mostly in black and white, however, like the newspaper photos that also publicized the atrocity."

Picasso himself, said as he worked on the painting, "The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom. My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? ... In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call Guernica, and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death."

One interesting very recent story concerning this painting, now in Madrid, surrounds a copy of the painting in tapestry which has been on display in the United Nations building in New York City, at the entrance to the room where the Security Council meets. The tapestry was paid for by Nelson Rockefeller and given to the United Nations. On February 5, 2003, when U. S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Negroponte gave a press counference at the United Nations, a curtain was placed over the tapestry so that it could not be seen on television coverage of the press conference. On the next day, it was said that the t.v. news crews had asked that it be covered up as it made for a bad backdrop in front of which it was difficult to see the faces of the speakers. But the U. N. officials claimed that the Bush Administration had pressured them to cover the tapestry rather than have it in the background while Powell and other U. S. diplomats argued for war against Iraq. To read a full account of this event, check out David Cohen's article, "Hidden Treasures: What's so controversial about Picasso's Guernica". This painting has been identified by PBS as one of the Treasures of the World.

We will see in this course that events have what some call their "pre-history" and their "post-history." By this we mean that every event has multiple causes and ancestors presenting very intricate relationships and each event has many elements and ingredients. To understand the event, one needs to recognize that each event has its own "pre-history." But also every event, however small, has effects - it influences other subsequent events, is one of future events' pre-history, and becomes a part of an intricate system of interrelationships too. No event occurs in total and complete isolation and as a result, it is very difficult to understand any event standing alone.

Picasso's painting had its own "pre-history" - the events in Spain during its civil war, the bombing of the small, undefended, and completely civilian target of Guernica, and then Picasso's own mental participation in that civil war against the fascists and on behalf of the Republicans. But Picasso's painting has also had a long and intricate "post-history." As we noted above, its fascimile in the United Nations produced considerable embarassment to the U. S. government in 2003 in ways that had little or nothing to do with Picasso, the town of Guernica, or even the Spanish Civil War. And this is just a painting! How much more pre- and post-histories do larger issues and events have! We'll get some sense of this during the many interesting topics and subjects you'll find in this course.

The world today is even more interconnected today than it was in Picasso's day. These interconnections are economic, cultural, political, and depend heavily on the new means of communication which have been developed in just the past 100 years. Each of you knows already a great deal more about the world and its peoples, and what different parts of the world look like, than did even a tiny percentage of the world's population 300 years ago! While they are more prominent today than ever before, global interactions and global problems are not new features of world history. To the contrary, there is a long historical context for contemporary globalization, and many believe that only in the light of past experience is it possible to understand the contemporary world. What many today do not know well, even if one pays attention to the news, is the fact that global interactions and contacts on the one hand and global problems on the other are not new to the past 30 years. In this course we will discover that there is a very long historical context for our present-day globalization. It is the opinion of many, particularly those who study history and teach it, that "shining the light of study" on past experience will make it possible to understand much better our contemporary world.

One needs only think of a recent event - say, the mid-term U. S. election of November 2006 - to realize what I mean by the statements above. Each vote was the product of particular attitudes, created in a myriad of different ways, and based on different sets of information. Each non-vote, likewise represented a set of attitudes. One needs to group these small events (votes) together to make sense of them. From one perspective, the official count in each state or district or town is an "objective" grouping and the meaning might be considered "objectively" accessible to an historian or student of history. But we know there are many ways to group this information, these "facts", and there are quite different ways to interpret them. How much more complicated, more difficult, to do this for events from the last decade, or even more from the last century, or even 500 years ago, the era when we begin HST 150! Yet it is important to try, and that is what we are going to do in this course together.

In History 150, we will begin the process of this organization of the many pasts of the last 500 years into an understandable past. It will be a challenging, interesting, and I hope enjoyable exercise. In the process, we will focus on careful reading and thinking about important subjects. You will have many opportunities for analytical writing. The assignments are on this WWW syllabus. You will find the reading and writing schedule for this course, and information about the grading system that we use. While this is a "semester-long" course, it is offered in the summer in a much shorter period of time - ony 7 weeks instead of the normal 15 weeks during the academic year. So the assignments will occur more often than they would in this course when it is offered over an entire semester.

History 150 is the second semester of a year-long course on World History. In HST 150.  We include the period primarily after 1500 C.E. Those of you who have studied World History before 1500, say our own HST 140, know that Europe was not the most advanced region of the globe - far from it - in 1400. Most European cities were still recovering from the devastation of a pan-Asian and pan-European pandemic, the so-called Black Death. Two of Europe's most powerful states were in the midst of a hundred years' long war which left both of them exhausted and financially weak. Imagine a war that would have begun with the start of the First World War and which wuold be still continuing today without stop! But by 1500, or very soon therafter, many areas of the globe including Europe were in cultural and economic contact.

There are two required books for this course, though there are many other readings online which we expect you to read too. Be sure to use the correct volumes and editions of these books, as the assignments relate specifically to them:  Jerry Bentley and Herbert Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters: A Global Perspective on the Past, vol. II (From 1500 to the Present), McGraw-Hill, 2008, Fourth Edition (ISBN: 0-07-333063-9;  and Kevin Reilly, Worlds of History: A Comparative Reader, vol. II (Since 1400), Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007, Third Edition (ISBN: 0-312-44686-1.  They are currently available at the bookstores in East Lansing, as well as online through them and such online booksellers as Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com. Because they are not inexpensive, we are not asking you to purchse any other books this semester!