The Mighty Continent

In 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 be: exciting, uplifting, ironic, not infrequently tragic—and above all, fair to the figures who made modern Europe so world-shakingly powerful and inescapably influential.