Analyze the last 100 years of European history, explaining how Europe (and in many respects, the world itself) has turned out like it has in our current day.
You should be able to blend the isms and the events of, say the latter 19th and all of 20th century. You should be to demonstrate how the isms and the events are connected, how the one led to the other, building through the 20th century all the way to our current day.
If there was an outline, it probably would start with explaining what the major isms were (remember our discussion on this where we listed them). Don’t add “isms”; just focus on the list we worked on that is listed in the discussions and in the syllabus.
Then the bulk of the essay would explain and analyze that interplay between the isms and the events over the past 100 years. There are far too many major events for me to list them or expect you to cover them all, so you have some freedom here. You could look at the creation of nations, wars, social movement, suffrage movements, technology rise and other events. This section probably is 3-4 pages alone, and so in here I would imagine you would present at least 4 moments or movements, but you might even mention a few more.
Finally, there would be something of a conclusion that centered on modern day crisis points where you are explaining how we got this point (through the isms and events of that last 150ish years). Modern day issues from the past 10 years that connect well here include, but are not limited to: North Korean Crisis, Immigration crisis in Europe, ISIS, Israel-Palestine, European economic crisis, Brexit, Russia vs Ukraine, nationalism rising in Europe, rise of China, war on terror, Middle East Islam issues (Turkey, Kurds, Iran, Saudi Arabia), world trade tensions, or civil rights struggles.
This is not some random, sprawling essay, no matter how it appears to you, nor is it merely a chronology of events. The essay MUST BE based on and around the “isms” which, as you know, is the centerpiece of this course. In the end, you will want to build an analysis that will show how all of our modern-day issues are built out of decisions and choices from the previous years…in particular post-French Revolution and World War I.
**************
Helpful Thoughts
In the last half of the class, we have studied the world reeling from the mid-1850s that led to radical changes in the 1920s