Alan Spitzer

Thursdays, February 4 - April 1     3:30 - 5:30 p.m. 9 sessions
Vincent Club, 71 Brimmer Street

In 1890 Europe seemed poised at the peak of three-quarters of a century of unparalleled industrial growth and material progress – the center of empires covering a considerable portion of the earth’s surface.

For the plays by Aeschylus, please obtain “Aeschylus I – Oresteia,” translated and with an introduction by Richard Lattimore, University of Chicago Press, 1953.

The first fourteen years of the twentieth century would be recalled nostalgically as la belle epoque by those who occupied the economic and social summit. But hardly such a lovely era for the millions who toiled on the land or worked in mines and mills for miserable wages with little support from a public safety net. The pervasive optimism of the period was qualified by sharpened class conflict, and a cultural clash that pitted those concerned with preserving a threatened past against those eager to embrace a dynamic future.

While we shall try to reconstruct the life and thought of peoples who could not anticipate the coming catastrophe, our interpretations are inevitably shadowed by knowledge of the consequences of the First World War.

The following works (out of an immense bibliography) are suggested:

• Barbara Tuchman. The Proud Tower. A Portrait of the World Before the War 1890-1914
• Eric Hobsbawm. The Age of Empire. 1875-1914
• Philipp Blom. The Vertigo Years. Europe 1900-1914
• H. Stuart Hughes. Consciousness and Society
• Oron J. Hale. The Great Illusion. 1900-1914

Alan Spitzer, who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University, retired to Boston after thirty years of teaching history at the University of Iowa. He has published books as well as articles on the history of France and the philosophy of history. This is his sixth semester as a group leader for BHS.