Lecture 15: German Unification and the Long Fuse Introduced

Today's lecture is reproduced here in an audio podcast only (mp3). We surveyed the process by which Germany because a unified nation-state and its implications for the future. Although Otto von Bismarck cobbled together the factors and supplied his own crucial motive force (statecraft and war), many things happened before he became Prussian Prime Minister in 1862 that set the process in motion: the Confederation of the Rhine, Prussian militarism, the Zolverein, and the revolutions of 1848 among them. At the end of the podcast, I introduce the story of what Leonard Lafore called "the long fuse" to World War I, the developments between 1871 and 1914 that brought the curtain down on the nineteenth century and triggered the Great War.

Audio podcast of the unification of Germany and intoduction to the "long fuse"