This course surveys Russian and Eastern European history from the late Roman Era to the present, including the migrations of Slavs, Hungarians, Jews, and others, tensions between Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant Christianity, the development of a distinctive Jewish culture and its eventual destruction in the Holocaust, the situation of other minorities such as the Roma (Gypsies), Tatars and Karaites, the effects of nationalism, wars and invasions on the region, and the rise and fall of the empires of Lithuania, Poland, Austria-Hungary, Tsarist Russia, and the Soviet Union, ending with the current state of post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe.