The textbook was developed as part of the three-year Erasmus+ Strategic Partnership project Teaching European History in the 21st Century (TEH21) and nearly a hundred historians and historians from eight European universities participated in its creation. On behalf of Charles University, ten experts from the Charles University Faculty of Arts (ÚSD, ÚČD, ÚHSD and SIAS) contributed to the textbook, while Jaroslav Ira (ÚSD) was also one of the editors.
In almost a thousand pages and twenty-nine thematic chapters, divided into subchapters on early modern (1500-1800), modern (1800-1900) and contemporary (1900-2000) history, the textbook deals with the fundamental phenomena and processes that have shaped modern Europe, while attempting to capture their manifestations in a variety of settings and from a variety of perspectives.
The book is available in Open Access mode on the Open Book Publisher website. A video-lecture for each chapter exists on the project’s YouTube channel. A set of sources is available on the Historiana platform website. There is also a manual for using the textbook in an international learning environment.
The European Experience brings together the expertise of nearly a hundred historians from eight European universities to internationalise and diversify the study of modern European history, exploring a grand sweep of time from 1500 to 2000. Offering a valuable corrective to the Anglocentric narratives of previous English-language textbooks, scholars from all over Europe have pooled their knowledge on comparative themes such as identities, cultural encounters, power and citizenship, and economic development to reflect the complexity and heterogeneous nature of the European experience. Rather than another grand narrative, the international author teams offer a multifaceted and rich perspective on the history of the continent of the past 500 years. Each major theme is dissected through three chronological sub-chapters, revealing how major social, political and historical trends manifested themselves in different European settings during the early modern (1500–1800), modern (1800–1900) and contemporary period (1900–2000).
This resource is of utmost relevance to today’s history students in the light of ongoing internationalisation strategies for higher education curricula, as it delivers one of the first multi-perspective and truly ‘European’ analyses of the continent’s past. Beyond the provision of historical content, this textbook equips students with the intellectual tools to interrogate prevailing accounts of European history, and enables them to seek out additional perspectives in a bid to further enrich the discipline.
