Meet 35 of the most influential people who lived during the 200 most difficult years in the history of the West. Between the years 1715 and 1914, the lives of these artists, writers, scientists, and leaders shaped our times and reflected their own. You'll meet such figures as Charles Darwin, Sir Robert Walpole, David Lloyd George, Mary Wollstonecraft, Captain Alfred Dreyfus, Napoleon Bonaparte, and others whose lives represent the crucial forces that shaped European history during two decisive centuries. You'll also examine the transformation of Europe from a world of lord and serf, horse and carriage, superstition and disease into today's modern state of boss and worker, steam and steel, science and medicine. As you grow to understand the living context of European history, you appreciate the great transforming themes embodied by the people who populate this fascinating march. The two most important themes are the movement toward democracy-culminating in the French Revolution-that dominated the first of the two centuries covered, and the Industrial Revolution with the explosion of science and technology that dominated the second. In choosing the characters whose lives most reflect these themes, Professor Steinberg has not confined himself to those who are most often studied-monarchs, politicians, military leaders-but has included scientists, artists, philosophers, and industrialists, and even an entire population threatened with starvation-the Irish.With a fascinating approach to European history, the biographical approach of these 36 lectures provides a fun way to look at the great changes of the period and to educate ourselves about the world.
European History and European Lives: 1715 to 1914
01: History as a “Soft” Science
This lecture is a road map to the period in which the world of Europe becomes like our own and a new “self” set in a new social reality, becomes the dominant actor.
02: Augustus the Strong—Princely Consumption
The life of the Duke of Saxony and King of Poland is far from unique among the rulers of his time and is a way to understand the lost world of “old regime” Europe.
03: Robert Walpole—Politics of Corruption
England's first modern prime minister belongs to an aristocratic, premodern social order. Yet his shrewd, corrupt, and comfortable administration clearly offers a look at our own world beginning to take shape.
04: Frederick the Great—Absolute Absolutist
This monarch's 46 years of rule embody the principle of rational autocracy and reveal its limitations, for no ruler, no matter how brilliant, can avoid the paradoxes built into mortality and human nature.
05: Jean-Jacques Rousseau—A Modern Self
Novelist, philosopher, and political theorist, this major figure of the Enlightenment is the first representative of what becomes our modern sense of self.
06: Samuel Johnson—The “Harmless Drudge”
The most famous literary figure of 18th-century England is himself the subject of the greatest biography in the English language, and represents a new stage in the evolution of modern communications: the emergence of mass media and the public sphere.
07: Maria Theresa—Mother of the Empire
Ruler over a complex of states and territories, but forbidden by gender to claim her title as Holy Roman Empress, this remarkable woman raises for the first time in this course the “Austrian problem” that would dominate European politics from 1740 to 1914.
08: David Hume—The Cheerful Skeptic
Now widely regarded as the greatest philosopher of knowledge, Hume's publication of “A Treatise of Human Nature” in 1739 applies the experimental method to ideas and demolishes all the existing rules of thought.
09: C.P.E. Bach—Selling the Arts
The most distinguished son of J.S. Bach develops an expressive style far different from that of his father and spearheads the emergence of art as a commodity, suddenly available to a new middle-class public.
10: Catherine the Great—Russian Reformer
Seeking to Westernize Russia, Catherine's astonishing successes and equally clamorous failures illustrate the dilemma of striving for her nation's modernity while preserving its soul.
11: Joseph II—The Rational Emperor
Maria Theresa's son is the champion of rule by pure reason, but his attempt to impose rationality unleashes history's law of unintended consequences and spotlights the inherent dilemma of enlightened despotism.
12: Goethe—The Artist as Work of Art
The first bourgeois artist to become a megastar, Goethe is to Germany what Shakespeare is to England; his unleashing of romanticism causes an entire generation to reframe its values.
13: Adam Smith—The Wealth of Nations
A Scottish moral philosopher discovers the nature of modern capitalist markets and the division of labor but sets limits that his champions overlook to this day.
14: Marie Antoinette—Queen Beheaded
A young queen's notorious reputation for pleasure and extravagance comes to symbolize the blindness of the old regime in the face of the need for change.
15: Edmund Burke—The New Conservatism
Rising to high office on the strength of intellect alone, this extraordinary man pens “Reflections on the Revolution in France” and invents modern conservative thought.
16: Robespierre—The Democrat as Terrorist
Terror becomes a modern political concept as this provincial French lawyer's attempt to force people to be free, virtuous, and happy leads to the execution of 40,000 “enemies of the people” and, ultimately, himself.
17: Mary Wollstonecraft—The Rights of Women
Her eventual death after childbirth makes biology her destiny in the most terrible way, but not until the career of this “first feminist” launches a debate whose impact is still felt.
