HI 6540 - Topics in European History

Credits: 3

Description This course will concentrate on critical continuities, trends, and events in European history, with particular emphasis on historiographical interpretations and controversies from the Classical world to the 20th century. The initial sections of the course focus on the consolidation of European society and its structures underlying the “longue durée” from the tenth through the eighteenth centuries: the central Middles Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, Voyages of Exploration, and the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment. The course ends with Europe’s transformation during the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries: the Democratic and Industrial Revolutions, Modernism, Imperialism and the two World Wars, the rise and decline of Communism and Fascism. Most units focus on central issues historians have identified and the varying interpretations they have offered, with the goal of both consolidating students’ grasp of the subject matter and introducing them to the constructed and contested nature of historical knowledge.