"Richard J. Evans, bestselling historian of Nazi Germany,
returns with a monumental new addition to the acclaimed Penguin History
of Europe series, covering the period from the fall of Napoleon to the
outbreak of World War I. Evans’s gripping narrative ranges across a
century of social and national conflicts, from the revolutions of 1830
and 1848 to the unification of both Germany and Italy, from the
Russo-Turkish wars to the Balkan upheavals that brought this era of
relative peace and growing prosperity to an end. Among the great themes
it discusses are the decline of religious belief and the rise of secular
science and medicine, the journey of art, music, and literature from
Romanticism to Modernism, the replacement of old-regime punishments by
the modern prison, the end of aristocratic domination and the emergence
of industrial society, and the dramatic struggle of feminists for
women’s equality and emancipation. Uniting the era’s broad-ranging
transformations was the pursuit of power in all segments of life, from
the banker striving for economic power to the serf seeking to escape the
power of his landlord, from the engineer asserting society’s power over
the environment to the psychiatrist attempting to exert science’s power
over human nature itself.
The first single-volume history of
the century, this comprehensive and sweeping account gives the reader a
magnificently human picture of Europe in the age when it dominated the
rest of the globe."