A scholar of European history and the First World War will talk about the ethnic and racial hatred that marked many of that continent’s conflicts in the early 1900s when he lectures at Washington College on Thursday, November 20.
Eric Dorn Brose, a professor of history and politics at Drexel University, will speak at 4:30 p.m. in Litrenta Lecture Hall as part of the Wingate Lecture Series. His lecture, “The Ethnic/Racial Dimension to the European Power Struggle in the Early Twentieth Century,” will focus on how centuries of prior warfare between Germans, English, French, Russians, Turks, and others shaped racial mindsets and senses of identity that could translate into dangerous racism against other groups. As World War I unfolded, a series of atrocities, including three genocides, were committed against civilian enemies outside and inside the warring nation states. “These murderous racial passions had largely run their course by the early 1920s,” says Brose, “although they had not been thoroughly eradicated, as the Fascist and Nazi tragedies demonstrated.”
“Because much of what I write and lecture about involves social upheaval, political revolution, and military Armageddon, students and readers will quickly learn that complacency about our own present and future is not an option,” he has written. “Leaders of the European Union today remain sensitive to the nightmare scenario of Europe sliding back downhill to the days of racial carnage.”
Brose, who earned a Ph.D. from Ohio State University, has written eight books on European history, including A History of the Great War: World War One and the International Crisis of the Early Twentieth Century. (Oxford University Press, 2009).
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