HIST-LIT 90 – World War II in Image, Text, and Sound

HIST-LIT 90 – World War II in Image, Text, and Sound

Semester: Fall
Offered: 2025
Instructor: Jules Riegel
Meeting Time: TBA

Almost eighty years after the end of World War II, its legacies are alive as ever. The conflict was fought across much of the globe, ravaging landscapes and ecosystems and wiping villages, towns, and even cities from the face of the earth. Estimates of combined civilian and military deaths typically range between 50,000,000 and 85,000,000, an almost unimaginably devastating toll. Yet how does our understanding of World War II change when we return to literature, art, music, and other cultural works of the time?

This course examines civilians’ and soldiers’ everyday experiences of the war through sources such as diaries, photographs, films, songs, and visual art. We will focus on the war in Europe, while considering sources from the war’s other theaters, including the U.S. and the Pacific. Topics will include the war’s origins; life and death under occupation; the impact of strategic bombing; the propaganda war; documentation of wartime atrocities, especially through photography; the Holocaust; the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the pursuit of postwar justice. Throughout the semester, we will employ lenses such as race, gender, and class as we analyze wartime cultural creations, seeking to better understand what it meant to live and die during the most terrible war in human history.

Course Notes: Interested students should petition to enroll on my.harvard. In your petition, say a few words about your interest in the course (including concentrations you are considering if you are undeclared), any requirement the course may satisfy, and whether you have taken any other History & Literature seminars. Please contact the instructor if you have any questions.

For more details please visit the Harvard Course Catalog.