All Episodes 2002 - 2006

These three seemingly simple words demand reflection. Where is the West? Who is Western? If civilization means cities, where do those come from? And when we look at history, how do we tell what is truly foundational from what may be merely famous? What is the difference between celebrity and distinction?

Borrowing our title from a famous book by S. N. Kramer, we look at why this small slice of what is now southern Iraq became;along with Egypt; one of the two foundations of Western civilization.

As Sumer was the gift of the Tigris and Euphrates, so Egypt; a ribbon of fertile floodplain 750 miles long but not much more than 15 miles wide; has been called the gift of the Nile. But the differences between Egypt and Mesopotamia tell us as much as the similarities.

Israel, built by the descendants of Abraham, was one of the small states that arose after the Egyptian Empire fell (c. 700 B.C.). Unified and independent only from 1200 - 900 B.C., it bequeathed to the West crucial religious ideas.

The peoples holding sway over the ancient Near East included the cruel Assyrians, the Medes, the Neo-Babylonians who overthrew the Assyrians around 600 B.C., and the Persians, who along with the Medes would build the largest empire the world had seen to that time.

Why is it important for you to grasp the archaeological record of the period from 1500 - 1200 B.C. in order to understand The Iliad and The Odyssey, ;two poems composed 500 years later?

What unique circumstance, unknown before or since in human history, made the Greek Dark Ages so dark? And how do we do the history of a time and place that is so obscured from our view? Surprisingly, we know a good deal.

Spartan society was harsh and peculiar, yet many observers at the time and since have found the Spartan way strangely compelling. After all, they won the war against Athens, and their victory moved Plato to re-imagine Athenian society in The Republic. What were the main features of this system, and why did the Spartans embrace it?

Lurching from crisis to crisis, the Athenians accidentally created one of the world's most freewheeling democracies, at least for adult male citizens, even as they were building an empire. How did the whole thing work, and what finally brought it down?

Can you list the key public buildings of an ancient Greek city? How did they combine beautiful and functional forms with deep ideological meanings? What made drama (including comedy) the public art par excellence

What does it mean to say that the Greeks, while certainly not the first people to reflect on the past, nonetheless invented history? How did Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, each in his own unforgettable way, contribute to this basic turning of the Western mind?

How did the Greeks begin moving from religious to more philosophical views of the world, and why did these views first arise in a particular part of the Greek world called Ionia? Who were the Sophists, what did they teach, and why did Socrates oppose them?

The goal of this lecture is to explain why Raphael's famous painting, The School of Athens,has Plato pointing up and Aristotle pointing down, and why both are defending and extending the work of Socrates.

Why couldn't thinkers as brilliant as Plato and Aristotle conceive of a non-imaginary alternative to the polis, and why does the career of one of Aristotle's students mean that in the end, such a shortcoming may not have mattered anyway?

The world after Alexander was cosmopolitan, prosperous, and dominated by Greeks and Macedonians all over the Mediterranean and far out into the old Persian Empire. Literature, science, and new philosophies flourished.

This lecture is about the foundations on which Roman history rests, including the geography of Italy and the two centuries or so of monarchical rule (ending, tradition says, in 509 B.C), that the republic overthrew.

What does it mean to speak of the constitution of the Roman republic? What are the essential offices, procedures, and ideals involved, and how did the whole thing really work?

By the time the republic found that it didn't merely possess but was an empire, Roman rule extended from the Atlantic to Mesopotamia, and from the North Sea to the Sahara Desert. How and why did this happen?

The Romans did more than war and politics. They created a distinctive culture that flowered in magnificent lyric and epic poetry, assimilated profound Greek influences, and gave us Cicero as Rome's greatest booster and toughest critic.

The 200 often-turbulent years between the murdered reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus and the rise of Octavian saw the old Roman system drown amid overwhelming temptations and tensions brought on by Rome's very conquests.

When Octavian became Augustus, First Citizen, in 31 B.C., he was inaugurating a 200-year period of security, prosperity, and wise rule that Tacitus would nonetheless wryly label "a desert [that we] called peace." Was Tacitus right?

