History of Modern Europe

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

'This course will study the History of Europe during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, a period known as 'Modern Europe', (as opposed to 'Contemporary Europe', which covers the late twentieth century up to the present day). Modern Europe differs from other periods in that the people who lived through it were conscious of their own modernity, and frequently commented on it and interrogated what it meant to live in a society where so much was changing so quickly. We will begin the course with the Europe that emerged in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and the first wave of industrialization, and the rest of what historians call the 'long nineteenth century' that lasted until 1914. Topics will include the rise of mass culture and consumer society; the social changes that led to the modern labor movement and the rise of Marxism; the intellectual and artistic reactions to modernity; colonization and its impacts on Europe and on Europeans' self-understanding. From there, we will go to the 'short twentieth century', the period from 1914 to 1991, and study the major traumas of the first half of the century, including WWI, the Russian Revolution, the rise of totalitarianism, World War II, and the Holocaust, before finishing with the cold war and the relative prosperity of Western Europe during the following decades. As the final phase of the course will cover a period of history which the students will consider to be distant history like the rest of the course, but which the professor remembers living through, it is at this point that he will be begin to feel very, very old.