Modern Europe History Reading List

General Works

  • Jerrold Seigel, Modernity and Bourgeois Life: Society, Politics, and Culture in England, France and Germany since 1750 (Cambridge University Press 2012)
  • Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton University Press 2009)
  • Kitchen, Martin. A History of Modern Germany, 1800-2000.
  • Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (Vintage 2000)
  • Sperber, Jonathan. The European Revolutions, 1848-1851.
  • Walter L. Arnstein, Britain Yesterday and Today, 1830 to the Present, 8th ed.
  • Wright, Gordon. France in Modern Times.

Industrialization and Class

  • Kocka, Jurgen and Allen Mitchell, eds., Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth-century Europe
  • Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe From 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 2003 ed.)
  • Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966).

Nationalism

  • Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities.
  • Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality.
  • Smith, Anthony D. The Cultural Foundations of Nations: Hierarchy, Covenant, and Republic.

Gender

  • Shoemaker, Robert and Mary Vincent, eds. Gender & History in Western Europe.
  • Scott, Joan Wallach. “Gender: a Useful Category of Historical Analysis,’ American Historical Review 91 (December 1986): 1053-1075.
  • Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Gender in History.

WWI

  • Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: the Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age
  • Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory (25th anniversary edition, 2000)
  • John Horne, ed., A Companion to World War I (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010)
  • Joll, James and Gordon Martel. Origins of the First World War (2007 ed.).

Interwar Europe

  • Evans, Richard. The Coming of the Third Reich.
  • Fitzpatrick, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times.
  • Griffin, Roger. Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler.
  • Jackson, Gabriel. The Spanish Republic and the Civil War, 1931-1939.
  • Payne, Stanley. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945.
  • Peukert, Detlev. The Weimar Republic.
  • Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945 (Univ. California, 2004)

WWII and the Holocaust

  • Bell, P.M.H. The Origins of the Second World War, 3rd edition, 2007.
  • Evans, Richard. The Third Reich at War.
  • Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944
  • Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Harvard University Press 2003)
  • Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (Harper 1998)
  • Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (Basic Books 2010)

Postwar

  • Arthur Marwick, British Society Since 1945 (Penguin, 2003)
  • Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (Oxford University Press, 2011)
  • Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente (Harvard, 2005)
  • Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945.
  • Kotkin, Stephen. Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970-2000.
  • Lebow, Richard Ned, et. al., The Politics of Memory in Postwar Europe.
  • Stephen Cohen, Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives. From Stalinism to the New Cold War (Columbia U. Press, 2009)