To understand how culturally creative and important the principate was, you need only reflect that what today strikes the popular imagination as quintessentially Roman is a product of this period (republican Rome was a city of wood).

No well-informed observer in the time of Augustus and his successors would have predicted that a world-changing movement would arise in a small, poor, and insignificant region of Palestine. But that is what happened.

The word church (ekklesia) occurs only twice in only one of the Gospels (Matthew). Yet Paul, whose letters predate the Gospels, uses the word routinely. This intriguing fact is your gateway to the fascinating history of early Christianity.

For 100 years after the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, the Romans put up almost no great public structures, a sign of severe trouble. What lay behind this crisis, and how did Diocletian (who became emperor in 284) and his successor Constantine successfully respond?

Although the notion that Rome somehow 'fell' remains pervasive, scholars of late antiquity (c.300 to 700) have no use for the idea. More intriguing still, there weren't any barbarian invasions as usually understood.

Once Rome stopped persecuting its adherents, the new Christian faith spread through the Roman world in the form of a large, hierarchical organization. Still, achieving a catholic (i.e., universal) definition of key beliefs proved difficult.

How and why did it matter that Christianity triumphed in the Roman world? Church Fathers, the lives of monks and nuns, and the interaction of Christian faith with a host of day-to-day issues hold the answer.

As with ancient Israel or 1st-century Palestine, no one could have predicted that 7th-century Arabia would become the cradle of a world-changing new religion. Yet new as it was in many ways, Islam had important ties to Greece and Rome as well as the scriptural traditions of the West.

When he rebuilt an old Greek town in about 330 and named it after himself, what did the Emperor Constantine think he was doing? (Hint: It wasn't founding something called 'Byzantium.') What was the result, over the centuries, of Constantine's vision?

Within and without the old Roman frontiers, the world of the West became a world of small Germanic, Celtic, and Slavic kingdoms. What were they like, and how does understanding them prepare you to grasp the history of the West properly?

How could Charlemagne have achieved so much? He ruled more of Europe than anyone else between the times of the Romans and Napoleon. Yet his Carolingian empire survived him by barely more than a generation.

Since 1839, scholars have been associating the Carolingians with a renaissance. Why? What is Carolingian culture's distinctive contribution to the West, and how does it set them apart from their Muslim and Byzantine contemporaries?

Despite being battered by centuries of Muslim, Magyar, and Viking attacks and invasions, Europe was able by 1095 to begin striking east and south in a series of Crusades that would span two centuries. It was one of history's great reversals. How did it happen?

The three-part medieval scheme of fighting men, praying men, and working men is worth pondering, but so are all those whom it omits.

What are the two words that best sum up the national achievements of England and France during the Middle Ages? Why do medieval historians now avoid the term 'feudalism'?

European history as commonly taught centres tightly on England and France as the key nations of Europe at this time. This lecture will explain why you ought to challenge that view.

The great Scholastics; Anselm, Abelard, and Aquinas were brilliant, often eccentric thinkers who came out of the Latin-speaking clerical and academic world that gave the West one of its greatest intellectual and institutional patrimonies: the university.

The years from 900 onward saw an explosion of vernacular (i.e. non-Latin) writings. Why did people begin creating formal written works in their native tongues? Does knowing this literature bring us closer to the people of medieval Europe?

To understand the Renaissance, you must know the political, religious, and social context in which it took place. The age was one that Dickens might have called "the worst of times". The Renaissance was a response to grave challenges.

So, what's the problem? Actually, there are four; or at least one problem with four sides. Here are two clues: How did a movement that began in Italy wind up with a French name? And how can a rebirth be something new?

How to capture a sense of the Renaissance? With cultural biographies of Boccaccio, Petrarch, Lorenzo de' Medici, Pope Pius II, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and others.

What happened when the Renaissance and its new learning crossed the Alps? Humanists could be found on both sides of the mountains, but they turned to different sources north and south, with fateful results.

The Reformation (if indeed there was only one) is not as obvious a historical phenomenon as you might think. To penetrate its meaning, you will find it helpful to begin with the first of its magisterial figures, Martin Luther.

