Outline
HIST 353 is divided into fourteen units, each of which examines a specific topic of the Holocaust:
Unit 1: Definition of Genocide—Situating the Holocaust in the Colonial Context
Unit 2: From the “German Catechism” Debate to the Holocaust and Nakba
Unit 3: Victims of a Racial State—from Imperial Germany to the Third Reich
Unit 4: Antisemitism—Origins, Paradigms, and Problems of Definitions
Unit 5: Jewish Victims’ Agency within the Power Structure of the Nazi Regime—Intersectional Approach
Unit 6: State Destruction and Double Occupation—Structural Factors behind the Genocide
Unit 7: Colonization, Resettlement, and Expulsion—Nazis as Demographers
Unit 8: Ghettoization and the Failure of Nazi Resettlement Policies
Unit 9: Nazi-Soviet War—Radicalization and the Final Solution
Unit 10: From Auschwitz to Lety—Dehumanization and Desexualization in L’Univers Concentrationnaire
Unit 11: Taboo and Agency—Sexuality, Sexual Violence, and Sexual Barter
Unit 12: Perpetrators—Ordinary Men or Willing Executioners?
Unit 13: Collaboration and Collaborationism in History and Memory
Unit 14: The Holocaust in the Twenty-First Century—Anxious Histories, Multidirectional Memory, and Settler Colonial Forgetting
Learning outcomes
After completing HIST 353, you should be able to
- situate the Holocaust in a broader historical and global context;
- acquire critical understanding of human agency, causation and complexity, and change and continuity of the targeted historical era;
- investigate the ways in which knowledge about the Holocaust is created, deployed, enforced, and reinforced, as well as how it is resisted;
- employ and contextualize a wide variety of Holocaust-related historical sources to make sense of complex, richly textured, diverse, and sometimes disparate materials and to identify biases, ambiguities, and uncertainties in primary and secondary historical sources;
- conduct research on the Holocaust that is accurate, critically analytical, comprehensible, and thorough; and
- communicate research results cogently, clearly, and logically in written form that corresponds to professional standards of doing history.
Evaluation
To
receive credit for HIST 353, you must complete all reflection assignments and essay assignments and participate in discussions. You must achieve a minimum grade of D (50 percent) on both essay assignments and an overall grade of
D (50 percent) for the entire course to pass. All work must be submitted or completed by the end of your course contract date.
| Activity | Weight |
| Reflection A | 10% |
| Reflection B | 15% |
| Historiographical Essay 1 | 25% |
| Historiographical Essay 2 | 25% |
| Reflection C | 10% |
| Discussions | 15% |
| Total | 100% |
To learn more about assignments and examinations, please refer to Athabasca University’s online Calendar.
Materials
Physical course materials
The following course materials are included in a course package that will be shipped to your home prior to your course’s start date:
Browning, Christopher R. Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.
Snyder, Timothy. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2015.
Other Materials
All other materials are available online.