A Timeless Classic of Societal Customs, Cultural Disputes, and The Cost of Non-Conformity Henry James' novella Daisy Miller, features one of his greatest heroines. At first glance it seems to be a simple story of a lovely young, independent American girl traveling through Europe. But her flouting of social conventions has the potential to lead to catastrophe as she disrupts the rigid social rules of the Old World, attracting and scandalizing all...

When the lights go out one night, no one panics. Not yet. The lights always come back on soon, don't they? Surely it's a glitch, a storm, a malfunction. But something seems strange about this night. Across Europe, controllers watch in disbelief as electrical grids collapse. There is no power, anywhere. A former hacker and activist, Piero investigates a possible cause of the disaster. The authorities don't believe him, and he soon becomes a prime suspect...

"A Tramp Abroad" is a work of travel literature, including a mixture of autobiography and fictional events, by American author Mark Twain, published in 1880. The book details a journey by the author, with his friend Harris (a character created for the book, and based on his closest friend, Joseph Twichell), through central and southern Europe. While the stated goal of the journey is to walk most of the way, the men find themselves using other forms...

Begin your course with a geographic overview of Eastern Europe, a region that begins at the Baltic Sea in the north and spans 20 countries to the Black Sea in the south. Here, Professor Liulevicius introduces you to the key themes of this course: Eastern Europe’s remarkable diversity, it shifting borders, and its separateness from—and connections with—the West.

Americans call the Second World War "the Good War." But before it even began, America's ally Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens--and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war's end, German and Soviet killing sites fell behind the Iron Curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Assiduously researched, deeply humane,...

William Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," is a classic comedy of mistaken identities, a device employed in a number of the bard's plays, which is believed to have been written sometime between 1601 and 1602. When Viola is shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria she is separated from her twin brother Sebastian, who she mistakenly believes to be dead. With the help of the ship captain who rescues her, she enters into the service of Duke Orsino, who has fallen...

"Unlike World War I, when the horrors of battle were largely confined to the front, World War II reached into the lives of ordinary people in an unprecedented way. Entire countries were occupied, millions were mobilized for the war effort, and in the end, the vast majority of the war's dead were non-combatant men, women, and children. Inhabitants of German-occupied Europe--the war's deadliest killing ground--experienced forced labor, deportation,...

This spellbinding creation by Catalan architect Antoni Gaudi interprets the Gothic cathedral through Gaudi's visionary, modernist style. Study the striking sculpted decoration of the exterior portals, the dreamlike interior with its columns fashioned as stylized trees, and the powerful Christian iconography of this unique melding of the traditional and the radically new.

The book that made Mark Twain famous and introduced the world to that obnoxious and ubiquitous character: the American tourist Based on a series of letters first published in American newspapers, The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's hilarious and insightful account of an organized tour of Europe and the Holy Land undertaken in 1867.   With his trademark blend of skepticism and sincerity, Twain casts New World eyes on the people and places of the...

Daisy Miller, an innocent yet bold American girl, runs afoul of the European code of conduct at the turn of the twentieth century.