Sources and References

This chapter synthesizes the reading program of HIST 111 with a broader body of modern scholarship on the history of the West from the middle of the seventeenth century to the present. The primary textbooks assigned in the Winter 2025 and Winter 2026 iterations of the course are James Carter and Richard Warren, Sources for Forging the Modern World, second edition (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), and Brian Levack, Edward Muir, and Meredith Veldman, The West: Encounters and Transformations, volume 2, fifth Loose-Leaf edition (Pearson). These works provide the backbone for the chronological narrative. Alongside them, the chapter draws on Eric Hobsbawm’s tetralogy The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875, The Age of Empire, 1875-1914, and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991; Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century; Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945; Eric Foner’s work on Atlantic revolutions and reconstruction; Judith Coffin and Robert Stacey’s Western Civilizations; Lynn Hunt’s studies of the French Revolution and human rights; C. A. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World; Jennifer L. Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic; Ada Ferrer’s Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution; Pekka Hamalainen’s essays on Indigenous power in the Southwest borderlands; and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands. Open-access lecture materials from MIT OpenCourseWare’s Western history surveys, John Merriman’s Yale OpenCourseWare lectures on modern France and Europe since 1871, Cambridge Histories Online volumes on Europe and the Atlantic World, and Stanford’s History Education Group materials on historical thinking were consulted where they illuminate particular topics. Primary-source pedagogy draws on the SlaveVoyages database and Yad Vashem’s online exhibitions. All framing and prose below are original; no lecture content from the University of Waterloo has been reproduced.

Chapter 1: The West as a Question and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis

The phrase the West is not the name of a fixed place but rather a historical argument that people have made in different ways at different times. To write the history of the West from roughly 1650 to the present is therefore to trace how a shifting family of institutions, ideas, and claims about civilization came to be entangled with the fate of the rest of the world. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the lands that would eventually be gathered under this label were exhausted. The General Crisis of the 1600s, as historians such as Geoffrey Parker have described it, brought together the Thirty Years’ War, the Fronde in France, the English Civil Wars, revolts in Catalonia, Portugal, Naples, and the Ukraine, a cooling climate that shortened growing seasons, recurrent plague, and chronic silver shortages. Demographic pressure on thin harvests produced famine and desperation, and confessional rivalry between Catholic and Protestant powers turned ordinary political quarrels into apocalyptic contests.

Confessionalization and the Limits of Religious War

Out of the wreckage of the Wars of Religion a new pattern of church-state cooperation emerged that historians call confessionalization: the disciplining of populations into clearly demarcated Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed communities by rulers who used catechisms, parish registers, and visitation records to make their subjects legible. The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is often remembered as a pragmatic compromise that allowed princes to determine the faith of their territories and quieted Europe’s religious wars, but its more important legacy was the normalization of the sovereign territorial state as the basic unit of European politics. Mercenary violence receded. Standing armies, salaried bureaucracies, and tax collectors advanced.

Science, Skepticism, and the Remaking of Knowledge

In the same decades, a loose network of astronomers, mathematicians, anatomists, and natural philosophers produced what later generations would call the Scientific Revolution. Nicolaus Copernicus’s sun-centered cosmology, Johannes Kepler’s elliptical planetary orbits, Galileo Galilei’s telescopic observations, and Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica of 1687 together displaced the Aristotelian cosmos in which the earth had sat at the center of a nested set of crystalline spheres. Recent scholarship, especially the work of Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, has argued that this transformation was neither as sudden nor as purely rational as earlier textbooks implied; it was embedded in courtly patronage, religious polemic, and the craft knowledge of instrument makers, midwives, and apothecaries. Still, the cumulative effect was a new confidence that the natural world could be described in mathematical regularities, and that experiment could adjudicate between rival claims about nature. That confidence would become one of the West’s most consequential exports.

