David Blackbourn is Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University. His previous publications include "Class, Religion and Local Politics in Wilhelmine Germany" (1980), "The Peculiarities of German History" (with Geoff Eley, 1984), "Populists and Patricians" (1987), and the prize-winning" Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany" (1993).