Russia on the Eve of Modernity is a pioneering exploration of a world that has been largely destroyed by revolutionary upheavals and obscured in historical memory by scholarly focus on elites. Drawing on traditional religious texts, ethnographic materials and contemporary accounts, this book brings to light the ideas and perceptions of the ordinary Russian people of the towns and countryside who continued to live in a pre-modern, non-Western culture that showed great resilience to the very end of the Romanov Empire. Leonid Heretz offers an overview of traditional Russian understandings of the...

A comparative history of the cultural impact of technological change in Britian and Germany from 1890 until 1945.

Why do people take an interest in politics? What do they hope to gain from voting? Why support one political "party" rather than another? To what extent is political behavior rooted in "class" or community? Although these are all questions which might be asked of emerging Third World countries, the focus in this study is on nineteenth-century Europe and, in particular, the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution in France. It covers responses to the counter-revolutionary policies of the imperial regime of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte following his coup d'etat and the subsequent emergence of democracy in...