Brian Hamnett examines key historical novels by Scott, Balzac, Manzoni, Dickens, Eliot, Flaubert, Fontane, Galdós, and Tolstoy, revealing the contradictions inherent in this form of fiction and exploring the challenges writers encountered in attempting to represent a reality that linked past and present.

This engaging collection of primary sources, selected fiction excerpts, and images explores important events, figures, and themes in European history, from 1789 to 1900. 19th Century Europe offers five types of selections: memoirs of individuals who witnessed important historical events; excerpts from works of fiction; writings of influential figures and theorists; significant historical documents, and images. Primary source selections acquaint students with the writings and documents that helped shape the long 19th century European history, while the fiction selections bring historical events to the level of human life. The selections explore significant themes of this time period--modernization, liberalism, and nationalism, society and culture, the relationship between the individual and society, and the relationship between Europe and the world--enhancing students' understanding of the historical events presented in course. Both challenging and captivating, 19th Century Europe provides students with a glimpse of the emotions, ideologies, and attitudes that lie behind the facts and figures of history, allowing them to experience the past and to better understand it.

Struggling to make sense of the Revolution of 1789, the French in the nineteenth century increasingly turned to visual forms of historical representation in a variety of media. Maurice Samuels shows how new kinds of popular entertainment introduced during and after the Revolution transformed the past into a spectacle. The wax display (in which visitors circulated amid life-size statues of historical figures), the phantasmagoria show (in which images of historical personages were projected onto smoke or invisible screens), and the panorama (in which spectators viewed giant circular canvases depicting historical scenes) employed new optical technologies to entice crowds of spectators. Such entertainments, Samuels asserts, provided bourgeois audiences with an illusion of mastery over the past, allowing them to picture their new role as historical agents.Samuels demonstrates how the spectacular mode of historical representation pervaded historiography, drama, and the novel during the Romantic period. He then argues that the early Realist fiction of Balzac and Stendhal emerged as a critique of the spectacular historical imagination. By investigating how postrevolutionary France envisioned the past, Samuels illuminates a vital moment in the cultural history of modernity.

To all thoughtful people World War I has brought to intention the importance of a knowledge of 19th Century European history. For without such knowledge no one can understand, or begin to understand, the significance of the forces that have made it, the vastness of the issues involved, the nature of what is indisputably one of the gravest crises in the history of mankind. No citizen of a free country who takes his citizenship seriously, who considers himself responsible, to the full extent of his personal influence, for the character and conduct of his government, can, without the crudest self-stultification, admit that he knows nothing and cares nothing about the history of Europe. Contents: The Old Regime in Europe The Old Regime in France Beginnings of the Revolution The Making of the Constitution The Legislative Assembly The Convention The Directory The Consulate The Early Years of the Empire The Empire at Its Height The Decline and Fall of Napoleon The Congresses France Under the Restoration Revolutions Beyond France The Reign of Louis Philippe Central Europe in Revolt The Second French Republic and the Founding of the Second Empire The Making of the Kingdom of Italy The Unification of Germany The Second Empire and the Franco-Prussian War The German Empire France Under the Third Republic The Kingdom of Italy Since 1870 Austria-Hungary Since 1848 England From 1815 to 1868 England Since 1868 The British Empire The Partition of Africa Spain and Portugal Holland and Belgium Since 1830 Switzerland The Scandinavian States The Disruption of the Ottoman Empire and the Rise of the Balkan States Russia to the War With Japan The Far East Russia Since the 1905 War With Japan The Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 The European War Making the Peace

A panoramic global history of the nineteenth century A monumental history of the nineteenth century, The Transformation of the World offers a panoramic and multifaceted portrait of a world in transition. Jürgen Osterhammel, an eminent scholar who has been called the Braudel of the nineteenth century, moves beyond conventional Eurocentric and chronological accounts of the era, presenting instead a truly global history of breathtaking scope and towering erudition. He examines the powerful and complex forces that drove global change during the "long nineteenth century," taking readers from New York to New Delhi, from the Latin American revolutions to the Taiping Rebellion, from the perils and promise of Europe's transatlantic labor markets to the hardships endured by nomadic, tribal peoples across the planet. Osterhammel describes a world increasingly networked by the telegraph, the steamship, and the railways. He explores the changing relationship between human beings and nature, looks at the importance of cities, explains the role slavery and its abolition played in the emergence of new nations, challenges the widely held belief that the nineteenth century witnessed the triumph of the nation-state, and much more. This is the highly anticipated English edition of the spectacularly successful and critically acclaimed German book, which is also being translated into Chinese, Polish, Russian, and French. Indispensable for any historian, The Transformation of the World sheds important new light on this momentous epoch, showing how the nineteenth century paved the way for the global catastrophes of the twentieth century, yet how it also gave rise to pacifism, liberalism, the trade union, and a host of other crucial developments.

This book examines how the French invention and the Scottish re-invention of historical fiction prepared the genre's popularity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

A history of European women's professional activities and organizational roles between 1789 and 1914.