Chapter 2: Absolutism, State-Building, and the First Global Economy

The Sun King and His Rivals

The political form most closely associated with late seventeenth-century Europe is absolutism, a theory and practice of monarchical power in which the king claimed unchecked authority over legislation, taxation, and religion. Louis XIV of France became the model. His court at Versailles choreographed the nobility into dependent spectators, his minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert rationalized taxation and promoted manufactures, and his wars over Flanders, the Rhine, and the Spanish succession pressed the boundaries of France outward at enormous human cost. Jacques-Benigne Bossuet provided a theological justification in Politics Drawn from the Words of Holy Scripture, arguing that the king ruled by divine right. Yet the reality fell short of the theory. Peter Campbell, William Beik, and others have shown that French absolutism worked only through negotiation with provincial elites, guilds, and parlements.

Elsewhere the pattern varied. Prussia under Frederick William, the Great Elector, and later Frederick the Great, built a militarized service state around the Junker nobility. Russia under Peter the Great and Catherine the Great imposed westernizing reforms from above and pushed the empire toward the Baltic and the Black Sea. The Habsburg monarchy held together a multilingual composite realm around Vienna. Against this grain, England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 expelled James II, installed William and Mary on conditions set by Parliament, and produced John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, with its argument that legitimate authority rested on the consent of the governed. The Dutch Republic, a commercial federation rather than a monarchy, stood as a living rebuke to the Sun King’s pretensions.

Oceans, Slave Ships, and Plantation Capitalism

Behind the dynastic wars a different revolution was underway. European trading companies, chartered by their monarchs and financed by joint-stock capital, pushed into the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific worlds. The Dutch VOC, the English East India Company, and French commercial ventures constructed a web of factories, forts, and fleets that tied together the sugar islands of the Caribbean, the spice archipelagoes of Southeast Asia, and the silver mines of Spanish America. The most consequential link in this web was the transatlantic slave trade. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, more than twelve million Africans were forced across the ocean. The SlaveVoyages database, built by David Eltis and colleagues, has made the scale and routes of this traffic visible in granular detail.

Jennifer Morgan’s Reckoning with Slavery has underscored how gender and kinship were reshaped by the slave trade: enslaved women bore both the productive and reproductive burdens of plantation life, and their children inherited the status of their mothers under the legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem. Sugar reached European tables, calicoes dressed European bodies, and silver from Potosi flowed through Seville and onward to Canton in exchange for Chinese porcelain and tea. What contemporaries experienced as the refinement of European manners was inseparable from a brutal Atlantic infrastructure of violence.

Chapter 3: The Enlightenment and the Age of Atlantic Revolutions

Reason, Publicity, and the Republic of Letters

In the eighteenth century, European intellectuals turned the new confidence in natural philosophy toward the human world. The Enlightenment was never a single program; it was a sprawling conversation carried on in coffeehouses, salons, Masonic lodges, academies, and the pages of journals and cheap pamphlets. Jurgen Habermas described the emergence of a critical public sphere in which private individuals debated matters of common concern. Voltaire turned satire against religious intolerance and judicial cruelty. Montesquieu theorized the separation of powers and tried to link forms of government to climate and mores. Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert edited the Encyclopedie, a multivolume compendium designed, in Diderot’s phrase, to change the common way of thinking. Immanuel Kant defined enlightenment as humanity’s emergence from its self-imposed minority through the public use of reason. David Hume and Adam Smith in Scotland investigated the passions, sympathy, and commercial sociability. Jean-Jacques Rousseau insisted that civilization had corrupted a naturally free humanity and that legitimate politics must rest on a general will.

The Enlightenment was also a project with sharp internal contradictions. Its universalist claims about human dignity coexisted with racist taxonomies of humankind produced by figures such as Linnaeus and Blumenbach, and with a persistent confinement of women to the domestic sphere, which Mary Wollstonecraft attacked in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Much recent scholarship, including Sebastian Conrad’s and Jennifer Pitts’s, has insisted that the Enlightenment must be read as a global phenomenon in which European thinkers drew on knowledge from China, India, the Ottoman Empire, and the Americas even as they rehearsed claims about European superiority.

