Modern Europe

To the wounded soldiers of the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale was a phantom of mercy, moving through the dark wards of Constantinople with a lantern to check on the suffering.

Long before he stood upon the dusty mounds of the Aegean, Heinrich Schliemann was a boy listening to his impoverished pastor father recite the grand, sweeping battles of the Iliad.

To rule the Habsburg domains in 1848 was to inherit a world fractured by revolution, and Franz Joseph I assumed this burden at just eighteen years old after his uncle Ferdinand I abdicated in the midst of the Hungarian…

For more than forty years, sandwiched between the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and the industrialized slaughter of 1914, Europe experienced a rare interval of regional peace and soaring optimism.

The destruction of European Jewry did not begin in the gas chambers, but in the deliberate dismantling of human dignity.

The global order of the late twentieth century was defined by a war that never officially broke out.