HIST-3351H: World War I
Instructor: James Wood
Course Code: HIST 3351H
When Taken: Summer 2021
Class Notes: Class Notes (1)
Major Assignments: 3315Schnurr3.docx, 3351Schnurr2.docx, 3351Schnurr1.docx
This class was also a summer school course. When signing up for it, I had clearly a lot of confidence in my academic skills, jumping from first year to a third year history course. Despite being very difficult, I think that this class went well. I gained a lot of confidence in my skills, wrote decent assignments, and learned a great deal about the first world war, a conflict that I had previously always been flummoxed by.
My biggest takeaway from this course was the differences in wartime experiences between different classes of soldiers. Previously, I had tried to understand wars through a top-down view, looking at the political causes for these conflicts, broad strokes of how they played out, and how they were resolved. All of these themes of exploration focus on the experiences of political or military leaders, but do not include a focus on how ordinary people experienced the war.
This class, while it did devote some attention to the leaders, also looked at the experiences of regular people during the war, both on the front lines, and the home front. Expanding my view of war beyond the leaders made this conflict more complex, but also more human, as I saw the ways in which people tried to make the best out of difficult situations in which they had few choices.