Why is seeing the Reformation as Protestants versus Catholics such a serious mistake, and what view makes better sense? To answer those questions, you will consider other major Protestant figures besides Luther, especially John Calvin.

Beginning around 1550, the Catholic Church undertook a reformation of its own, founding new institutions and launching new religious orders. At the same time, confessional lines were hardening on the religious map of a permanently divided Europe.

In purely material terms (population, natural resources, etc.) the peninsular appendage of Asia that is Europe should not have been the one among all world civilizations to span the globe. But starting in the latter decades of the 15th century, that is what happened.

You leave the West in 1600, on the cusp of the Age of Empire, the Scientific Revolution, and the Baroque Period. It's a long way from those mud-walled villages in Mesopotamia to the threshold of its modern era, but certain patterns, problems, and possibilities endure to make the West what it is.

This lecture is an overview of the past 500 years of European history and culture—the system of government, economic structures, science and technology, and much of the literature, art, and music.

We look at how the physical realities of Europe and the Atlantic world—its geography and climate—shaped its destiny by affecting patterns of population, immigration, diplomacy, war, and political and cultural divisions.

The "Great Chain of Being" assumed an ordered, hierarchical universe in which humans—like angels, animals, plants, and even stones—were placed in a particular rank by God. As Europe emerges from the Middle Ages, that concept is challenged and strained by forces in politics, society, religion, and culture.

A revived interest in the literary and historical works of classical Greece and Rome unleashes new ideas about the qualifications of a gentleman, the role of women, and the expectations of a prince–with a resulting emphasis on textual accuracy, literacy, education, and the human and practical.

The Humanist emphasis dovetails with the rise of a new kind of ruler, with expanding powers in every area of life and seeking to pay for their ambitions by claiming trade routes to the Far East and the Americas.

The exploration and exploitation of Africa and Asia by the Portuguese and of the Americas by, first, the Spanish, then, the French and the English changed the economies, cultures, and political makeup of each of these regions forever. Native civilizations were destroyed; native populations were subjugated, enslaved, and transported from place to place; and often, nearly died out. European rulers and merchants gained new sources of wealth, which they used to purchase luxury goods and increase their political and military power.

German decentralization, the rise of literacy and the development of the printing press in Europe made possible the dissemination of powerful new ideas, in particular the Reformation launched by Martin Luther. Scandalized by the Church’s sale of indulgences, Luther came to offer an alternative theology and religious structure to Catholicism. Protestantism, elaborated by such thinkers as Calvin and Zwingli, swept across Europe, leading England, Scotland, Denmark, the Netherlands, and numerous northern German states to repudiate their allegiance to Rome.

The Reformation split Europe into opposing camps. Spain, led by Phillip II, spent its immense colonial wealth trying to force Christendom back together. The result was a series of bloodbaths culminating in the Thirty Years’ War, the near-bankruptcy of Spain, and the conviction, expressed in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, that perhaps religion was best not settled at the point of a sword or the barrel of a gun.

Beginning with Copernicus in the 15th century, European thinkers, such as Galileo, Kepler, Bacon, and Newton, questioned received views of how the world worked and pioneered the scientific method in the process. The resultant discoveries and intellectual tools promoted confidence in the ability of human beings to understand and even master the physical world through reason and technology and encouraged philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, to apply the same methods to politics and society.

Following the disasters of the Wars of Religion, the monarchies of Europe experienced a crisis of authority. The French response, foreshadowed by Henry IV and Cardinal Richelieu and perfected by Louis XIV, was an absolutism that made the king a virtual god on Earth. This solution was imitated in Spain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. The major continental exception was the Protestant Netherlands, which, under William of Orange, fought almost single-handedly to thwart Louis’ plans to inherit the Spanish throne and achieve European domination.

The English response to the crisis of the 17th century was far less neat than the French. The Stuart monarchs of England struggled with Parliament and their own foibles and extravagances over taxation, religion, and foreign policy. The result was the British Civil Wars, which culminated in the trial and execution of King Charles I in 1649.