Three Revolutions and Their Echo

Between 1776 and 1804, a series of linked upheavals on both sides of the Atlantic broke through the limits of the old regime. The American Revolution began as a tax dispute between British settlers and their metropolis and issued in a federal republic grounded on a written constitution, a bill of rights, and the notion that sovereignty belonged to the people. The French Revolution of 1789 went further and faster. The summoning of the Estates-General to address a fiscal crisis released long-pent demands for political reform; the storming of the Bastille, the August 4 abolition of feudal privileges, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen dismantled the old regime in a few months. The Revolution then radicalized through the deposition of Louis XVI, the Jacobin republic, the Terror presided over by Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, and the Thermidorian reaction. Lynn Hunt has shown how these events reconfigured not only politics but also the emotional repertoire of citizenship.

The third revolution was the one metropolitan thinkers had least expected. In 1791, enslaved people on the sugar island of Saint-Domingue rose against their masters. Under leaders including Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henri Christophe, and against French, Spanish, and British armies, they built the Haitian Revolution, which in 1804 produced the second independent state in the Americas and the first to be founded on the abolition of slavery. Michel-Rolph Trouillot argued in Silencing the Past that European historiography long refused to treat Haiti as thinkable; Ada Ferrer’s Freedom’s Mirror has reconstructed the way news of Haiti reverberated through the Caribbean and the United States. Taken together, these revolutions transformed the political vocabulary of the Atlantic world: citizenship, nation, rights, constitution, and republic acquired their modern resonance.

Napoleon and the Export of Revolution

The revolutionary decade ended with Napoleon Bonaparte, a Corsican general who rode the republic’s armies into the role of consul and then emperor. His civil code rationalized French law, his concordat reconciled church and state, and his armies carried principles of legal equality, weights and measures, and secular administration across a Europe that stretched from Portugal to the gates of Moscow. His defeat by a coalition of Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Britain at Leipzig and Waterloo left behind a Congress of Vienna led by Metternich that tried to restore dynastic legitimacy and contain revolution. The restoration was real, but the genie was out of the bottle.

Chapter 4: Industrialization, Class, and the Remaking of Everyday Life

Steam, Coal, and the Factory System

While the battlefields of Europe were still smoking, a second, quieter revolution was transforming northern England. The Industrial Revolution began in textile manufacture, iron-making, and coal mining, accelerated by the application of James Watt’s improved steam engine, and spread from Lancashire across the British Midlands, then to Belgium, the Rhineland, northern France, the United States, and eventually Germany, northern Italy, and Japan. Eric Hobsbawm’s Age of Capital and Age of Empire chronicled how the resulting productive machine turned out cotton cloth, rails, locomotives, and pig iron in volumes that dwarfed the handicraft world that preceded it.

The human cost was staggering. Peasants pushed off the land by enclosure crowded into insanitary industrial towns where the rhythms of the factory bell replaced those of the agricultural year. Women and children worked in mines and mills for wages that barely covered bread. Friedrich Engels’s The Condition of the Working Class in England remains a harrowing document of Manchester in the 1840s. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class argued that the modern proletariat did not simply fall out of the factory system; it made itself through chapels, friendly societies, trade unions, strikes, and the long struggle for the vote.

Liberal Political Economy and Its Critics

Industrialization demanded a language to describe and justify itself. The British classical political economy of Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, and later John Stuart Mill became the quasi-official creed of the new order, teaching that free trade, sound money, and the discipline of the market would produce general prosperity. Critics answered that laissez-faire was a license for suffering. Romantic writers lamented the satanic mills. Utopian socialists such as Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and Henri de Saint-Simon sketched cooperative alternatives. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and later in Capital, theorized industrial society as a class struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat driven by the exploitation of labor, and predicted that the same contradictions that produced capitalism would also produce its grave-diggers.

Chapter 5: Nation, Citizen, Empire (1815-1914)

1848 and the Springtime of Peoples

The mid-century crisis of the old order came in the revolutions of 1848. Beginning in Palermo and Paris, revolts swept through Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Venice, Budapest, and Prague. Liberals demanded constitutions and freedom of the press, nationalists demanded unified states along linguistic lines, and workers demanded a right to work and bread. The Frankfurt Parliament tried to build a liberal German nation-state; the French Second Republic introduced universal male suffrage only to produce the election of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who engineered a coup and refashioned himself as Emperor Napoleon III. By 1849 the insurrections had largely been crushed by Habsburg and Russian armies, but the agenda they set shaped European politics for the rest of the century. As Hobsbawm put it, 1848 was the revolution that failed, yet its failure redefined possible futures.

