Eighty years since the end of WWII, and the older I get the more I realize how little I understand about how it started.
@davoh I suppose that question also depends on where you view the events from. Many might be thinking of Japan’s war in Manchuria and then against all of China. Poles from the east of that country’s old borders as well as Lithuanians, Latvians, and Estonians might be thinking about the Soviet Union’s invasion. There was also the USSR’s war against Finland. Then there’s the war in Europe, followed a couple years later by Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Your question could also be about the U.S. and its understanding of its role in the world. being a bit confused should be considered normal. An excellent, if somewhat older survey of the whole war is Gerhard Weinberg’s widely circulated A World at Arms: A Global History of World War II (Cambridge UP, 1994).
@markstoneman thanks for the book recommendation! I was finding that no matter what I pointed to as a cause, it too had causes. A very long sequence of events, a web of relations, going back, back, back into history.
@davoh That’s how history works. When teaching historical thinking in survey classes, I’ve drawn a small circle for a big event. Then I draw a bunch of squiggly lines that come from different parts of the board left of my circle, then pass through the circle, and then leave the circle as more tangled curvy lines going in other directions to the right. The simple point: don’t trust monocausal explanations. I often found a now retired theologian’s list useful too: “A Sense of History: Some Components” by Gerald W. Schlabach, www.geraldschlabach.net/resources…
@markstoneman @davoh But I’d also caution against approaches that try to go too far back in history. Marc Bloch, in The Historian’s Craft, cautioned against fetishizing origins. His old book (early 1940s, translated early 1950s) is as relevant as ever.
