Robert Bucholz
Author
Publisher
Teaching Company
Pub. Date
c2006
Language
English
Description
Americans are all, to a greater or lesser extent, inhabitants of a land shaped by the last five centuries of Western history and culture. Explores the ideas, events, and characters that molded Western political, social, religious, intellectual, cultural, scientific, technological, and economic history during the tumultuous period between the 16th and 20th centuries.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
The Industrial Revolution is primarily a northern and western European phenomenon. Elsewhere, the big issue is nationalism, and the failure of the Congress of Vienna to take nationalism and liberalism into account leads to revolutions across Europe throughout the next 30 years.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
The European powers, as well as the United States, seek new empires overseas. The resulting competition for colonies breeds conflict between nations that otherwise have no reason to fight, a factor that in the long run contributes to World War I.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
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.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
The most backward and repressive nation in Europe, terribly overmatched in the war, experiences the overthrow of both its czar and the republican government that succeeds him before suing for peace with Germany and establishing the world's first Communist government.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
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.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
Lenin's early experiments with forced collectivization at home and revolution abroad are disastrous for the Soviet Union's domestic and foreign policy and even worse for its people. When Lenin dies, a vicious power struggle results in the rise of Josef Stalin.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
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?
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
While several factors make Europe the logical place for industrialization to begin, it is Britain's advantages - financial, political, and social - that makes it the best-suited country to exploit those conditions. The result is a host of brilliant inventors, financiers, and managers who bring about the first Industrial Revolution.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
Its final effort to win the war thwarted, and facing food and fuel shortages, Germany finally agrees to an armistice. The ensuing peace conference produces a treaty that will weaken the German economy and breed tremendous resentment.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
Building on its military success - powered by innovative deficit financing - Britain becomes the most prosperous trading nation in Europe, with much of the foundation of that prosperity built on the misery of Africans forced into the Triangular Atlantic trade in sugar, tobacco, and African slaves.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
At the dawn of the 21st century, the European legacy of democracy, capitalism, and relative freedom for the individual is challenged by internal and external movements, including the rise of religious fundamentalism, international terrorism, tensions over immigration, and integration into a global economy. Will European ideals survive?
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
European thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu, and Rousseau expand the ideas of Locke and others in a movement that comes to be known as the Enlightenment. When even enlightened monarchs fail to change their societies, some Europeans begin to consider an alternative: revolution.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
In the face of half-hearted or partial solutions to the problems of the Industrial Revolution, Romantic writers such as Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley urge revolution, forever altering how Europeans and, later, Americans, perceive the world.
Publisher
The Great Courses
Pub. Date
2006.
Language
English
Description
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.