The Mighty Continent

A renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning historian recounts the dramatic tale of modern Europe’s ascent.

In The Mighty Continent: A Candid History of Modern Europe, Walter McDougall, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, provides readers with a sweeping historical narrative that takes in the political, economic, social, intellectual, and cultural developments in the major European nations from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century.

Along the way, McDougall 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, attuned to European failings yet refreshingly free from cloying moralism, 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.

Author Biography

Walter A. McDougall is the Alloy-Ansin Professor of International Relations and Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. A graduate of Amherst College and a Vietnam veteran, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1974 and taught at UC Berkeley for thirteen years before coming to Penn, where he teaches U.S., European, and Asia/Pacific diplomatic history. McDougall’s books include . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (winner of the Pulitzer Prize); Let the Sea Make a Noise: A History of the North Pacific From Magellan to MacArthur; Freedom Just Around the Corner: A New American History 1585–1828, Throes of Democracy: The American Civil War Era 1829–1877, and The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest. McDougall loves Chicago sports, Christian theology, and all genres of music from Bach to Bob Dylan. He and his “Wonder Wife” Jonna reside in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.