The Habsburg Empire, 1848-1918

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Catholic Great Power. Medieval Holdover. Sick Man on the Danube. Prison of the Peoples. Laboratory of the Apocalypse. The Habsburg Empire has been called many things, but I bet you never have heard of it. But I bet you have heard about the Austrian Archduke, Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination sparked the outbreak of the First World War; or maybe your parents made you listen to Mozart as a child in the hopes that you'd be brilliant. What you probably don't know, because historians have generally forgotten it, is that the Habsburg Monarchy stood at the center of Europe and European politics and culture for nearly four hundred years. Germans, Croatians, Slovenes, Poles, Jews, Czechs, Slovaks, Serbs, Bosnians, Romanians, Italians, Ukrainians and (last but not least) Hungarians all played a role in the longevity and vibrancy of this multinational Empire. In this course, we will explore the history of this great continental empire from its modern origins during the reign of Maria Theresia (1740-1780) to its collapse and dismemberment in the First World War. In the process we will learn much about the history of Europe itself and about what becomes common knowledge and what does not. Our topics will include Enlightened Absolutism, the French Revolution, Liberalism, German Unification, Music and Culture, modernity, economic development, Jewish emancipation and identity, and finally the First World War.