While recognising the shadows cast by two world wars (one concluded and one imminent) over European society during the 1920s and 1930s, this free course, Roaring Twenties? Europe in the interwar period, demonstrates how a number of specific features indicate that the interwar period was a distinctive and important moment of modernity in the twentieth century, from the rise of the metropolis and the emergence of new forms of mass media, to the changing lifestyles of women and the increasingly interventionist approaches to managing the health and welfare of modern populations.

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• understand ‘modernisation’, ‘modernity’ and ‘modernism’ and how they relate to each other
• understand modernity in interwar Europe
• understand the main historical debates about society and culture in interwar Europe, in particular a sense of the patterns of change and continuity, and the extent to which any change can be attributed to the First World War
• interpret visual sources, use data in tables to construct arguments, and summarise historiographical review articles.