After the execution of the king, the English people experimented with a republic called the Commonwealth ruled by Parliament, followed by a protectorate ruled by Oliver Cromwell, before inviting the return of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. The restored Stuarts, Charles II and James II, sought to emulate Louis XIV by pursuing absolutism, but the power of Parliament over royal finances and the English people’s rejection of Catholicism thwarted their plans. Finally, in 1688, the Protestant William of Orange invaded England and, with the support of the English people, overthrew King James II. The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688–1689 made England a Protestant constitutional monarchy and set the pattern for an alternative, more democratic form of government in Europe and the Americas.

The Revolution of 1688–1689 precipitated a series of general European wars pitting the French and their allies against the British and Dutch and their allies for mastery in Europe and control of trade with colonies in America and Asia. The first of these wars, the Nine Years’ War, ended in 1697 in a draw, necessitating a second, the War of the Spanish Succession. Perhaps the most lasting legacy of the first war was the Irish Penal Code.

The War of the Spanish Succession resulted in a clear victory for the Grand Alliance, thanks in part to the military genius of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. But the real secret to British success in the wars of the period lay in its commercial wealth and a financial revolution that would produce new ways of raising quick cash by exploiting deficit finance. There ensued two decades of peace, during which the British consolidated their holds on trade to India and China, the Mediterranean, and most importantly, the triangular Atlantic trade in sugar, tobacco, and African slaves. Britain became the most prosperous trading nation in Europe, but much of the foundation of that prosperity was built on the misery of Africans.

Most of Europe, but France in particular, emerged from two decades of warfare exhausted financially and militarily. Moreover, after the death of Louis XIV in 1715, France was ruled by a series of regencies under the boy-king Louis XV, while Britain was ruled by the relatively disengaged Hanoverians George I and George II. France and Britain were only finally drawn back into war in the early 1740s by the aggression of Frederick the Great of Prussia against Maria Theresa of Austria. The resulting War of the Austrian Succession ended in a draw in 1748, but another conflict, the Seven Years’ War, ended in a crushing British-Prussian victory over the French and the Austrians in 1763. The Treaty of Paris of that year left Britain the undisputed master of Canada and the eastern seaboard of North America.

Up to this point in the course, European society has changed little from what it had been in the Middle Ages. A small circle of aristocrats still absorbed most of the wealth, while most of the people were poor peasants. Thanks to the commercial and financial revolutions, the middling orders of merchants and professionals were growing in numbers, wealth, and political savvy. These groups would be key to the coming revolution in European social and economic relations. This lecture concludes with an examination of basic issues of family formation, child-rearing, education, lifestyles, and death rates in Europe before the French and Industrial Revolutions.

While European society seemed to have changed little from the Middle Ages, European thinkers, including Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, were absorbing, spreading, and expanding on the ideas of their predecessors, including Newton and Locke, in a movement that came to be known as the Enlightenment. These philosophes called for the reform of old, irrational traditions; an end to aristocratic privilege; the free interchange of ideas; and, in at least one crucial case, democracy. Some European monarchs, known as enlightened despots, tried to implement their ideas from above and within the existing system, but in the end, they remained despots. Their failure to significantly change their societies led some Europeans to consider the alternative: revolution.

The American Revolution started as a dispute over taxation necessary to pay for the British defense of the American colonies from a French revival, but eventually, it became a fight over Enlightenment ideas. America’s distance from Britain, the divisions within the mother country over the American question, and French help all made victory by the revolutionaries possible. The new republic and its constitution represented the first comprehensive attempt to put Enlightenment ideas into practice and, thus, became a model and an inspiration to Europeans who wanted reform. It also bankrupted the French.

French participation in the American Revolution, combined with terrible harvests in 1788 and 1789, nearly bankrupted the French state. By 1789, Louis XVI was forced to convene the Estates General, France’s legislature, which had not met since 1614. When the Third Estate, representing ordinary men and women, could get no reforms past the clergy and aristocrats in the Estates General, it broke away to form a National Assembly, abolish aristocratic privilege, issue a Declaration of the Rights of Man, and by 1791, draft a new French constitution. France was now a constitutional monarchy, but would the king accept his reduced role?

