First published in 1972. Browning was a keen observer and dramatic recorder of nineteenth-century European culture; his poetry reflects a wide range of intellectual, religious and artistic issues of his day. Roy E. Gridley shows here that during the six decades of Browning’s active writing career (1832-89), his poetry is a record and an interpretation of the changing modes of thought, feeling and expression of nineteenth-century life. Browning was a ‘romantic’ who, by virtue of his realistic and often revolutionary poetry, became a ‘modern’, and had considerable influence on writers such as Yeats, Eliot and Pound. While surveying the whole of Browning’s life and work, Gridley focuses closely on the more famous poems, examining them as documents that give the general reader a deeper appreciation of the richness and diversity of life in Victorian Europe.

The pioneering political scientist presents his “fragment theory” of class, culture and ideology in post-colonial societies around the world. In his groundbreaking work, The Liberal Tradition in America, Louis Hartz demonstrated that beneath America’s history of political conflict was an enduring consensus around Lockean liberal principles. In The Founding of New Societies, Hartz continues his examination of ideology and national identity with a study of five societies established by European migration and colonization. The diverse political and cultural traditions of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia share little in common. Yet, as Hartz demonstrates, they each represent a cultural fragment of the European countries from which they sprang. Each new society retains the ideology that had been dominant at home at the time of their founding. Extraordinarily influential when it was first published in 1964, The Founding of New Societies is a classic work of political science. Hartz’s fragment theory continues to offer powerful insight into today’s political landscape.

An illuminating study of America's agricultural society during the Colonial, Revolutionary, and Founding eras In the eighteenth century, three‑quarters of Americans made their living from farms. This authoritative history explores the lives, cultures, and societies of America's farmers from colonial times through the founding of the nation. Noted historian Richard Bushman explains how all farmers sought to provision themselves while still actively engaged in trade, making both subsistence and commerce vital to farm economies of all sizes. The book describes the tragic effects on the native population of farmers' efforts to provide farms for their children and examines how climate created the divide between the free North and the slave South. Bushman also traces midcentury rural violence back to the century's population explosion. An engaging work of historical scholarship, the book draws on a wealth of diaries, letters, and other writings--including the farm papers of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington--to open a window on the men, women, and children who worked the land in early America.

First Published in 2005. The provincial stock exchanges have long been an area of considerable neglect in the study of the history of finance and investment. They have always been dwarfed by the London Stock Exchange, but at least from 1836 onwards it was not the only market in the country. Those who have traced the development of the English capital market have been careful to point to the importance of provincial capital in railway promotion, yet while the role of provincial capital was emphasized, the praises of the 'vehicle' which helped to mobilize such funds went unsaid. It is difficult to see how provincial investors would have been prepared to commit so much of their capital resources for such purposes without some assurance of being able to liquidate their holdings fairly speedily, since for most of them London was at some distance. This book is an attempt to fill a gap—to trace the origins of the provincial investment 'vehicle' and its progress to the present day.