Third Year Hon. Mention: In Time We Hate That Which We Often Fear

HIST 3843, Occupation, Collaboration and Death: A Social and Military History of the Second World War to 1944. CD: Deb Neill.

Abstract

This paper is an exceptional instance of a specialized genre: the literature review. The author has selected three books concerning a single topic—in this instance studies of the people who conducted the Holocaust—comparing and contrasting the books’ methods, sources, modes of argument, and conclusions. The genre requires meticulous reading, a keen understanding of method, an aptitude for concise summary, an acute sense of telling detail, a scrupulous fairness to positions the writer does not share, and a capacity to make and express sound and persuasive judgments. That is all to say that the literature review presents many challenges—challenges made the greater by the fact that one of the books under review is deeply, even notoriously flawed. This paper meets them all, doing justice to the works under review and making its own persuasive case for its relative valuations. (It’s worth noting that the paper features one of the most effective self-situating footnotes the readers have seen.)