HIST 213 Major Power Europe
This course will trace European society from the peak of its global dominance, when aristocrats waltzed and military parades cultivated a sense of national greatness, to its implosion in war, political extremism, and genocide. It begins in 1870, with emergence of the German Empire and growing tensions between the major European powers (Britain, France, Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary) over their regional and global influence. We will examine how national identity was cultivated through public schools, state-directed campaigns at suppressing ethnic or religious minorities, and even through newspapers, clubs, sports, and holidays. We will consider the paradox in the claim of European imperialists that European civilization was the peak of all human achievement even as European imperial rule in Africa and Asia contributed to famine and disease and factored into Europe's rush to war in 1914. We will explore the First World War in depth for its pivotal changes in international relations, in industrial production, and in the scale of modern warfare, and conclude with the cultural anxiety and political extremism of the 1920s and 1930s that would culminate in fascism, Nazism, and a Second World War that left much of Europe shattered in 1945.