24-Lecture Course: European Civilization, 1648-1945

October 11, 2010 · 0 comments

GD Star Rating
a WordPress rating system

This course spans European history from the end of the Thirty Years’ War to the aftermath of World War II. It examines the experiences of ordinary people during these times, as well as to events and figures like the French Revolution and Napoleon. The course also looks at demographic change, political revolution, and cultural development through lecture and works of art, literature, and cinema.

John Merriman is a Professor of History at Yale University, where this course was recorded. His publications include The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848-1851, A History of Modern Europe Since the Renaissance, and Police Stories: Making the French State, 1815-1851.

1. Introduction (#1)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) The course will concern European history from 1648 to 1945. The assigned readings include both standard historical texts and works of fiction, as well as films. Although the period in question encompasses many monumental events and "great men," attention will also be paid to the development of themes over the long term and the experiences of people and groups often excluded from official histories. Among the principle questions to be addressed are the...

2. Absolutism and the State (#2)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) The rise of absolutism in Europe must be understood in the context of insecurity attending the religious wars of the first half of the seventeenth century, and the Thirty Years' War in particular. Faced with the unprecedented brutality and devastation of these conflicts, European nobles and landowners were increasingly willing to surrender their independence to the authority of a single, all-powerful monarch in return for guaranteed protection. Among ...

3. Dutch and British Exceptionalism (#3)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) Several reasons can be found to explain why Great Britain and the Netherlands did not follow the other major European powers of the seventeenth century in adopting absolutist rule. Chief among these were the presence of a relatively large middle class, with a vested interest in preserving independence from centralized authority, and national traditions of resistance dating from the English Civil War and the Dutch war for independence from Spain, respe...

4. Peter the Great (#4)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) Peter the Great's historical significance stems not only from his military ambitions and the great expansion of the Russian Empire under his supervision, but also from his efforts to introduce secular, Western customs and ideas into Russian culture. Despite his notorious personal brutality, Peter's enthusiasm for science and modern intellectual concerns made an indelible mark both on Russia's relationship to the West and on its internal politics. The ...

5. The Enlightenment and the Public Sphere (#5)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) While the major philosophical projects of the Enlightenment are associated with the names of individual thinkers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire, the cultural transformation in France in the years leading up to the Revolution should also be understood in the context of the public sphere and popular press. Alongside such luminaries as those associated with Diderot's Encyclopédie were a host of lesser pamphleteers and libellists eager for f...

6. Maximilien Robespierre and the French Revolution (#6)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) Robespierre's ascetic personal life and severe philosophy of political engagement are attributed by some to his difficult childhood. As a revolutionary, one of his most significant insights was that the Revolution was threatened not only by France's military adversaries abroad, but also by domestic counter-revolutionaries. Under this latter heading were gathered two major groups, urban mercantilists and rural peasants. Relative strength of religious c...

7. Napoleon (#7)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) One way of understanding Napoleon's life is through attention to his Corsican origins. Although Napoleon himself would later disavow his earlier identification with the island in favor of French identity, many of his actions and attitudes agree with stereotypical notions of Corsican culture. Did Napoleon inaugurate the era of total war? This question, posed in a recent book, is up for debate. On one hand, the violence of the Revolution and the Napoleo...

8. Industrial Revolutions (#8)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) The Industrial Revolution was for a long time treated as a decisive break in which some countries, specifically England, innovated and progressed rapidly while others were left behind. This type of analysis lead many historians to overlook the more gradual process of industrialization in countries like France, and the persistence of older methods of artisanal production alongside new forms of mechanization. To understand the Industrial Revolution it i...

9. Middle Classes (#9)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) The nineteenth century in Europe is, in many ways, synonymous with the rise of the bourgeoisie. It is misleading, however, to consider this newly dominant middle class as a homogenous group; rather, the century may be more accurately described in terms of the rise of plural middle classes. While the classes comprising this group were united by their search for power based on property rights rather than hereditary privilege, they were otherwise strikin...

10. Popular Protest (#10)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) Collective violence, in the form of popular protest, was one of the principal ways in which people resisted the expansion of capitalism and the state throughout the nineteenth century. The nature of this protest can be charted through three different, but related examples: grain riots across Europe in the first half of the century, the mythical figure of Captain Swing in England, and the Demoiselles of the Ariège in France. While these movements were...

11. Why no Revolution in 1848 in Britain (#11)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) Revolutions occur when a critical mass of people come together to make specific demands upon their government. They invariably involve an increase in popular involvement in the political process. One of the central questions concerning 1848, a year in which almost every major European nation faced a revolutionary upsurge, is why England did not have its own revolution despite the existence of social tensions. Two principal reasons account for this fac...

12. Nineteenth-Century Cities (#12)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented degree of urbanization, an increase in urban population growth relative to population growth generally. One of the chief consequences of this growth was class segregation, as the bourgeoisie and upper classes were forced to inhabit the same confined space as workers. Significantly, this had opposed effects in Europe, where the working classes typically inhabit the periphery of cities, and the United St...

13. Nationalism (#13)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) In light of the many ethnic and national conflicts of the twentieth century, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 appears less surprising than the fact that it remained intact for so long. National identity is not an essential characteristic of peoples, and in many cases in Europe it is a relatively recent invention. As such, there are many different characteristics according to which national communities can be defined, or, in Bened...

14. Radicals (#14)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) Socialism in the nineteenth century can be divided into two different strains of thought, reformist and revolutionary. While reformist socialists believed in changing the State through legal activity, such as voting, revolutionary socialists viewed such measures as ineffective and perhaps even complicit in maintaining the status quo. Along the spectrum of leftwing political thought, syndicalists and anarchists shared the conviction that the State coul...