Louis XVI’s refusal to become a constitutional monarch led the revolution to turn violent in an attempt to purge counter-revolutionaries in the Reign of Terror. The execution of the king in January 1793 led, in turn, to war with virtually every other monarchical regime in Europe. Attacked on all sides by the crowned heads of Europe, the French people rallied to the revolution and a new concept: nationalism. Having stopped the Allies at the French border, the French set about trying to solve their internal problems. The French Revolutionary Wars brought to power a series of governments, culminating in the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte. Having fought the Allied powers to a peace in 1801, Napoleon concentrated on rational domestic reforms.

Napoleon resumed conflict in 1803, first with Britain, then with the other crowned heads of Europe. He was stopped from invading Britain in October 1805 at Trafalgar by the Royal Navy under Admiral Lord Nelson. Unable to beat the British at sea, he tried to starve them out by erecting the first European trade union, the Continental System. To force the nations of Europe into his system, Napoleon conquered most of them in a series of brilliant military campaigns. These campaigns ended when he took on the vast Russian Empire, where he suffered the loss of most of the Grand Army in 1812. This led to the eventual collapse of his empire in 1814. After a brief return to power, Napoleon suffered final defeat on the field of Waterloo in 1815. At the same time, the Congress of Vienna sought to put Europe back together after 20 years of revolution by restoring the Bourbon monarchy in France but leaving in place liberal and Napoleonic reforms. The Congress of Vienna was less successful in dealing with the growing nationalism of various European peoples, leaving many under the “protection” of empires and states that were culturally foreign and politically oppressive.

Europe was the first continent and Britain the first country to industrialize. Europe got there first because of its abundance of natural resources and an agricultural revolution that led to a growing population and its corollaries: high demand for manufactured goods and a potentially large labour force. Britain was the first European nation to exploit these advantages because the commercial and financial revolutions had endowed it with an abundance of investment capital; because its government took a hands-off (laissez-faire) attitude to the economy; and because it was the least hierarchical and most open to merit and new ideas of any of the great nations of Europe. These conditions produced a host of brilliant inventors, financiers, and managers who made the first Industrial Revolution happen. Demand for cheap textiles (especially cotton) resulted in developments in other fields, from mechanical engineering and metallurgy to transportation and marketing.

The consequences of the first Industrial Revolution were significant and arguably did more to create the world in which we live than any other development studied in this course. First, industrialization made available a vast array of cheap manufactured goods. It also revolutionized transportation and distribution networks. It created new wealth, further enriching aristocrats wise enough to invest in it, splitting the middle classes into factory owners and craftsmen who could no longer compete with handmade goods, and drawing vast numbers of workers to the cities to man the factories, which created a working class. Unprotected by agricultural custom, paternalist employers, or interventionist governments, factory workers lived and worked in terrible conditions, which began to draw the attention of European intellectuals.

The appalling conditions in which the working class lived and worked produced a series of intellectual and political reactions in Western Europe. At first, liberal thinkers, such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, urged a “hands-off” approach to these problems, arguing that if aristocratic privilege, censorship of the press, and outdated government regulations were abolished, the market would take appropriate care of everyone. Later generations of liberals, such as Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, called for government intervention to improve the lives of workers. The first type of liberal was especially popular with middle-class factory owners. Together, they would persuade politicians to reform the law and extend the vote to their ranks in Britain and France by the mid-19th century. However, enfranchisement and protection for the workers would take longer in coming.

When the first Liberals offered only halfhearted or partial solutions to the problems of the Industrial Revolution, Romantic writers, such as William Wordsworth, William Blake, and Percy Shelley, following the French model, urged revolution. The Romantic political and economic revolution never materialized, in part because the Romantics were all feeling and no plan. But Romantic writers, such as Schiller and Hugo; musicians, such as Beethoven and Wagner; and painters, such as David and Turner revolutionized how Europeans and, later, Americans saw and felt the world.

The earliest Socialists, frustrated at the failure of liberalism and Romanticism to attack the problems of industrial society, urged the middle-class factory owners to share the wealth by giving up their ownership of natural resources and the factories to society as a whole, for the good of all. When this failed to happen, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels urged a more radical solution: Workers should seize the “means of production” by revolutionary action. Marx’s critique of capitalism was powerful and influential, but in the end, rising prosperity, union organization, enfranchisement of workers, and reform legislation prevented industrial Europe from ever experiencing the revolution for which he called.

