Europe and Western Civilization in the Modern Age

TTC - Europe and Western Civilization in the Modern Age
48 lectures of 30 minutes - 557Mb - MP3
Taught by Thomas Childers

Three lifetimes ago, Europe was a farming society ruled by families of monarchs.

Modern European history began with two seismic tremors—capitalism and democracy—that shattered Europe's foundations:
* In the decades after 1750, the Industrial Revolution in England thrust aside the old economic order and introduced modern industrial capitalism.
* The French Revolution of 1789–99 swept away the Ancien Regime in France and threatened entrenched elites everywhere in Europe.

Consider the events that followed:
* In the span of one life, England became an industrial, urban culture; tens of thousands were guillotined in France; Napoleon's Empire—the greatest since Rome—rose and fell; and revolution swept the capitals of Europe.
* In one more lifetime, the Russian serfs were freed; Italy and Germany were created from a loose collection of city-states; European powers divided and conquered Africa; Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein published world-shaking ideas; and millions died in a Great War.
* And in a third lifetime, the world plunged into economic depression, global war, and genocide; Europe abandoned its African colonies; the Soviet Union rose and fell; Fascism and Communism challenged democracy; democracy became the dominant form of government; and the same powers that had bled each other for hundreds of years created a Common Market and unified currency.

With Professor Thomas Childers, the history of Europe from the 1750s to the present becomes as immediate to you as today's headlines. Professor Childers makes this parade of events, horrible and magnificent, comprehensible and even predictable, as he employs the historian's craft and a storyteller's skill to find the causes of what otherwise might seem a march of folly.

Course Lecture Titles
1. Introduction—Europe in the "Modern Age"
2. Social and Political Life Under the Ancien Regime
3. Intellectual and Cultural Life—The Challenge of the Enlightenment
4. The Origins of the French Revolution
5. The Outbreak of the Revolution and the Monarchist Response
6. The Terror and Its Aftermath
7. The Rise of Napoleon—Heir of the Revolution or New Form of Tyranny?
8. Napoleonic Europe—An Epoch of War
9. The Restoration and Reactionary Conservatism
10. The Challenge of Liberal Nationalism
11. Liberal Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution—The English Experience
12. The Social Impact of the Industrial Revolution
13. The Revolution in France
14. Revolution in Central Europe
15. The Political Implications of the Revolution
16. The Unification of Germany
17. The Unification of Italy
18. The New Imperialism
19. Race, Religion, and Greed—Explaining European Expansion
20. Marx and the Challenge of Socialism
21. The Social Problem and the Crisis of Liberalism
22. A New Conservatism—Anti-Modernism and the Origins of Fascism
23. European Cultural and Intellectual Life
24. Social Norms, Social Strains in the Belle Epoque
25. The International System, 1871–1890
26. The Breakdown of the International System and the Slide Toward War
27. Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Central and Eastern Europe
28. The July Crisis and the Outbreak of War
29. The War to End All Wars—The Experience of the Trenches
30. The Treaty of Versailles and the Failed Peace
31. The Bolshevik Revolution
32. Civil War and the Establishment of the Soviet State
33. The Soviet System Under Stalin
34. Mussolini and the Emergence of Italian Fascism
35. The Democracies in Crisis
36. Hitler and the Rise of Nazism in Germany
37. Totalitarianism—The Third Reich
38. The Third Reich—Ideology and Domestic Policy
39. Ideology and Hitler's Foreign Policy
40. The Twenty-Year Crisis—The International System, 1919–1939
41. The Coming of War, 1939
42. The Blitzkrieg, 1940–1941
43. The Holocaust
44. The World at War
45. The Origins of the Cold War
46. The Division of Europe
47. The Collapse of Communism
48. Conclusion—Europe on the Eve of the 21st Century