HST 105 - Modern European History

Course unit(s): 1
Meets GAR (students beginning prior to Fall 2024): Meets general academic requirement HU.
This course offers a one-semester introduction to the History of Europe and the development of European Civilization from the late Middle Ages to the present. It will focus on issues and problems in European history and try to explore major trends in the development of European thought and society and the growth of the modern state. After a two-week introductory section examining some ideas of ‘history’ as a discipline of study, the course will spend roughly two weeks on each century from the fifteenth to the twentieth. In the process, we will focus on the Hundred Years War, the Bubonic Plagues and Great Schism of the late Middle Ages, and the concurrent rise of ‘national monarchies’; the Renaissance and Humanism; Luther, Calvin, and the Protestant Reformation; the growth of the modern state and the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century; the Enlightenment and political and social revolutions of the eighteenth century; the industrialization of Europe and development of nationalistic and revolutionary ideologies in the nineteenth century; and the world wars of the twentieth century.