Heated Rivalries: Making Modern Eastern Europe

Catalog description

Modern Eastern Europe has been one of the most consequential regions of the last two centuries: the site where empires collapsed, nations were created, genocides were carried out, communism was built and broken, and Europe is, once again, at war. This course offers a survey of the region from the nineteenth century to the present, using sport to make its history visible. The class moves through a Habsburg ski race that killed two rivals in 1913, the World Cup Mussolini ran as fascist theatre in 1934, Hungary versus the Soviet Union in a Melbourne pool weeks after the tanks in 1956, the Maksimir football riot many call the day Yugoslavia ended in 1990, and the Sochi Olympics that closed four days before the annexation of Crimea in 2014. While reading each moment in its historical context, we will also consider the questions the region poses. What holds Eastern Europe together as a region, and what tears it apart? Who decides where its borders fall, and on what grounds - religious, ethnic, ideological, imperial? And why, more than two centuries after the modern map of Europe began to take shape, are those questions still being settled? Each week begins with one such moment and asks a key question: how did this come to be? From there, we reconstruct outward - the empires that contained it, the nations that emerged from it, the ideologies that contested it, and the global frames that have shaped how the region is seen and how it sees itself. Along the way, we engage the major historiographical debates that have shaped the field and treat sporting events as historical sources alongside literary, visual, and archival materials in translation. The course will teach you how to read the scoreboard, the crowd, and the ceremony as evidence of how Eastern Europe has been made and unmade before a global audience.