Thank you for all of this, Prof. Snyder. You do such a good job of making history understandable. It is so complex that I nearly gave up the first year I started reading it--mostly the 19th c. through the July Crisis. About a year in, everything started to come together. Then when I read S.P.'s "The Gates of Europe" I had to start all over again to familiarize myself with (to me) new characters, new wars, new treaties, new everything. But it was worth it.
Just one thing: I've noticed there have been calls for historical maps. I don't need them because I have them and have studied them. But others don't, else they wouldn't be asking for them. And historical maps have been crucial in helping me to understand what I'm reading. The boundaries of Europe have changed so much over the centuries. If not for historical maps, I would have felt like I was blind had I tried to read history without them. It just occurred to me that there may be copyright issues. Well hmpf. Still, students can't understand history without maps.
Thank you, Prof. Snyder. I really do want other people to read and understand history, because if you stick with it the first year, even when you're ready to throw your arms up in the air and give up because its complexities are so mind-boggling you feel like you'll never be able to remember any of it, there will be a reward: you will start to understand. And the more you read, the better you will understand. And there is nothing like it. Absolutely nothing. I wouldn't trade that understanding for anything in the world.
Thanks for bringing this up, Rose. I too would greatly appreciate some historical maps.
I tried to make screenshots of a couple of the maps shown in the uTube videos of the live course, but couldn’t get the quality to render them legible. Sometimes a pic is worth a lot of words.
Hi, Penelope. Here's what I've done for maps that either are not in my historical atlases, or that make good, handy references so that I don't have to keep looking them up: Wikipedia articles often have good maps. So let's take the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Duchy_of_Lithuania), the Kingdom of Poland, and then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Commonwealth). First of all, you have to keep in mind that these polities were continually expanding and contracting, so a single map won't do. For example, there were several wars in different years between the G.D. of Lithuania and the G.D. of Muscovy over Smolensk.
What I do is to expand the maps in the Wikipedia articles, do a screenshot, then paste them onto a Word document. Make sure you label them according to name and year(s), and keep them in chronological order. You might even want to copy the source's link and paste it to the doc along with the other labels. If you have a printer, you can print them for quick references as you're reading.
You might also want to check out the maps in Paul Robert Magocsi's "A History of Ukraine: The Land and its Peoples." There's also Magocsi's "Historical Atlas of Central Europe," Third Revised and Expanded Ed (2018). My main concern in making the request is that not everyone can afford to buy these books.
Thankyou so much, Rose. Very helpful indeed. I will follow up the links. I've done a lot of expanding Wiki pics then taking screenshots, but hadn't thought of pasting them into Word. Mainly, I have printed them off, as being of a certain age, I still find print much easier for reference and filing than online (!)
Thanks for the laugh, Penelope. I know what it means to be "of a certain age"! I prefer the printed maps, too. Talking of which, My laptop can no longer find my printer. I printed a long article to take with me to the midterm elections last Nov., then a week later, when I went to print out another article, the printer was gone. I've tried the usual (unplugging the printer, then plugging back in), which didn't work. Then I googled the problem, and found a solution, but have no idea what the article is talking about. There is a software engineer who lives across the street from me, and he has been so kind to me. I guess it's time to call him again. Whenever he comes to help me with computer problems, I give him a bag of doggie treats for his dog. My dog doesn't mind!
Hello again, Rose! Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this—occasionally one has to take some time out to go shopping, put around the vacuum , etc.
I'm interested to know more about what Steiner's father, Count Hoyos and the July crisis mean to you. The references to Steiner's father were brief in the source material available to me at the Steiner online library and archive. I knew only that he was "an engineer", that the family were German-speaking, and that when Steiner was born, on 25 February 1861, they were living in Donji Kraljevec, then in Hungary.
There's quite a bit of misinformation about Steiner online, stemming from the usual adversarial forces which aim to obfuscate and confuse. So I suggest you go to the Steiner online library if you want reliable data. Steiner spent his life fighting against the forces that would later break out in full-blown Nazism. Whether, in that, he departed from his parents' views, I do not know. But I do know that as early as 1916 he was bringing out horrific information about the activities of the proto-Nazis at the time.
Hoping you have the time to reply, and thanking you for your input.
Hi again, Penelope! Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you. I don't have the excuses you gave. I NEED to vacuum, but when will I ever get to it? According to the Wikipedia page, "Steiner's father, Johann(es) Steiner (1829–1910), left a position as a gamekeeper[28] in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras, northeast Lower Austria to marry one of the Hoyos family's housemaids, Franziska Blie (1834 Horn – 1918, Horn), a marriage for which the Count had refused his permission. Johann became a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway, and at the time of Rudolf's birth was stationed in Murakirály (Kraljevec) in the Muraköz region of the Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire (present-day Donji Kraljevec in the Međimurje region of northernmost Croatia)."
