During the war years the English way of life underwent a far-reaching transformation. While shortages reduced the gaiety of existence, women achieved a new freedom, wages rose and labour increased its bargaining power.
The revolutionary upheaval that brought down Louis-Philippe swept into power a famous French Romantic poet. Gordon Wright describes how Lamartine acquitted himself with courage and energy; but his fall was as swift and sudden as his rise.
J.B. Morrall offers his study of the events that led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, and of the French Calvinists’ fortunes thereafter, both at home and abroad, down to the beginning of the present century.
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.
