Kategoria BISAC: History >> Modern - 19th Century

Examining the lives and works of three iconic personalities --Germaine de Stael, Stendhal, and Georges Cuvier--Kathleen Kete creates a groundbreaking cultural history of ambition in post-Revolutionary France. While in the old regime the traditionalist view of ambition prevailed--that is, ambition as morally wrong unless subsumed into a corporate whole--the new regime was marked by a rising tide of competitive individualism. Greater opportunities for personal advancement, however, were shadowed by lingering doubts about the moral value of ambition.

Kete identifies three strategies...

In 1872, China--ravaged by poverty, population growth, and aggressive European armies--sent 120 boys to America to learn the secrets of Western innovation. They studied at New England's finest schools and were driven by a desire for progress and reform. When anti-Chinese fervor forced them back home, the young men had to overcome a suspicious imperial court and a country deeply resistant to change in technology and culture. Fortunate Sons tells a remarkable story, weaving together the dramas of personal lives with the fascinating tale of a nation's endeavor to become a world...

"Voices of Victorian England" illuminates the character, personalities, and events of the era through excerpts from primary documents produced between 1837 and 1901. By allowing Queen Victoria's contemporaries to speak for themselves, this work brings the achievements and conflicts that occurred during the queen's long reign alive for high school and college students as well as the general public.

Excerpts represent literary giants such as Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, and Anthony Trollope. The book covers the worlds of politics, religion, economics, and science, and...

What was distinctive-and distinctively "modern"-about German society and politics in the age of Kaiser Wilhelm II? In addressing this question, these essays assemble cutting-edge research by fourteen international scholars. Based on evidence of an explicit and self-confidently "bourgeois" formation in German public culture, the contributors suggest new ways of interpreting its reformist potential and advance alternative readings of German political history before 1914. While proposing a more measured understanding of Wilhelmine Germany's extraordinarily dynamic society, they also grapple...