15. Imperialists and Boy Scouts (#15)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) The boom in European colonial expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, the so-called New Imperialism, can be seen to follow from three principle factors, in ascending order of importance: religious proselytizing, profit, and inter-imperial political strategy. With respect to the latter concern, the conflicts emerging from imperialism set the stage for World War I. Along with its military and industrial consequences, imperialism also ent...

16. The Coming of the Great War (#16)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) If the early years of the twentieth century were marked by a general consensus that a major war was impending, no similar consensus existed concerning the likely form that war would take. Not only the carnage of World War I, but also the nature of its alliances would have been difficult to imagine. Indeed, in 1900 many people would have predicted conflict, rather than collaboration, between France and Britain. The reasons for the eventual entente betw...

17. War in the Trenches (#17)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) With the failure of Germany's offensive strategy, WWI became a war of defense, in which trenches played a major role. The use of trenches and barbed wire, coupled with the deployment of new, more deadly forms of artillery, created extremely bloody stalemate situations. The hopelessness of this arrangement resulted in a number of mutinies on the French side, motivated neither by defeatism nor by ideology, but rather by the sheer horror of trench warfar...

18. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Guest Lecture by Jay Winters) (#18)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) As a result of World War I, Europe had a different understanding of war in the twentieth century than the United States. One of the most important ways in which the First World War was experienced on the continent and in Britain was through commemoration. By means of both mass-media technologies and older memorial forms, sites of memory offered opportunities for personal as well as political reconciliation with the unprecedented consequences of the wa...

19. The Romanovs and the Russian Revolution (#19)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) The period between the Russian Revolution of February 1917, which resulted in the overthrow of the autocracy and the establishment of a provisional government, and the Bolshevik Revolution in October of that same year, offers an instructive example of revolutionary processes at work. During this interval, the fate of Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, was bound up in the struggle for power amongst competing political factions in Russia. Until his de...

20. Successor States of Eastern Europe (#20)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) Contrary to the "Great Illusion" that the end of World War I heralded a new era of peace, the interwar period can be considered to form part of a Thirty Years' War, spanning the period from 1914 to 1945. In the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, Europe was divided both literally and figuratively, with the so-called revisionist powers frustrated over their new borders. One of the most significant and ultimately most pernicious debates at Versailles conc...

21. Stalinism (#21)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) One of the central questions in assessing Stalinism is whether or not the abuses of the latter were already present in the first years of the Russian Revolution. The archival evidence suggests that this is partly the case, and that even in its early stages Soviet Russia actively persecuted not just those who were believed to have profited unfairly, without laboring, but also non-Russian ethnic groups. Stalin, although not an ethnic Russian himself, wa...

22. Fascists (#22)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) While Nazi Germany's crimes were unprecedented, Adolf Hitler himself was in many respects a typical figure. An idle youth, of seemingly mediocre talents, his political career and passionate hatreds were formed by the experience of World War I. The rise of fascism in Germany, as elsewhere, must be understood in the context of a postwar climate of resentment and instability. Germany's economic crisis, in particular, led the middle classes to support Nat...

23. Collaboration and Resistance in World War II (#23)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) One of the principal myths concerning collaboration during World War II in France, as in other countries, is that the domestic collaborators did so despite themselves, or to prevent even greater atrocities. In fact, many French, Belgians, Hungarians, Poles, Dutch and others voluntarily and enthusiastically abetted the occupying Germans. This collaboration, inspired by anti-Semitism and xenophobia, often resulted in extremely zealous persecution of Jew...

24. The Collapse of Communism and Global Challenges (#24)

- European Civilization, 1648-1945 (HIST 202) The disintegration of the Soviet Union resulted from a number of different factors. Three important ones are nationalism among Soviet satellite states, democratic opposition movements, and economic crisis. Along with these elements, the role of Mikhail Gorbachev should not be discounted. Although his attempt to reform communism was rejected, his reformist positions as Soviet premier helped open the way for full-fledged political dissidence. One of the...

Share with friends:

Keep up with new videos daily through RSS or Email

Previous post: How to Live to be 100+

Next post: Shh! Sound health in 8 steps

24-Lecture Course: European Civilization, 1648-1945

1. Introduction (#1)

2. Absolutism and the State (#2)

3. Dutch and British Exceptionalism (#3)

4. Peter the Great (#4)

5. The Enlightenment and the Public Sphere (#5)

6. Maximilien Robespierre and the French Revolution (#6)

7. Napoleon (#7)

8. Industrial Revolutions (#8)

9. Middle Classes (#9)

10. Popular Protest (#10)

11. Why no Revolution in 1848 in Britain (#11)

12. Nineteenth-Century Cities (#12)

13. Nationalism (#13)

14. Radicals (#14)

15. Imperialists and Boy Scouts (#15)

16. The Coming of the Great War (#16)

17. War in the Trenches (#17)

18. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Guest Lecture by Jay Winters) (#18)

19. The Romanovs and the Russian Revolution (#19)

20. Successor States of Eastern Europe (#20)

21. Stalinism (#21)

22. Fascists (#22)

23. Collaboration and Resistance in World War II (#23)

24. The Collapse of Communism and Global Challenges (#24)

Free Online College Courses and Lectures

Random

Instructor

Location

Length

Subjects

Search

Follow

Recent Full Courses

Online Education News

Company

Meta

Copyright

Thanks To