HIST-316 Eastern Europe in the Age of Empire (3)

This course introduces intersecting areas of the Austro-Hungarian (Habsburg), Prussian-German, Russian, and Ottoman empires with emphasis on the era from the 1770s through World War I. Theoretical and case-study analyses demystify intermingled peoples who lived across the heterogenous region between Berlin and Moscow, spoke diverse languages, and practiced a variety of religious sects. The course explores how, even as modern infrastructures, bureaucracies, industries, and social movements pervaded each empire, the rise of ethnic nationalism steadily took root among these hybrid populations, until the political destruction of all four empires amid the war’s end yielded nation-states that ultimately signified an end to the tense but sometimes fruitful prior coexistence.