TTC Video – Europe and Western Civilization in the Modern Age

Consider the events explored, explained, and connected by this course. Three lifetimes ago, Europe was a farming society ruled by families of monarchs:

In one life, England became an industrial power; thousands were guillotined in France; Napoleon’s Empire rose and fell; and revolution swept Europe.
In one more lifetime, Italy and Germany were created from a collection of city-states; European powers conquered Africa; 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; 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.

The Ancien Regime, Revolution, and the Reaction to Napoleon

The course begins with Europe on the eve of the French Revolution. We consider the social order, the various forms of monarchy, and how the ideas of the Enlightenment, emphasizing reason and attacking tradition, threatened absolutist monarchy.

We evaluate the principles of the revolution embodied in the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen,” the Terror of 1793, and the revolution’s achievements. We turn to Napoleon Bonaparte, who pushed aside the republican government and declared himself emperor of the French.

Europe’s monarchs unanimously viewed Napoleon and his empire as a challenge to the balance of power and to monarchy. We study the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and the work of the Congress of Vienna, where the conservative powers restored the old order at home and re-established a balance of power abroad.

The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution produced social and economic changes as great as the French Revolution. Between roughly 1750 and 1850, Britain was transformed from a largely agrarian and commercial society into a dynamic industrial one.

We untangle the different factors that made Britain the first industrial nation. We study how free-market, laissez-faire ideas underpinned emerging liberal capitalism, and we assess the impact of industrialization, especially on the working class it created.

The Revolutions of 1848, the Unification of Italy and Germany, and Conservative Restoration

The revolutions of 1848 were the first European-wide revolution of the modern age. The revolution in France was driven by a liberal agenda to create a more representative government.

The issues in Central Europe were complicated by nationalism. Liberal revolutionaries wanted to overthrow the governments of the various German states and simultaneously to create a united Germany.

Conservatives learned from the events of 1848 how to modernize conservatism for the last half of the 19th century.

Those lessons are demonstrated in the unification of Italy and Germany. We study the shrewd Otto von Bismarck, and the unification of Italy initiated under Cavour.

The “Grab for Africa” and the Advent of Mass Politics

Between 1871 and 1900, Europe colonized Africa. We study the racial, religious, and financial motivations behind this sudden burst of European imperialism.

Especially after 1890, Socialism challenged both liberal and conservative politics. We examine Marxist thought, working-class organization into labor unions, and political parties.

One conservative solution to the spread of Socialism was to tap the discontent among farmers and shopkeepers which often expressed itself in antiurbanism, antimaterialism, and anti-Semitism. During the 1890s these ideas evolved into Fascism.

European Society: Triumphant on the Eve of War

From 1890 to 1914, European education, culture, technology, and military might were viewed as supreme. At the same time, serious strains emerged in European culture, creating uncertainty and even dread. It was the age of Nietzsche and Freud, of strict conformity, repressed sexuality, and mounting class conflict.

We probe the causes of the First World War in the collapse of the Bismarckian international system of 1871–90, and in ethnic problems in the Ottoman and Habsburg monarchies.

Three lectures examine the war itself, its outbreak in the summer of 1914, the brutal realities of trench warfare, and the ill-starred Treaty of Versailles in 1919.

The Legacy of the War: The Soviet Union and Fascism

The Russian Revolution in 1917 was a product of the Great War. We analyze the causes of the revolution and the roles of the Bolsheviks and their leader, Lenin. We trace the outcome of the revolution, the bloody civil war that followed, the establishment of the Soviet state under Lenin, and the competition between Stalin and Trotsky to succeed Lenin.

European Fascism also followed the Great War, first appearing in Italy in Mussolini’s Fascist Party.

We chart the meteoric rise to power of Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist, or Nazi, Party in Germany. We evaluate the inability of the parliamentary democracies, especially England and France, to deal with European Fascism.

Three lectures examine Soviet and National Socialist totalitarianism. We explore the Soviet Union under Stalin, its objectives, and how the regime implemented them. We also examine Nazi domestic policy, especially its radical racial initiatives, and Hitler’s foreign policy before 1939.

The Second World War

The scale and scope of the Second World War dwarfed all other conflicts in human history.

We evaluate the roles of each major combatant, their foreign policies, and military standing. We closely observe the crises of 1938 and 1939, assessing each of the steps on the way to catastrophe.

Three lectures focus on the war itself, from the early Blitzkrieg phase of the war in 1939–41, to the sudden fall of France in 1940 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union the next year, to the final defeat of Nazi Germany by the Allies. In the midst of this conflict, the Nazi regime unleashed a genocidal war against the Jews of Europe.

The Legacy of War: Divided Europe and United Europe

After 1945, Europe was split by an ideological confrontation that lasted almost 50 years. We study the ambitious rebuilding of Western Europe in the 1950s under the Marshall Plan, the creation of NATO, and the growing commitment to Western European economic and perhaps political union. We then analyze the sudden collapse of the Soviet bloc in the 1980s and 1990s.

Finally, we evaluate the present state of European affairs, and speculate about the future of a revitalized and increasingly integrated Europe.

Professor Thomas Childers, Ph.D.
University of Pennsylvania

Lectures:

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