Industrialization was the material product of an age of advancing science. But science, with its emphasis on empirical evidence, reason, and experimentation, also revolutionized how Europeans thought. In so doing, it challenged fundamental beliefs, most dramatically in the form of Darwin’s theories of evolution and natural selection. The social Darwinists applied Darwin’s theories to human society to justify everything from the class system to imperialism. The beginnings of modern medical technology, especially in surgery, also began to extend life expectancies into the 50s. In the meantime, women began to demand the benefits of Enlightenment and industrialization in the form of higher education, professional opportunities, and the vote.

big issue was nationalism. The failure of the Congress of Vienna to take the new forces of nationalism and liberalism into account led to revolutions across Europe throughout the next 30 years, in France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Greece, the German states, the Italian states, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Where those revolutions received the assistance of the middle class (France) or outside countries (Greece), they prospered. Otherwise, the forces of reaction were too strong.

Following the revolutions of 1848, Prussia and Piedmont-Sardinia rose to leadership of the German and Italian states, respectively. In the meantime, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires grew weaker as many of their constituent peoples (Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Slovaks, Rumanians, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and others), especially in the Balkans, yearned to break out and form their own independent states. The creation of a unified Italy in 1861 did little to upset the balance of European power because its economy remained primarily agricultural. But the unification of Germany at the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871, combined with its growing industrial might and the instability of Eastern and Southern Europe, would upset the balance of power on the Continent for generations to come.

During the last years of the 19th century, the European powers, as well as the United States, sought new empires overseas, carving up most of Africa and much of the Pacific. They did so for economic, military, religious, and racist reasons. The raw materials flowing in from around the globe would fuel the second Industrial Revolution. But the resultant competition for colonies would breed conflict between nations that had no other reason to fight, contributing in the long run to World War I. Imperialism would also change forever the societies and cultures of both the conquerors and the conquered, colonizers and colonized peoples. We are still living with the long-term consequences of Western imperialism

Between 1870 and 1914, Europe experienced a second Industrial Revolution. For most people, its immediate result was a cornucopia of new products and opportunities that expanded possibilities for communication, entertainment, travel, leisure, and individual expression. On an international level, the last years of the 19th century saw the emergence of two new industrial giants to challenge Great Britain: Germany and the United States. The rivalry with Germany created tensions that helped to frame World War I. European imperial and industrial rivalries spilled over into an arms race between Great Britain and Germany. Germany’s decision to build a navy to challenge the long-time maritime supremacy of the British not only exacerbated tensions between the two greatest military powers on Earth but also nearly bankrupted their treasuries.

In theory, the one thing preventing nationalistic and economic tensions from exploding into full-scale European war was the Alliance System, a series of interlocking treaties devised by Otto von Bismarck to ease tensions over the Balkans. But, by the first years of the 20th century, Britain, France, and Russia felt sufficiently threatened by Germany, Austria, and Italy’s Triple Alliance to form the Triple Entente. By dividing Europe into two interconnected armed camps, the Alliance System ensured that nearly any international incident had the potential to start a war. As a result, the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by a Bosnian-Serb terrorist in the late summer of 1914 led to a chain reaction of accusation and mobilization that resulted in the First World War.

The Great War was greeted by cheering crowds and floods of volunteers in all the great capitals of Europe. Why did so many young men rush so enthusiastically into the chaos of war? Many were inspired by nationalism and patriotism, but others fled a stagnant economy and a society and culture in flux. As Nietzsche and other philosophers questioned ancient beliefs about God, scientists, such as Freud and Einstein, revolutionized our understanding of the human self and the universe. Writers, artists, and musicians broke old structural and narrative conventions, and women demanded votes in the streets. As a result, many conservatives and liberals looked to the war to clarify issues one way or another.

