This course tells the history of Europe from the aristocratic early 18th century to the outbreak of the First World War through the lives of the colorful personalities who traversed its landscape.
This 36-lecture course covers the years 1715 to 1914 and is roughly biographical in scope, but also concerns itself with how each of these lives embodied a specific, critical stage in Europe’s development or represented new and powerful ideas that propelled the continent toward modernity.
Great figures such as King Augustus the Strong, Queen Victoria, Goethe, Napoleon, Darwin, Pasteur, Marx, Tolstoy, and Wagner abound, but the course also introduces ordinary people whose struggle for existence and happiness makes up the great story of Europe.