Social

From 1848 until 1867, writes E.R.R. Green, the romantic nationalists of Ireland, with strong backing from the Irish-Americans, conspired in vain to make their country an “Independent Democratic Republic.”

Tsarist Minister of Finance, and briefly Prime Minister, Witte was one of the pioneers of Russian industrialization, writes Lionel Kochan.

W.J. Fishman describes how Lenin adopted Tkachev's maxim: “to destroy Tsarism now and to establish the Socialist society before Capitalism took root.”

For the landed gentry at the end of the eighteenth century, writes J.F.G. Gornall, there were two main components in marriage. Jane Austen’s novels reveal how 'equal alliance' was at least as important as mutual affection.

Only in a free political society, declared Lamennais and his followers, could nineteenth-century Catholics hope to evangelize the new age. Complete religious liberty, with disestablishment of the Church, freedom of education and of the press, and the decentralization of governmental authority, writes J.B. Morrall, were among the aims they advocated. His views having been condemned by the Vatican and himself denounced by conservative critics as “Robespierre in a surpliceLamennais at length abandoned the faith to which he had devoted so much talent and energy.

Patrick Renshaw introduces an archetypal twentieth century figure: the American Trade Unionist who fled to Russia and who Comintern believed they could use to lead an American Bolshevik revolution.

A reformer of law and critic of society, writes Lionel Kochan, Radishchev emerges as a founding figure in the liberal tradition of the Russian intelligentsia.

The economic and cultural transformation of Russia’s vast possessions in Central Asia is still rapidly going forward. Geoffrey Wheeler describes how she began to enter this field during the first half of the eighteenth century.

Suspicion and persecution fell upon the lively Philosophical Societies of the late eighteenth century because of their international sympathy with Revolution, writes Eric Robinson.

Often denounced by moralists and economic experts, writes Robert Woodhall, public lotteries flourished in England from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I until their abolition in 1826.