What History Teaches: The Rule of Law and the Erosion of Democracy
About the Event
Historians have long debated whether the collapse of the Weimar Republic was inevitable or the result of actions taken by Germany’s political elites. This session will focus on the circumstances that surrounded the birth of Weimar democracy at the end of World War I. It will also examine how Germany’s experiment in democracy was affected by the course of German economic development in the 1920s and 1930s. Lastly, it will explore the opportunities this afforded the Republic’s enemies, with particular emphasis on the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in what proved to be a successful crusade against Weimar democracy.
About the Speakers
Larry Eugene Jones
Larry Eugene Jones is Emeritus Professor of History at Canisius University in Buffalo, New York. Dr. Jones earned a BA in History and Philosophy (1961) and a Master’s degree in History (1963) at the University of Kansas before graduating with a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1970. He joined the history faculty at what was then Canisius College in the fall of 1968, where he continued to teach until his retirement from full-time teaching at the end of 2017. Dr. Jones has taught specialized courses on the history and literature of the Holocaust and attended summer institutes on the Holocaust at the Holocaust Education Foundation at Northwestern University and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.
As a scholar Dr. Jones has specialized in the history of the Weimar Republic. His book German Liberalism and the Dissolution of the Weimar Party System, 1918-1933 was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1988. He has since published two monographs with Cambridge University Press in the field of Weimar political history, Hitler versus Hindenburg: The 1932 Presidential Elections and the End of the Weimar Republic (2016) and The German Right: Political Parties: Organized Interests, and Patriotic Associations in the Struggle against Weimar Democracy (2020).
Dean Pavlakis
Dean Pavlakis is Emeritus Professor of History at Carroll College in Helena, Montana. Dr. Pavlakis earned a BA in History and Economics from Harvard College and Master’s degrees from Yale University and the State University of New York at Buffalo (UB) before graduating from UB with a PhD in Modern European History. He has taught history courses for UB and for Canisius College. In addition, he completed the intensive Summer Institute on the Holocaust, run by the Holocaust Education Foundation of Northwestern University.
Dr. Pavlakis has published in the fields of humanitarianism, colonial studies, and genocide studies. He has taught a number of courses with relevance to today’s topic, including The History of the Holocaust, Understanding the Psychology and History of the Holocaust, Interwar Europe, The Second World War, Twentieth-Century Europe, Modern German History, and a course entitled Strange Times: the historical background to current events, where a third of the course was devoted to the subject of “How Democracies Die.”