Germany had long realized that its geographic and diplomatic position would necessitate a war on two fronts. The Schlieffen Plan had been designed years before to knock France and Britain out of the war quickly to enable the German army to concentrate on Russia. But the unexpectedly rapid mobilization of Russia in 1914, combined with the determined resistance of French forces at the Battle of the Marne, resulted in the failure of the Schlieffen Plan, dooming Europe to a bloody stalemate. The new inventions of the second Industrial Revolution, in particular the machine gun, gave the defensive side all the advantages in the Great War. Because most commanders had no understanding of the new technology, they repeatedly ordered their men “over the top” into a hail of machine gun bullets. The result was a bloody stalemate in which the armies of Europe rotted in the trenches between futile attacks.

Both the Allies and the Central Powers sought to break the deadlock of the Great War by opening up new fronts. Britain and France tried first, with an abortive attempt to invade the Ottoman Empire (Turkey) at Gallipoli in 1915. Germany sought to break the stalemate at sea in 1915 and 1917 by starving Britain out with unrestricted submarine warfare, but the inevitable consequence of sinking merchant shipping on the Atlantic would be the deaths of heretofore neutral Americans and the entry of the U.S. into the war on the side of the Allies. The Germans had one more trick up their sleeves. In 1917, they attempted to foment revolution in Russia.

In 1917, Russia, the most backward and repressive regime in Europe, generally lacking in heavy industry and modern transportation, terribly overmatched in the war, suffering from food shortages and mass desertions of its army, experienced the overthrow of, first, the czar, then of a republican provisional government in favor of a communist regime led by Vladimir Lenin. That regime sued for peace with Germany and established the world’s first communist government.

Having won the war in the east in 1917, the Germans sought to bring the full weight of their military to bear in the west in the following year. The Kaiserschlacht offensive nearly took Paris before the German tide was stemmed by fresh American troops and German exhaustion. By the late summer of 1918, Germany faced food and fuel shortages and agreed to an armistice to begin on 11 November 1918. The ensuing peace conference assembled at Versailles in 1919 was convened amid much optimism that the West had learned its lesson and would never again fight a general war. But the leaders of France and Britain outmaneuvered American President Wilson in securing severe penalties on Germany, which would weaken the German economy and breed tremendous resentment. The treaty did better with the issues of nationalism and liberalism, establishing independent democratic republics where there had been empires. The treaty also established the League of Nations, which was designed to provide a peaceful opportunity for nations to resolve their differences.

The world economy never fully recovered from the Great War. This left the United States as both Europe’s creditor and the world’s wealthiest nation. Therefore, the collapse of the American stock market in 1929 had a disastrous ripple effect, as American banks called in European loans. Unemployment in Western Europe was more than 30 percent; in Germany, crippled by massive war reparations, more than 65 percent. This helps to explain why the peoples of Europe began to question democracy and, in the case of Italy and Germany, embrace fascist regimes. In other countries, the communist alternative was appealing, because the Soviet Union was left largely untouched by the Great Depression.

Lenin’s early experiments with forced collectivization at home and international revolution abroad were disastrous for the Soviet Union’s domestic and foreign policy and even worse for its people. After a brief period of retrenchment, Lenin died in 1924, leading to a vicious power struggle that resulted in the rise of Josef Stalin. On the surface, the Soviet constitution provided ample freedoms within a federal system, but in reality, Stalin ruled as autocratically and arbitrarily as any czar. Millions died because of his various purges, treason trials, and the sheer inefficiency of the Soviet system. Stalin’s ruthless methods did make Russia into an industrial power, but his attempts to get the West to pay attention to him were rebuffed

The disillusionment with democracy and, later, capitalism that arose in Europe following the Great War and the Great Depression made alternatives seem reasonable. For many veterans, workers, and members of the middle class, fascism, with its appeals to patriotism, family, and muscular Christianity, was far more attractive than communism. In Italy, Benito Mussolini seized power in 1922; in Germany, Adolf Hitler, in 1933. Both leaders created states that boasted full employment, absolute conformity, and aggressive foreign policies in order to maintain the first two factors.