18: Napoleon—The Revolutionary Emperor
The most important life covered in this course represents the implementation throughout Europe by force of the principles of the French Revolution, but reduced and contained in the interests of political order.
19: Metternich—The Spider and the Web
A genius at persuasion makes Metternich Napoleon's greatest adversary (not on the battlefield but over the lacquered tables of diplomacy) as he attempts to restore the balance of power in Europe after 1815.
20: N.M. Rothschild—Financier to the World
The “English” Rothschild provides the financial foundation for Britain's victory over France, but the problem of emancipated Jews as symbols of capitalism and change also helps create modern anti-Semitism.
21: Goya—The Painter as Social Critic
Goya's uncompromising portrait of his times represents a starting point for 19th-century culture, exploiting the new romantic cult of genius to exert influence beyond art's conventional boundaries.
22: Giuseppe Mazzini—Idealist of the Nation
Combining Romanticism with Nationalism, Mazzini creates an explosive mixture that fails to create the mass movement he envisions, even though his ideal of an “Italian people” ultimately becomes reality.
23: George Eliot—A Scandalous Woman
The “greatest English novelist” scandalizes her own generation as both a “professional woman” and as a person “living in sin” reflecting in her great work, “Middlemarch,” - the changes through which she is living.
24: The Irish Starve—The Great Famine
This collective biography of a starving people reflects both the limits of 19th-century liberalism and the problems of population growth, disease, and subsistence.
25: Napoleon III—The Empire of the Boulevards
Obsessed with his uncle's legacy, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte tries to end the instability of French politics by restoring the first Napoleon's system in the “land of revolutions.”
26: Pius IX—The Infallible Pope
The most important pope of the 19th century declares war on the modern secular state and enunciates the doctrine of papal infallibility, setting the terms of the Church's struggle to adapt to the modern world.
27: Richard Wagner—Revolution in Music
The first prophet of the new irrationality and the cult of art seeks to redefine art as an alternative to conventional religion.
28: Marx and Engels—The Perfect Collaboration
Two dramatically different men nevertheless form a perfect working relationship, and their lifelong collaboration alters the course of history.
29: Otto von Bismarck—Blood and Iron
Germany is reunified, without destroying the old absolutist state, by a diplomatic realist whose character is very different from the image handed down by history.
30: Charles Darwin—Origin of Species
Though arriving at Cambridge to study for the ministry, Darwin creates still another crisis in faith, creating the new theory of evolution and almost single-handedly destroying the old account of creation.
31: Queen Victoria— “We are not amused”
Giving her name to an entire era, this remarkable queen makes the British monarchy the popular symbol of the middle classes while becoming the catalyst by which the British political system transforms itself.
32: Friedrich Krupp—The New Plutocracy
Monarchy, feudalism, technology, capitalism, the new sexuality, and the mass press all combine in this family story of a huge industrial concern torn by contradictory forces of modernity and autocracy.
33: Louis Pasteur—Modern Laboratory Science
A French chemist and pioneer microbiologist changes the way we live in this examination of scientific creativity and the structures developed by 19th-century society to make scientific work possible.
34: Count Leo Tolstoy—Lord and Serf
The struggle of Russia to retain its soul while modernizing resurfaces in the story of a privileged aristocrat whose inner journey brings him to a real-life ending far different from its beginnings.
35: Alfred Dreyfus—First Act in the Holocaust
The false accusation of a Jewish French officer is both the last act of the French Revolution of 1789 and the first act of the tragedy that will lead to the Holocaust.
36: David Lloyd George—Champion of the Poor
The youngest character in our series is also one of the most extraordinary, breaking the power of the House of Lords, introducing social security, and creating the modern welfare state.
Overview Course No. 8270
About
Dr. Jonathan Steinberg is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History at the University of Pennsylvania. He completed his undergraduate work at Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge University and served for 30 years as University Lecturer in European History, Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and Vice-Master. Professor Steinberg served as an expert witness in the Commonwealth of Australia War Crimes prosecution and was also appointed to the Historical Commission of the Deutsche Bank A.G. Frankfurt am Mein to examine bank activity under the Nazis. Professor Steinberg is the author of Yesterday's Deterrent: Tirpitz and the Birth of the German Battle Fleet, Why Switzerland?, and All or Nothing: The Axis and the Holocaust. His reviews have appeared in The London Review of Books, The Evening Standard, The Financial Times, and The Times Literary Supplement. Professor Steinberg has written many radio and TV documentaries, including the BBC Radio Four's salute to the U.S. Constitution, Secure in their Persons. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of Franklin College in Lugano, Switzerland, and the Presidential Advisory Commission on Holocaust Assets.
