After the execution of Charles I, England experiments with a republic, a protectorate, and even, once again, a semi-absolutist monarchy, before the Glorious Revolution sets an example of an alternative, more democratic, form of government for Europe and the Americas.

The two undisputed superpowers threaten each other with nuclear arsenals and fight proxy wars for global dominance. Americans use their leadership and wealth to establish democracies in Germany and Italy and to restore Western European economies through the Marshall Plan. This lecture doesn't address the end of the Cold War.

The Reformation splits Europe into opposing camps, producing a series of bloodbaths culminating in the Thirty Years' War, the near-bankruptcy of Spain, and the eventual conviction that perhaps religious matters are best settled peacefully.

This episode examines England's so-called "island mentality" and its complicated relationship to both Europe and the Celtic lands of Scotland, Ireland, and Wales.

Learn how, with the Catholic Church weak and divided at the top, Henry and his new leading minister, Thomas Cromwell, break England's allegiance to the Pope, secure the king's divorce, and initiate the Reformation in England.

Nearly bankrupted by its participation in the American Revolution, and unable to achieve reform under its existing system, France becomes a constitutional monarchy, with aristocratic privilege abolished and a Declaration of the Rights of Man set forth. But will Louis XVI accept his reduced role?

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.

The appalling conditions of life and work for the working class produce a series of intellectual and political reactions in Western Europe, with the best routes to reform the subject of wide-ranging debate among liberal thinkers.

The problems that James I inherits from the Tudors will eventually overwhelm the early Stuart state and produce the British Civil Wars. This episode introduces five enduring areas of tension (sovereignty, financing the government, war and foreign policy, religion, and local control) with a focus on the first two.

Here, England begins its movement out of the countryside to towns and fledgling colonies that form an alternative for those who cannot make a go of it in England, or who cannot conform to its rigid religious and social structure.