Published by: Anonymous on 19 July 2016 | Views: 825
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They lived during the years 1715 to 1914, and they include:
Augustus the Strong—his gargantuan appetites nearly exhausted his royal treasury Charles Darwin—a disinterested theology student whose real obsession was to explain things Sir Robert Walpole—an extraordinary politician with an even greater mastery of corruption David Lloyd George—his incomparable political strengths were put to a radically different purpose Mary Wollstonecraft—her groundbreaking manifestos launched feminism but offered little protection from the irony of her own biological destiny Captain Alfred Dreyfus—he was condemned to Devil's Island in a notorious miscarriage of justice that foreshadowed the Holocaust Napoleon Bonaparte—his conquests and administrative genius turned the French Revolution from chaos and disorder to stability and permanence.
What do these people have in common? And what links them to such similarly disparate figures as Marx and Engels, Marie Antoinette, Edmund Burke, C.P.E. Bach, Metternich, Pope Pius IX, Nathan Rothschild, or Louis Pasteur?
They are all major players in the grand drama of history, whether ruler or statesman, artist or philosopher, general, scientist, or leader of a faith. And each plays a role in this course—a deft mix of history and biography—as a way to understand this history.
A Dramatic Classroom Approach
Professor Jonathan Steinberg makes clear at the outset that this approach is different from anything he has seen in almost 40 years in the classroom.
This course:
Focuses on 35 people whose lives represent the crucial forces that shaped European history during two decisive centuries Examines the transformation of Europe from a world of "lord and serf, horse and carriage, superstition and disease" into today's modern state of "boss and worker, steam and steel, science and medicine."
A March through Living European History
In this innovative course you hear Professor Steinberg's extensive use of carefully chosen quotes from the people themselves and from several biographical sources. This attention to detail also includes musical excerpts when he discusses composers Bach and Wagner.
As you grow to understand the living context of European history, you appreciate the great transforming themes embodied by the people who populate this fascinating march.
The two most important themes are the movement toward democracy—culminating in the French Revolution—that dominated the first of the two centuries covered, and the Industrial Revolution with the explosion of science and technology that dominated the second.