Hmm. You say you read that he was an engineer. The positions of game keeper and telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway don't fit with your source at the Steiner online library and archive. Social mobility at that time and place were not impossible, but didn't happen as often as it does today. And Rudolf was educated. I don't know enough about the culture of Austria-Hungary to say anything more about it.
The July Crisis means a lot to me. I try to read as much as I can about it. But at this point in time I don't know enough about it to say much more because I haven't read enough. I will say this, though: Looking at it in hindsight, July 1914 may give the impression that one thing simply led to another, but there were other possibilities. It didn't have to happen. The Great War was such a monstrosity, such a waste: The lives lost and ruined, the chaos, cultural upheaval, the loss of confidence in governments, the continued violence in central and eastern Europe after November 1918: wars between states, revolution, counter-revolution, civil wars, political assassination, paramilitary violence. And on and on.
My concern, in my first response to you, was that you might be thinking, because Steiner's father was associated with Count Hoyos, therefore Steiner himself was associated in some way with the aggressive forces agitating for the outbreak of hostilities, commencing the First World War.
I know this not to be true: in fact, Steiner opposed everything associated with those streams right from the very beginning. So, now I see this was not where you were coming from. So far, so good!
As an aside, I had not known Steiner's father was initially a gamekeeper for Count Hoyos. Please discount my own idea that he was "an engineer". I cannot recollect exactly where I picked up that idea, and it may well have been from a secondary or even tertiary source purporting to recount Steiner's familial origins (you know how any given account has been proven to lose veracity in direct proportion to the number of sources it passes through). It strikes me that that part of the Wiki account must be true—it seems to be based on externally verifiable facts. It is, indeed, rather romantic! That Steiner's father had to leave the Count's employ in order to marry Steiner’s future mother tends to suggest that there were higher forces in play than the usual matchmaking scenario.
I now see that your concern centres around the July crisis, and whether the events that took place then could have been avoided.
This is interesting. By Steiner's own account, it was the British no less, in the form of Lord Grey, who passed up an opportunity, at the eleventh hour, to prevent the onset of hostilities.
I wanted to reply to you without undue delay, so you know I am still participating in our exchange. I will now go and hunt down the lecture in which Steiner made these statements. So hang on in there, and I will post again to give you the link to his revelations.
Thank you Dr. Snyder I watched all the lectures and took notes but didn't get through all the readings. This will help hold my feet to the fire on readings.
I also watched all of the lectures on YouTube last fall. Now I'm going to tackle the reading material. -I have read "Bloodlands" and the "Road to Unfreedom"--And then I'll watch the series again in the hopes of keeping up.
Thank you Dr. Snyder for sharing these ever so relevant podcasts for those of us who have not studied world history as much as we wanted. Back to school....listening, my best use of time learning. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I followed the online course quite closely with each session's release. Over the past several years, I've read The Road to Unfreedom, Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny (of course) and now I'm about half-way through Reconstruction of Nations. I am thankful, Prof. Snyder.
I also found them on line at DTI. Digital Texts International. I googled the name of the author and the article and this site came up. I was able to print them out.
I also tuned in for all of the lectures. I thoroughly enjoyed the series, and even though I had done a fair amount of the readings previously, I learned a lot!
Thank you for all of this, Prof. Snyder. You do such a good job of making history understandable. It is so complex that I nearly gave up the first year I started reading it--mostly the 19th c. through the July Crisis. About a year in, everything started to come together. Then when I read S.P.'s "The Gates of Europe" I had to start all over again to familiarize myself with (to me) new characters, new wars, new treaties, new everything. But it was worth it.
Just one thing: I've noticed there have been calls for historical maps. I don't need them because I have them and have studied them. But others don't, else they wouldn't be asking for them. And historical maps have been crucial in helping me to understand what I'm reading. The boundaries of Europe have changed so much over the centuries. If not for historical maps, I would have felt like I was blind had I tried to read history without them. It just occurred to me that there may be copyright issues. Well hmpf. Still, students can't understand history without maps.
Ok, good idea.
Thank you, Prof. Snyder. I really do want other people to read and understand history, because if you stick with it the first year, even when you're ready to throw your arms up in the air and give up because its complexities are so mind-boggling you feel like you'll never be able to remember any of it, there will be a reward: you will start to understand. And the more you read, the better you will understand. And there is nothing like it. Absolutely nothing. I wouldn't trade that understanding for anything in the world.
