History of European Civilization II

Undergraduate / Graduate

The second part of the sequence examines the period from approximately 1700 to the present in European history. Major topics include the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, industrialization, the world wars, and the European Union. This course challenges students to do more than simply define conceptual terms like imperialism, nationalism, liberalism, capitalism, and communism. We situate these and other grand narratives in new ideas of progress, new technologies and forms of knowledge production, and the material transformations of everyday life. Changes in media (newspapers, radio, films, etc.) and the rise of mass production and consumption in these centuries were both the cause and effect of many of the events we will be discussing. Sources include nineteenth-century novels, eyewitness accounts to revolution and the Holocaust, and speeches and manifestos of the political and cultural avant-garde. Throughout the course, we will continuously examine the paradoxes that have shaped modern Europe: its resilience and fragility, its great experiments in liberty and tragic acts of violence.