This collection of essays presents the most recent work on Germany's stormy and problematic encounter with mass politics from the time of Bismarck to the Nazi era. The authors--sixteen scholars from the United States, Canada, Great Britain and Germany--consider this problem from novel and sometimes surprising viewpoints. The history of elections, narrowly conceived, is abandoned in favor of a broader inquiry into roots of German political loyalties and their relationship to the historic cleavages of class, gender, language, religion, generation and locality. The essays not only present...

On the Road to Total War is a collection of essays that attempts to trace the roots and development of total industrialized warfare (which terrorizes citizens and soliders alike). International scholars focus on the social, political, economic, and cultural aspects and on the societal impacts of the American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification. Mass mobilization of people and resources and growing nationalism led to this totalization of war in nineteenth-century industrialized nations.