Thanks for bringing this up, Rose. I too would greatly appreciate some historical maps.
I tried to make screenshots of a couple of the maps shown in the uTube videos of the live course, but couldn’t get the quality to render them legible. Sometimes a pic is worth a lot of words.
Hi, Penelope. Here's what I've done for maps that either are not in my historical atlases, or that make good, handy references so that I don't have to keep looking them up: Wikipedia articles often have good maps. So let's take the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Duchy_of_Lithuania), the Kingdom of Poland, and then the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Lithuanian_Commonwealth). First of all, you have to keep in mind that these polities were continually expanding and contracting, so a single map won't do. For example, there were several wars in different years between the G.D. of Lithuania and the G.D. of Muscovy over Smolensk.
What I do is to expand the maps in the Wikipedia articles, do a screenshot, then paste them onto a Word document. Make sure you label them according to name and year(s), and keep them in chronological order. You might even want to copy the source's link and paste it to the doc along with the other labels. If you have a printer, you can print them for quick references as you're reading.
You might also want to check out the maps in Paul Robert Magocsi's "A History of Ukraine: The Land and its Peoples." There's also Magocsi's "Historical Atlas of Central Europe," Third Revised and Expanded Ed (2018). My main concern in making the request is that not everyone can afford to buy these books.
Thankyou so much, Rose. Very helpful indeed. I will follow up the links. I've done a lot of expanding Wiki pics then taking screenshots, but hadn't thought of pasting them into Word. Mainly, I have printed them off, as being of a certain age, I still find print much easier for reference and filing than online (!)
Thanks for the laugh, Penelope. I know what it means to be "of a certain age"! I prefer the printed maps, too. Talking of which, My laptop can no longer find my printer. I printed a long article to take with me to the midterm elections last Nov., then a week later, when I went to print out another article, the printer was gone. I've tried the usual (unplugging the printer, then plugging back in), which didn't work. Then I googled the problem, and found a solution, but have no idea what the article is talking about. There is a software engineer who lives across the street from me, and he has been so kind to me. I guess it's time to call him again. Whenever he comes to help me with computer problems, I give him a bag of doggie treats for his dog. My dog doesn't mind!
BTW, I just pulled up the Wikipedia page on Dr Rudolf Steiner, and am going to read it right now. Cheers!
Mon dieu! His father worked for Count Hoyos, who is known for his role in the July Crisis.
Hello again, Rose! Sorry for the delay in getting back to you on this—occasionally one has to take some time out to go shopping, put around the vacuum , etc.
I'm interested to know more about what Steiner's father, Count Hoyos and the July crisis mean to you. The references to Steiner's father were brief in the source material available to me at the Steiner online library and archive. I knew only that he was "an engineer", that the family were German-speaking, and that when Steiner was born, on 25 February 1861, they were living in Donji Kraljevec, then in Hungary.
There's quite a bit of misinformation about Steiner online, stemming from the usual adversarial forces which aim to obfuscate and confuse. So I suggest you go to the Steiner online library if you want reliable data. Steiner spent his life fighting against the forces that would later break out in full-blown Nazism. Whether, in that, he departed from his parents' views, I do not know. But I do know that as early as 1916 he was bringing out horrific information about the activities of the proto-Nazis at the time.
Hoping you have the time to reply, and thanking you for your input.
Hi again, Penelope! Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you. I don't have the excuses you gave. I NEED to vacuum, but when will I ever get to it? According to the Wikipedia page, "Steiner's father, Johann(es) Steiner (1829–1910), left a position as a gamekeeper[28] in the service of Count Hoyos in Geras, northeast Lower Austria to marry one of the Hoyos family's housemaids, Franziska Blie (1834 Horn – 1918, Horn), a marriage for which the Count had refused his permission. Johann became a telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway, and at the time of Rudolf's birth was stationed in Murakirály (Kraljevec) in the Muraköz region of the Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire (present-day Donji Kraljevec in the Međimurje region of northernmost Croatia)."
[28] "Gary Lachman, Rudolf Steiner Publ. Penguin 2007" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Steiner#cite_note-28
Hmm. You say you read that he was an engineer. The positions of game keeper and telegraph operator on the Southern Austrian Railway don't fit with your source at the Steiner online library and archive. Social mobility at that time and place were not impossible, but didn't happen as often as it does today. And Rudolf was educated. I don't know enough about the culture of Austria-Hungary to say anything more about it.
