What historians call the “long nineteenth century,” from 1815 to 1914, was a period of extraordinary peace among the great powers. But the peace was broken by one major disruption: an explosion of European nation-building wars fought between the mid-1850s and mid-1870s (involving Germany, France, Italy, England, Russia, and the Balkans)—not counting major wars outside Europe, including the U.S. Civil War. If this were deemed another Crisis era, and if the turn of the century were regarded as another Awakening era, the result would be one anomalously short cycle (1815 to about 1870) followed by
...more