Liberal Nationalism, Unification, and the New Mass Politics

In the decades after 1848, nation-building proceeded through the top-down diplomacy and warfare of figures such as Camillo di Cavour in Piedmont and Otto von Bismarck in Prussia. Italy was unified by 1861, Germany by 1871. The United States fought a civil war between 1861 and 1865 that preserved the Union and destroyed plantation slavery; Eric Foner’s Reconstruction shows how the brief postwar experiment in multiracial democracy was rolled back by terror and compromise. In Britain, the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884 extended the male franchise, while Gladstone and Disraeli competed to shape a liberal and a conservative answer to industrial society. Late nineteenth-century Europe became the age of mass politics: mass newspapers, mass parties, mass schools, and eventually mass leisure.

Socialism and organized labor entered politics too. The International Workingmen’s Association (the First International), the German Social Democratic Party, and a wave of trade unions built the institutional infrastructure of working-class life. Feminists, temperance reformers, and religious revivalists joined them in the expanding arena of civil society. At the same time, new forms of exclusion sharpened: scientific racism, antisemitism dramatized by the Dreyfus affair in France and the Russian pogroms, and anxieties about degeneration marked the underside of the new mass society.

The New Imperialism and the Scramble for Africa

Between roughly 1880 and 1914, European powers partitioned almost all of Africa and much of Asia and the Pacific into colonies, protectorates, and spheres of influence. The Berlin Conference of 1884-85 choreographed the Scramble for Africa, in which Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, and Spain redrew the political map of a continent without consulting its inhabitants. King Leopold II’s personal rule over the Congo Free State, documented by Adam Hochschild in King Leopold’s Ghost, produced mass atrocities in the service of rubber extraction. In India, Britain consolidated the Raj after the 1857 rebellion. France extended its authority over Indochina and the Maghreb. The United States, after 1898, took Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and a Pacific sphere.

The ideologies of New Imperialism mixed social Darwinism, the civilizing mission, Christian missionary enterprise, geopolitical rivalry, and straightforward economic interest. C. A. Bayly’s The Birth of the Modern World insists that we read this phase of empire not as a purely European story but as an interconnected global history in which Egyptian, Indian, Chinese, and African actors continually reshaped the terms of imperial rule. In North America and Australasia, settler regimes pursued what Patrick Wolfe called a logic of elimination toward Indigenous peoples, from the U.S. army campaigns on the Plains to the Canadian residential school system, reservation policies, and the confinement and dispossession described in Pekka Hamalainen’s work on the Comanche and the wider Southwest borderlands.

Chapter 6: The Great War and the Collapse of the European Order

Long Fuses and Short Triggers

The immediate cause of the First World War was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The deeper causes were the rigid alliance systems, the arms race, the convulsions of the Ottoman and Habsburg multinational empires, the mass nationalism that had been educated into European populations, and the confidence of general staffs in rapid offensive victory. Within weeks, mobilizations cascaded. By autumn the Western Front had frozen into a line of trenches from the North Sea to the Swiss Alps, and the Eastern Front was in constant, bloody motion.

Industrial War and Its Consequences

The war of 1914-1918 was the first total war on a European scale. Machine guns, barbed wire, quick-firing artillery, poison gas, submarines, aircraft, and tanks turned battlefields into killing zones. Nine million soldiers died, and many millions more were wounded, shell-shocked, or displaced. The home fronts were mobilized too: women entered factories and nursing services in unprecedented numbers, states rationed food and fuel, propaganda shaped a compulsory patriotism, and imperial troops from Senegal, Algeria, India, Vietnam, and the Caribbean fought for European metropoles that still denied them citizenship. By 1917 the Russian Empire had collapsed; the Bolshevik Revolution of October brought Lenin and the Communist Party to power with the promise of bread, peace, and land. In 1918 a devastating influenza pandemic swept the exhausted world.

