The purpose of history is to recreate in the mind of the historian the full range of individual and collective human experience in the past.
Historians employ a number of different approaches in the process of recreation.
But their overall goal is to understand people in the past in a manner which, while comprehensible to the present, remains as faithful as possible to the past. This course examines the history of Europe and Europeans during the Early-Modern Period. We will explore the different ways people in that period made their present and the different ways historians have attempted to recreate their past and ours. This course pays special attention to one of the central preoccupations of early-modern European scholarship, namely what were the causes for the expansion of Europe, the conquest of the Americas, and the triumph of modernism in the early modern era. Topics include the Protestant Reformation, the rise of individualism, the military and agrarian revolutions and the English Revolution.