Skip to Main Content

War: History, Ethics, Psychology, & Technology: Home

War

This guide includes resources on the history and ethics of war, as well as information on specific topics. Links to research guides on major wars are included.  We encourage you to visit the specific war guide for information related to various sub-topics related to that conflict and time period.  This is an ongoing project. As such, additional content will be added throughout the semester.

Journals

Archives

War & Human Nature:

 

In which John Green teaches you about war! Specifically, John talks about whether humanity is naturally warlike, hard-wired to kill, or if perhaps war is a cultural construct. John will talk about the Hobbes versus Rousseau debate, the effects that war has on human social orders, and the effects that war has on individuals. So is war human nature? Watch and find out what we have to say about it.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NIgqS47m5k

Perspectives

Blood Rites

An ALA Notable Book A New York Times Notable Book InBlood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the mystery of the human attraction to violence: What draws our species to war and even makes us see it as a kind of sacred undertaking? Blood Rites takes us on an original journey from the elaborate human sacrifices of the ancient world to the carnage and holocaust of twentieth-century "total war." Sifting through the fragile records of prehistory, Ehrenreich discovers the wellspring of war in an unexpected place--not in a "killer instinct" unique to the malesof our species but in the blood rites early humans performed to reenact their terrifying experience of predation by stronger carnivores. Brilliant in conception, rich in scope, Blood Rites is a monumental work that will transform our understanding of the greatest single threat to human life.

War Machine

This book examines Western perceptions of war in and beyond the 19th-century, surveying the writings of novelists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, poets, natural scientists, journalists and soldiers to trace the origins of modern philosophies about the nature of war and conflict.

War and Civilization: Crash Course World History 205

 

In which John Green investigates war, and what exactly it may or may not be good for. Was war a result of human beings organizing into larger and more complex agricultural social orders, or did war maybe create agriculture and "civilization?" It's hard to know for sure, but it's sure fun to think about.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jdVLAG_ptQM