The Treaty of Versailles of 1919 redrew the map of Europe and the Middle East, dissolved the Habsburg, Ottoman, Russian, and German empires, and created new states from Finland to Yugoslavia. It saddled Germany with the war’s blame and its bill. John Maynard Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace predicted that the settlement would poison European politics. Peter Jackson’s 2018 documentary They Shall Not Grow Old and Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 The Battle of Algiers offer two very different cinematic reckonings with twentieth-century war whose methodological claims reward careful critical attention.

Chapter 7: Interwar Crises and the Second World War

The Weimar Decade and the Global Depression

The 1920s opened with revolutionary aftershocks, hyperinflation in central Europe, and an anxious attempt to restore prewar stability through the gold standard and the Locarno diplomacy. Weimar Germany experimented with social democracy, avant-garde art, and sexual liberation under the permanent threat of paramilitary violence from the far right and far left. The Great Depression triggered by the 1929 Wall Street crash shattered what remained of international cooperation. Unemployment in Germany and the United States reached a quarter of the labor force. Faith in liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy eroded.

The Fascist Temptation

In Italy, Benito Mussolini had already seized power in 1922 with his march on Rome, giving a name to the movement of violent paramilitaries, corporatist economics, anti-socialism, and ultra-nationalism that came to be called fascism. In Germany, Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist movement grew on the back of the depression, captured the chancellorship in January 1933, and within months dismantled the Weimar constitution through the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act. The Nazi regime rearmed Germany, remilitarized the Rhineland, annexed Austria, dismembered Czechoslovakia under the Munich agreement of 1938, and invaded Poland in September 1939. Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War delivered a third fascist-leaning regime. Mark Mazower’s Dark Continent argues that in the 1930s liberal democracy looked, to many Europeans, like a failed experiment rather than a natural destiny.

Total War and the Holocaust

The Second World War was fought in Europe, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, North Africa, and across Asia and the Pacific. Its death toll, including civilians, is estimated between fifty and seventy million. Nazi Germany pursued a war of conquest and racial extermination in the East that Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands has placed at the center of twentieth-century history. The Holocaust, or Shoah, was the systematic murder of approximately six million Jews, alongside Roma, disabled people, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish intellectuals, and homosexuals, carried out through ghettos, Einsatzgruppen killing squads, and the death factories of Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and Auschwitz. Yad Vashem’s online collections preserve the testimonies, artworks, and biographies of victims and survivors whose voices resist abstraction into mere statistics.

The war ended in 1945 with the unconditional surrender of Germany and, after the American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of Japan. It left Europe physically devastated, morally exhausted, and permanently reduced in relation to the new superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals attempted a novel form of legal reckoning with state crime, and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights represented a fragile attempt to set new limits on what states could do to their own people.

Chapter 8: The Cold War, Decolonization, and the Postwar Settlement

Two Blocs and a Divided Europe

From 1947, the wartime alliance dissolved into the Cold War between a U.S.-led capitalist bloc and a Soviet-led communist bloc. The Marshall Plan poured American dollars into Western European reconstruction; the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to containment; the Berlin blockade and airlift of 1948-1949 dramatized the stakes; NATO and the Warsaw Pact institutionalized the divide. Germany was partitioned, and in 1961 the Berlin Wall made the division concrete. Tony Judt’s Postwar demonstrates how Western Europe rebuilt itself around an ambitious welfare state, mass consumption, decolonization under duress, and the tentative institutions of European integration that began with the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, continued through the Treaty of Rome in 1957, and culminated much later in the European Union.

Eastern Europe took a different path. Stalinist regimes imposed one-party rule, collectivized agriculture, and prosecuted show trials. Uprisings in East Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, Prague in 1968, and Gdansk through the late 1970s and 1980 were repeatedly suppressed. Yet, as Judt and Padraic Kenney have argued, civil society never wholly disappeared, and the long erosion of communist legitimacy was already underway before the dramatic finale of 1989.

