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LECTURE: An Age of Destruction: World War I One Hundred Years Later
February 20, 2014 @ 7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
If World War I was a European war over the future of the world, the futures of the world that emerged from the age of destruction were unlike anything the belligerents, high and low, had expected. How could this happen? An answer to this question hinges on understanding the peculiar “totalizing” energy of the war, which was unleashed in 1914 and crashed through legal, political and “civilizational” hedges that had meant to contain violence – away from bourgeois society and beyond the European world. It also depends on making sense of an age of destruction – a yet more deadly war, a forty-year war-in-sight confrontation in Europe and the violent ends of empire – that emerged from World War I.
The lecture will be led by Michael E. Geyer, Samuel N. Harper Professor of German and European History and faculty director of the Human Rights Program at the University of Chicago. This event is free and open to the public.
Co-Conveners and Sponsors: Duke Department of History, Duke Center for European Studies, UNC-CH Center for European Studies, UNC-CH Center for Global Initiatives, UNC-CH Department of History, UNC-CH Institute for Arts and Humanities, the German Historical Institute of Washington D.C., and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies.