Europe — A History

A single-volume history of Europe from prehistory to the 1990s, written to a deliberate structural argument: that the standard narrative of “European history” is really the history of its western half, and that Poland, Hungary, the Balkans, Russia and the Baltic belong in the main text rather than in the margins. Davies runs twelve chronological chapters and breaks them with several hundred short “capsules” on particular topics, plus appendices — a design that lets the book carry detail a continuous narrative would have to drop.

Context: The longest book in this shard by a wide margin and the list’s general-survey entry for Europe, positioned so that the narrower titles around it — Rome, Charlemagne, the Scottish Enlightenment — have something to sit inside.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Norman Davies — the author, a historian of Poland writing the continent from the east as well as the west.
• History — including the book’s own argument about how the subject gets framed.
• Rome — where the narrative starts in earnest.
• Renaissance and Enlightenment — two of the chronological chapters.