Lectures on Twentieth Century Europe

Welcome to The History Guide's Lectures on Twentieth Century Europe. These lectures were written over the past five years and served as the basis for my upper division European history classes at Florida Atlantic University (Boca Raton and Davie, FL) and Meredith College (Raleigh, NC).

The lectures presented here are between five and ten pages in length and are meant to be downloaded and printed. Of course, you can read them online if you wish. Please keep in mind that these lectures are intended for your education and edification and not for publication by anyone but myself. If you would like to link any of these pages to your own or use them in a classroom exercise or as a citation in one of your essays, please be courteous enough to let me know about it by sending email to . You should also read my Conditions of Use statement for particulars. If you are looking for my credentials, please consult my curriculum vitae.

The primary thrust of the lectures is modernism. My approach is intellectual in that I am trying to discover how centuries of devotion to human reason, or faith, or both together have created the twentieth century as a century of crisis. We begin our journey with Nietzsche and Freud and end with the fall of Soviet-style communism. The opinions expressed here are my own but I am sharing them with you because I believe that education is something much more than a classroom and grades. If I appear to have contributed something to your own knowledge of yourself and others, please share that knowledge with me.

Navigational Hints
Throughout these lectures you will encounter images and links. Clicking on an image will take you to a related page of information (located at this site) and a list of resources for further exploration. If the title of a work is hyperlinked, then that link will take you to a digitized version of that text located on another server. Hyperlinks in UPPER-CASE refer to pages located at this site. All other hyperlinks will take you to related sites on the Internet.

If you would like to see an index of all pages on this site, please use the SITE MAP.

January 10, 2002: This site has been edited and some new documents have been added.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Lecture 1: Random Thoughts on the Intellectual History of Modern Europe

Lecture 2: Nietzsche, Freud and the Thrust Toward Modernism (1)

Lecture 3: Nietzsche, Freud and the Thrust Toward Modernism (2)

Lecture 4: The Great War and Modern Memory -- currently editing

Lecture 5: The Russian Revolution: February - October 1917 (1)

Lecture 6: The Russian Revolution: Red October and the Bolshevik Coup (2)

Lecture 7: The Aftermath of the Bolshevik Revolution

Lecture 8: The Age of Anxiety: Europe in the 1920s (1)

Lecture 9: The Age of Anxiety: Europe in the 1920s (2)