Decolonization and the Global South

The postwar decades also saw the rapid unraveling of European empires. India gained independence from Britain in 1947 at the cost of a partition with Pakistan that killed hundreds of thousands and displaced fifteen million. Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah became the first sub-Saharan African state to achieve independence in 1957. France fought brutal colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria before conceding defeat; the Algerian war of 1954-1962 shaped a generation of anti-colonial thought including Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. The Radiolab podcast’s treatment of the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and recent scholarship by Caroline Elkins have reopened the record of British counterinsurgency violence. The Bandung Conference of 1955 announced a Non-Aligned Movement that sought a third way between the Cold War blocs. The Korean and Vietnam wars, the Cuban Revolution of 1959, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 turned decolonization and Cold War rivalry into an interlocking global conflict.

1968 and the Long Cultural Revolution

By the late 1960s the postwar order was under strain from within. Student protests in Paris, Prague, Mexico City, and Berkeley; the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy; the women’s liberation and gay liberation movements; and new currents in environmentalism, civil rights, and anti-war activism together constituted the long 1968. Historians such as Arthur Marwick and Gerd-Rainer Horn have argued that the cultural consequences of this moment were more enduring than its immediate political ones, reshaping gender relations, sexual mores, and popular understandings of authority.

Chapter 9: The West After the Cold War and in the Contemporary Era

Neoliberalism, 1989, and the End-of-History Mood

The economic crises of the 1970s, triggered by the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary system, the 1973 oil shock, stagflation, and the exhaustion of postwar industrial models, opened the way for a new political economy. Neoliberalism, associated with Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Ronald Reagan in the United States, and a wave of deregulation, privatization, and marketization across the West, rolled back the postwar welfare compromise. In 1989 a cascade of peaceful revolutions in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania dismantled the Eastern bloc, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself dissolved. Francis Fukuyama famously proposed that this moment represented the end of history, the global vindication of liberal democracy and market capitalism.

The mood did not last. The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, the Rwandan genocide of 1994, and the Russian economic collapse of the same decade reminded observers that the post-Cold War order was neither as peaceful nor as universally liberal as triumphalist rhetoric implied. European integration deepened with the Maastricht Treaty of 1992, the introduction of the euro in 1999-2002, and successive enlargements eastward.

Globalization, Migration, and New Populisms

The decades around the year 2000 were shaped by accelerating globalization: the World Trade Organization, transnational production chains, the internet, and mass migration for work, refuge, and reunion. Saskia Sassen’s studies of global cities and Adam Tooze’s Crashed on the 2008 financial crisis trace how interconnected and fragile the resulting system became. The attacks of 11 September 2001, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 global financial crisis, the Arab uprisings of 2011, and the European refugee crisis of 2015 each exposed limits in the post-1989 consensus. In the 2010s, right-wing populist and nationalist movements reshaped politics in the United States, Britain, France, Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Brazil. The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016 in the process that came to be known as Brexit. Climate change, pandemic disease, and the war in Ukraine from 2022 pressed fresh questions about the coherence and the boundaries of a Western world that had once seemed self-evident.

Historical Thinking and the Present

What links the topics surveyed here is not a teleology of progress but a set of questions about continuity and change, evidence and interpretation, inclusion and exclusion. The discipline of history asks how the surviving traces of the past — archival documents, account books, photographs, films, oral testimony, material objects, digital data — can be read to produce accountable claims about people who can no longer answer back. The craft depends on taking sources seriously as things made by particular people for particular purposes, and on putting them in conversation with the findings of other historians. In the story of the West from 1650 to the present, that craft has had to reckon with cosmopolitan Enlightenment and plantation slavery, with revolutionary constitutions and colonial violence, with welfare states and world wars, with the horrors of the Holocaust and the aspirations of decolonization, with the expansion of rights and the persistence of exclusion. The West is best understood not as a finished civilization handed down from the past but as a contested, unfinished argument about who counts as “we.” Learning how to enter that argument with evidence and care is finally what a course like this one exists to teach.