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The European Experience: A Multi-Perspective History of Modern Europe, 1500-2000

Jan Hansen, Jochen Hung, Jaroslav Ira, Judit Klement, Sylvain Lesage, Juan Luis Simal, Andrew Tompkins   •   2023

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Individual Resource

Levels and forms of education

Lower Secondary Education

Upper Secondary Education

Post Secondary Education

Tertiary Education

Teacher Training

Resource type

Alternative textbooks

Historic approaches concerned

Cultural History

Economic History

Gender History

Global History

Intellectual History

Local History

Military History

Political History

Social History

Transnational History

Other Approaches

Historic period

14th Century

15th Century

16th Century

17th Century

18th Century

19th Century

20th Century

21st Century

Countries or areas concerned

Europe

Languages

English

Description

The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience. Rather than another grand narrative, the international author teams offer a multifaceted and rich perspective on the history of the continent of the past 500 years. Each major theme is dissected through three chronological sub-chapters, revealing how major social, political and historical trends manifested themselves in different European settings during the early modern (1500–1800), modern (1800–1900) and contemporary period (1900–2000). This resource is of utmost relevance to today’s history students in the light of ongoing internationalisation strategies for higher education curricula, as it delivers one of the first multi-perspective and truly ‘European’ analyses of the continent’s past. Beyond the provision of historical content, this textbook equips students with the intellectual tools to interrogate prevailing accounts of European history, and enables them to seek out additional perspectives in a bid to further enrich the discipline.

Keywords

Identity

citizenship

multiperspectivity

European Experience

early modern history

modern history

contemporary history