The July Crisis means a lot to me. I try to read as much as I can about it. But at this point in time I don't know enough about it to say much more because I haven't read enough. I will say this, though: Looking at it in hindsight, July 1914 may give the impression that one thing simply led to another, but there were other possibilities. It didn't have to happen. The Great War was such a monstrosity, such a waste: The lives lost and ruined, the chaos, cultural upheaval, the loss of confidence in governments, the continued violence in central and eastern Europe after November 1918: wars between states, revolution, counter-revolution, civil wars, political assassination, paramilitary violence. And on and on.
Take care, Penelope.
Thankyou, Rose! What a lovely reply…
My concern, in my first response to you, was that you might be thinking, because Steiner's father was associated with Count Hoyos, therefore Steiner himself was associated in some way with the aggressive forces agitating for the outbreak of hostilities, commencing the First World War.
I know this not to be true: in fact, Steiner opposed everything associated with those streams right from the very beginning. So, now I see this was not where you were coming from. So far, so good!
As an aside, I had not known Steiner's father was initially a gamekeeper for Count Hoyos. Please discount my own idea that he was "an engineer". I cannot recollect exactly where I picked up that idea, and it may well have been from a secondary or even tertiary source purporting to recount Steiner's familial origins (you know how any given account has been proven to lose veracity in direct proportion to the number of sources it passes through). It strikes me that that part of the Wiki account must be true—it seems to be based on externally verifiable facts. It is, indeed, rather romantic! That Steiner's father had to leave the Count's employ in order to marry Steiner’s future mother tends to suggest that there were higher forces in play than the usual matchmaking scenario.
I now see that your concern centres around the July crisis, and whether the events that took place then could have been avoided.
This is interesting. By Steiner's own account, it was the British no less, in the form of Lord Grey, who passed up an opportunity, at the eleventh hour, to prevent the onset of hostilities.
I wanted to reply to you without undue delay, so you know I am still participating in our exchange. I will now go and hunt down the lecture in which Steiner made these statements. So hang on in there, and I will post again to give you the link to his revelations.
This is very worthwhile!
Yes, somehow the maps maybe another post?
Plokhy’s maps at the beginning of The Gates of Europe are excellent!
Agree - maps would be a bonus
I watched your entire Yale series on Ukraine and learned so much. I keep coming back to your YouTube and SubStack.
Flood the Zone with Dr. Snyder lectures and pod casts ...for those that want to listen more than read
The Making of Modern Ukraine lecture series:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4vmTHBhhpsVynb2P2FPGXk?si=qzyefM8uRWqDpcZJUAMMyA
And a few more topics
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1mSbOQmqt0ItDjXEyYD7M7?si=7KaejFmHRheX3uaAK3NzdQ
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1vDSoBCEHiDY2ho1Earpg4?si=o3_xEgaMTv2EsnchVwnLPg
https://open.spotify.com/episode/1mSbOQmqt0ItDjXEyYD7M7?si=b6MdhIHsR--vmnitv4YmXQ
Thank you It is so lovely to be in class again!
Thank you Dr. Snyder I watched all the lectures and took notes but didn't get through all the readings. This will help hold my feet to the fire on readings.
I also watched all of the lectures on YouTube last fall. Now I'm going to tackle the reading material. -I have read "Bloodlands" and the "Road to Unfreedom"--And then I'll watch the series again in the hopes of keeping up.
Thank you Dr. Snyder for sharing these ever so relevant podcasts for those of us who have not studied world history as much as we wanted. Back to school....listening, my best use of time learning. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
I followed the online course quite closely with each session's release. Over the past several years, I've read The Road to Unfreedom, Bloodlands, Black Earth, On Tyranny (of course) and now I'm about half-way through Reconstruction of Nations. I am thankful, Prof. Snyder.
Slightly off-topic, but too good to miss—stunning Ukrainian artistic creativity:
https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/gallery/2023/feb/25/hats-off-ukrainian-artist-asya-kozina-paper-fashion-in-pictures
Fantastic! Thank you for the link. I sent it to my daughters, one of whom is an artist.
Judging by the number of ships in her creations, I suspect there may be a slight admixture of Viking in her ancestry?
Could be....
I sent it to a friend in Germany and she absolutely flipped!
For android users https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly95YWxlcG9kY2FzdHMuYmx1YnJyeS5uZXQvY2F0ZWdvcnkvbWFraW5nLW9mLW1vZGVybi11a3JhaW5lL2ZlZWQvcG9kY2FzdC8?ep=14
I got the gates book on Audio books. Words would have worked better in print
I also found them on line at DTI. Digital Texts International. I googled the name of the author and the article and this site came up. I was able to print them out.
I also tuned in for all of the lectures. I thoroughly enjoyed the series, and even though I had done a fair amount of the readings previously, I learned a lot!