A review of The Mighty Continent in the The Washington Free Beacon:
“Too often academic treatises these days are insufferably ‘woke’ or even unreadable, thanks to their postmodern jargon,” explains the author of this refreshingly countercultural work. “This book, by contrast, consists of old-fashioned, meat-and-potatoes history.” After lecturing on European history at UC Berkeley and Penn, Professor Walter McDougall is clearly exasperated at the way his craft has been wrecked by what he lists as “postmodernism, deconstructionism, critical race theory, radical feminism, and ‘wokeness’ in general.”
Instead of merely ranting against those ideologies, however, he has shown what can be achieved if historians simply ignore them. Drawing on his half-century of lectures, he has written a history of Europe from the Renaissance to 1945 that is erudite, thought-provoking, and engaging, proving that sweeping surveys of the past can still be written in the grand old style. This book is a triumphant return to proper history, the way it was written before the commanding heights of the Academy were captured by the Left. It’s so old-fashioned that there are no endnotes or bibliography, but is none the worse for that.
Professor McDougall expertly covers half a millennium of great movements, revolutions, and wars with a deft touch, and the underlying belief—cue shock, horror, and pearl-clutching from the Left—that “Europeans invented the modern world.” He tells the remarkable tale of the Renaissance, and Protestant and Catholic Reformations, imperialism, Louis XIV’s absolutism, the decline of magic and rise of science, British parliamentary evolution, the Scottish and French Enlightenments, more imperialism, the (highly contrasting) American and French Revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, the Industrial Revolution, the rise of Bolshevism and Fascism, and the horrors of the two world wars. Somehow, he manages to do this intelligently and accurately in only 422 pages.
