This course is designed to cover the topic of total war in the modern era as it applies to Europe (though we will occasionally discuss developments in the US as well). We will first look at what constitutes total war. We will then begin by tracing military developments since the age of industrialization and see how those developments impacted and the conduct of modern warfare. We will juxtapose these events against political developments and apply a theoretical framework to better understand these developments in the modern era. We will spend most of the semester studying WWI, the interwar period, WWII, and the Cold War to analyze how the concept of total war applied to each of those eras.