Dorothea Dix was the most politically engaged woman of her generation, which was itself a remarkable tapestry of activists. An influential lobbyist as well as a paragon of the doctrine of female benevolence, she vividly illustrated the complexities of the "separate spheres" of politics and femininity. Her greatest legislative initiative, a campaign for federal land grants to endow state mental hospitals, assumed a central role in the public land controversies that intertwined with the slavery issues in Congress following the Mexican War. The passage of this legislation in 1854, and its...

Contemporary ecumenism is a revival of a Reformation ideal. The Colloquy of Poissy was the last great expression expression of that ideal. At the colloquy, held in1561 on the eve of the French religious wars, revived Catholicism and emergent international Protestantism met in an attempt to establish peace, unity, and reconciliation of differing viewpoints. Ahistory of this great conference reveals how unfinished was the Reformation and how tragic a turnit had taken.

This work on the colloquy presents the dialecticalcomplexities of the sixteenth-century theology--atheology that had...

This first detailed study of the bishops of Florence tells the story of a dynamic Italian lordship during the most prosperous period of the Middle Ages. Drawing upon a rich base of primary sources, Dameron demonstrates that the nature of the Florentine episcopal lordship results from the tension between seigneurial pressure and peasant resistance. Implicit throughout is the assumption that episcopal lordship relied upon both the bishop's jurisdictional power and his spiritual or sacramental power.

The story of the Florentine bishops illuminates important moments in Italian history....

Ernest Gruening is perhaps best known for his vehement fight against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, where he set himself apart by casting one of two votes against the Tonkin Gulf Resolution in 1964. However, as Robert Johnson shows in this political biography, it's Gruening's sixty-year public career in its entirety that provides an opportunity for historians to explore continuity and change in dissenting thought, on both domestic and international affairs, in twentieth-century America.

Gruening's outlook on domestic affairs took shape in the intellectual milieu of...

The American Civil War and the Paris Commune of 1871, Philip Katz argues, were part of the broader sweep of transatlantic development in the mid-nineteenth century--an age of democratic civil wars. Katz shows how American political culture in the period that followed the Paris Commune was shaped by that event.

The telegraph, the new Atlantic cable, and the news-gathering experience gained in the Civil War transformed the Paris Commune into an American national event. News from Europe arrived in fragments, however, and was rarely cohesive and often contradictory. Americans were forced...

This book is an inquiry into the possibilities of politics in exile. Russian Mensheviks, driven out of Soviet Russia and their party stripped of legal existence, functioned abroad in the West--in Berlin, Paris, and New York--for an entire generation. For several years they also continued to operate underground in Soviet Russia. Bereft of the usual advantages of political actors, the Mensheviks succeeded in impressing their views upon social democratic parties and Western thinking about the Soviet Union.

The Soviet experience through the eyes of its first socialist victims is...

The episcopal biographies, saints' lives, charters, and poems knowncollectively as the "Le Mans forgeries" are an intricate puzzle that has occupied critics of medieval sources ever since the seventeenth century without yielding a generally acceptable solution. The persistent mystery has lain in the fact that, though the contents are obviously tendentious, the date of composition has seemed to be virtually contemporary with the events described.

By solving the mystery of the date of composition, Walter Goffart unmasks the full extent of the forger's deception and goes on to present...

This intensively researched volume covers a previously neglected aspect of American history: the foreign policy perspective of the peace progressives, a bloc of dissenters in the U.S. Senate, between 1913 and 1935. The Peace Progressives and American Foreign Relations is the first full-length work to focus on these senators during the peak of their collective influence. Robert David Johnson shows that in formulating an anti-imperialist policy, the peace progressives advanced the left-wing alternative to the Wilsonian agenda.

The experience of World War I, and in particular...

The model of the development of child welfare policy presented here illuminates the complexity of the struggles from which modern social policy emerged, and accounts for the ways in which similar policies could be adapted to changing political systems--monarchical, republican, or fascist. Following a period of policy innovation, rapid institutional expansion, and intensifying ideological conflict before the First World War, Dickinson shows, the period from 1918 to 1961 saw a succession of efforts to reconcile competing policy agendas within different political contexts: the...