Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

A survey of European history emphasizing the French Revolution, and Napoleonic Europe and first Industrial Revolution, liberalism and its opponents, agrarian conservatism, liberalism and conservatism, the Revolutions of 1848, the struggles for political unification, the second Industrial Revolution and the origins of the First World War. Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

The Long Nineteenth Century in Europe

Historian Eric Hobsbawm began Europe’s “long nineteenth century” with the French Revolution in 1789 and ended it with the outbreak of war in 1914. This century in Europe gave rise to such rapid, radical change that it ultimately determined the course of world events throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This course offers a closer examination of these changes in seeking to answer the following questions: How did the nineteenth century contribute to the formation of our contemporary world, in Europe and beyond? What is its most enduring legacy in the twenty-first century?

Among the many figures and topics this introductory course will cover are: Napoleon, Metternich, Bismarck; Karl Marx, Daniel O’Connell, Theodore Herzl; Mary Shelley, Émile Zola, Alfred Dreyfus; the French Revolution, the 1848 revolutions, the industrial revolutions; the birth of modern nationalism, the unifications of Italy and Germany, the decline of the Russian and Habsburg empires; the growth of socialism, communism, and racism; the competition for overseas colonies via imperialist conquest; advances and shifts in culture (science, technology, urban planning, literature, music, the visual arts); the political entanglements that led to war in 1914.

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Materials

REQUIRED READING: