Professor David Stevenson, Sardinia House 3.11

This course is available on the BA in History, BSc in International Relations, BSc in International Relations and History and BSc in Politics and History. This course is available as an outside option to students on other programmes where regulations permit and to General Course students.

May be taken by 3rd years where regulations permit.

The international and comparative history of the First World War. The military, diplomatic, political, economic, social, and cultural aspects of the conflict will all receive attention. The origins and outbreak of the war; the military campaigning on the Western, Eastern, Italian, and extra-European Fronts; the war at sea and in the air; the intervention of neutral powers, war aims and attempts to negotiate peace; domestic politics in the belligerents; the war's economic and social effects; the experience of combat; the Russian Revolution and the road to the Armistice; the impact of the war on the international system and on individual and collective consciousness.

Lectures will be pre-recorded and accessible online. The School aims to run in-person classes, subject to circumstances, with some online provision if and where necessary. There will be a reading week in the Michaelmas and the Lent terms.

Students will be required to write three essays of 2500 words: two in the MT and one in the LT.

C. Clark, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2013); N. Ferguson, The Pity of War (1998); A. Watson, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I (2014) ); A. Millett & W. Murray (Eds), Military Effectiveness, Volume I. The First World War (1988); H. Strachan (ed), The Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (1998); H. Strachan, The First World War: Vol. I. To Arms (2005); D. Stevenson, 1914-1918: The History of the First World War (2004); A. Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction, Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (2007); R. Chickering, Imperial Germany and the Great War, 1914-18 (1998); J. Winter (ed), The Cambridge History of the First World War (3 vols, 2014).

Exam (100%, duration: 3 hours) in the summer exam period.