The United States and the Second World War

HIST 427 is a research seminar that treats America's road into and through WWII as a problem in interpretation rather than a settled narrative — why a country committed to isolationism became the decisive Allied power, and how that transformation reshaped its strategy, society, and self-image. You'll work through weekly readings on intervention, grand strategy, Allied diplomacy, and the home front, then produce a term essay built from a paper proposal and defended in a verbal presentation, with a take-home final at the end. It sits at the upper-division end of the History track, so the payoff is less about memorizing battles than about learning to locate sources, weigh competing arguments, and write history yourself.