Monthly Programs

A presentation by Bert Gordon

Tourism is generally considered a leisure activity undertaken by vacationers during peacetime, and the majority of those served by the modern tourist industry are, indeed, peacetime travelers. War tourism, however, is one of the fastest growing sectors of today's tourism industry, with the Geneva Academy of International Law and Human Rights monitoring more than 110 armed conflicts in 2024. Perhaps most common are visits to scenes of past battles that have become heritage sites, such as Gettysburg and Normandy. The links between tourism and war, however, include watching war. Some join the military to “see the world.” There are visitors to sites of past battles, going as far back as Romans who were inspired by Homer's Iliad and went to visit Troy. Some even want to watch battles as they occur, usually through online tourism such as following the war in Ukraine in what has been called the “World's First TikTok War.” But others want to get close to the action; in 2022, Business Insider, a travel company, invited tourists to visit Ukraine to “see what it's like to live in the middle of a war zone.”

Bert's presentation focuses on the linkages between tourism and war throughout history.

Bert Gordon is Professor Emeritus of History at Mills College. His books include Collaborationism in France during the Second World War (1980), for which he interviewed French wartime collaborators with Nazi Germany including former members of the Vichy government. His Historical Dictionary of World War II France: The Occupation, Vichy and the Resistance, 1938-1946 was published in 1998. He has also written on culinary history, co-editing “Food and France: What Food Studies Can Teach Us about History,” a special issue of French Historical Studies (April 2015), and on the history of chocolate in France, England, and California. His latest book, War Tourism: Second World War France from Defeat and Occupation to the Creation of Heritage, was published by Cornell University Press in 2018. Recent lecture topics include the history of the links between war and tourism in general, about which he is writing a book, and the history of French wine. Gordon is a core member of the Tourism Studies Working Group at the University of California, Berkeley. He may be contacted at: bmgordon@berkeley.edu