This course is a general introduction to the restless, rapidly developing cultural, intellectual, and political landscape of England, Europe, and Russia in the nineteenth century, including the German Counter-Enlightenment, philosophical idealism, the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, the populist Revolutions of 1848, and new experiments in literary and artistic naturalism. Why did German and English authors turn against the influence of the French Enlightenment? How did German philosophers move beyond the early modern tension between empiricism and rationalism? What is a ‘superfluous man’? Did the reforms instituted by Napoleon fulfill the aims of the French Revolution? What did Tocqueville and Marx think of the so-called ‘Springtime of Nations’? What was the Paris Commune? Through independent reading, guided reading, lectures, and in-class discussion, students acquire a substantial introductory knowledge of the cultural, intellectual, and political history of nineteenth-century England, Europe, and Russia.