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The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe
Not yet published
Expected 20 Jan 26In The Mighty Continent, the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Walter A. McDougall recounts the truly dramatic tale of modern Europe’s ascent. McDougall serves this history straight up, free of shame, apology, and the cloying moralism so characteristic of today’s supposed scholarship. The result is a work that is not only expertly presented but thrilling.
McDougall’s sweeping narrative takes in the domestic political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural developments in the major European nations from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Along the way, he provides new insights on and interpretations of the Renaissance, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Age of Exploration, the Scientific, French, and Industrial Revolutions, the sources of modernism, the origins of World War I, the rise of totalitarianism, the advance of the European Union, the collapse of communism, and much else.
Comprehensive yet compact, objective yet unabashed, The Mighty Continent is history as it used to exciting, uplifting, ironic, not infrequently tragic—and above all, fair to the figures who made modern Europe so world-shakingly powerful and inescapably influential.
McDougall’s sweeping narrative takes in the domestic political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural developments in the major European nations from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century. Along the way, he provides new insights on and interpretations of the Renaissance, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the Age of Exploration, the Scientific, French, and Industrial Revolutions, the sources of modernism, the origins of World War I, the rise of totalitarianism, the advance of the European Union, the collapse of communism, and much else.
Comprehensive yet compact, objective yet unabashed, The Mighty Continent is history as it used to exciting, uplifting, ironic, not infrequently tragic—and above all, fair to the figures who made modern Europe so world-shakingly powerful and inescapably influential.
- GenresHistory
466 pages, Hardcover
Expected publication January 20, 2026
27 people want to read
About the author
Walter A. McDougall
17 books27 followersWalter A. McDougall is Professor of History and the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania.
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