HIST-317 Eastern Europe in the Age of Ethnic Cleansing (3)

This course explores the nationalizing successor states that appeared between Berlin and Moscow after World War I shattered the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman empires that had previously ruled the region’s multi-confessional, multilingual peoples. Theoretical and case-study analyses exhibit how, with international sanction, diverse peoples were persecuted because of their national identities. The massive population upheavals triggered by Nazi racial ideology and crimes (especially the genocide of the Holocaust) is followed with attention to the immediate post-1945 border shifts and ethnic cleansings that produced homogenous nation-states whose erasure of multiethnic and non-national heritages politically haunts and culturally challenges contemporary states and societies.