In 1941, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime embarked on the extermination of the Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, and other “undesirable” groups in Europe. Hitler’s program capitalized on longstanding European anti-Semitism and other prejudices. Starting in 1933, Hitler enforced conformity against protesting Christians, gays, intellectuals, and above all, Jews, first through boycotts, then discriminatory legislation, then forced relocation to work camps, and finally, after the beginning of the European war, to death camps. The resultant Holocaust killed at least 6 million people, possibly many more. This lecture concludes with a meditation on the meaning of this crime and its implications for the concept of Western civilization

The first act of aggression leading to World War II was the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931. Following its invasion of the rest of northern China in 1937, Japan joined the Axis powers. Following his rise to power in 1933, Adolf Hitler repudiated the Versailles Treaty, rearmed Germany, and demanded lebensraum—living space—for the German people. As he marched into the Rhineland, Austria, and eventually, Czechoslovakia, the Western powers, in particular Britain and France, sought to appease him, both out of genuine remorse over the excesses of Versailles and because neither state had the economic health to rearm. A few leaders—Stalin in the Soviet Union and Churchill out of power in Britain—warned of the danger, but Hitler’s true intentions became widely apparent only with his conquest of the Czechs early in 1939. Still, the West spurned Soviet help, leading Stalin to sign a non-aggression pact with Hitler in August 1939. This reassured Hitler that his eastern flank would be protected—and doomed Poland.

World War II began in Europe with Hitler’s blitzkrieg invasion of Poland. After a period of relative calm, Germany eventually conquered Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Only the British held out, thwarting invasion when the RAF defeated the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain in the fall of 1940. The following spring, Hitler invaded his erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. After initial successes, his armies bogged down in the winter of 1941–1942. In the meantime, the United States joined the war in December 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s decision to declare war on the States.

From 1942, the sheer size of the Soviet Union and its army, combined with the industrial might of the United States, guaranteed an Allied victory. But much life would be lost as the British, American, and Free French forces, compelled by their Russian allies, opened new fronts in North Africa in 1942, Italy in 1943, and Normandy in 1944. Despite last-ditch German offensives at Kursk in 1943 and the Bulge in 1944, the combination of Allied strategic bombing and naval blockade, along with the defeat of the German U-boats, starved Germany of fuel oil and manufactures. After Hitler’s suicide, the Germans sued for peace in May 1945.

The defeat of the Axis forces in World War II, combined with the devastation of once-mighty European states, left the United States the undisputed leader of the West and the Soviet Union the master of the East. The Soviets soon established puppet communist regimes in most of Eastern Europe. The Americans used their leadership and wealth to establish democracies in Germany and Italy and to restore the Western European economies through the Marshall Plan. Although often seen as an act of supreme generosity, these actions also revived Western European power in the face of the threat from the Soviet Union. The two late-20th-century superpowers threatened each other with nuclear arsenals and took advantage of the demise of colonialism by fighting proxy wars for dominance around the globe.

Following World War II, the great nations of Europe divested themselves of overseas colonies and ambitions, accommodated themselves to a precarious existence between the superpowers, and concentrated on rebuilding their economies, for the most part along socialist lines. In the Eastern bloc, communism was imposed by force; in the West, returning soldiers and sailors wanted no part of the old hierarchical systems, embracing a democratic socialism that nationalized industry and provided free education and “cradle-to-grave” healthcare. As the Cold War heated up in the 1980s, the Soviet system began to show signs of strain.

Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the political and economic structures of the Soviet Union ended in revolutions against totalitarian rule throughout the Eastern bloc. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the nations of Eastern Europe embraced democratic and capitalistic reforms, and some sought to join the European Union (EU). The EU has been successful economically and culturally, but the idea that it might form the basis for a United States of Europe was cast in doubt by a new Balkans crisis, which seemed to reaffirm American leadership. As the course closes, Europe faces many challenges, not least the condition of Russia, rising immigration from non-European societies, the threat of international terrorism, and the future of its relationship to the United States.

At the dawn of the 21st century, the European legacy of democracy, capitalism, and relative freedom for the individual was challenged by movements both internal and external. The rise of fundamentalism in religion, international terrorism, tensions over immigration, and integration into a global economy all threaten to undo the achievements of the previous five centuries. At this point, it might be worthwhile to assess what Europe has given to the world, for good or ill, and how European ideals are likely to stand up in the new millennium.