Author: J. K. Fedorowicz
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521240932
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 320
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Book Description
Poland continues to be a puzzle for the West, partly because its history remains unfamiliar. Recently, however, the country has produced a number of excellent historians whose work is highly esteemed by specialists but has not yet penetrated to the general reader. The present collection of studies by thirteen of Poland's leading historians will acquaint the layman with the basic issues of Poland's historical evolution, and offer specialists radical reinterpretations of some of those issues. It is intended both as an overview of recent trends in Polish historiography and as a summary of Polish history from its origins to the mid-nineteenth century. Historically, Poland represented the great exception to the emergence of centralized bureaucracy in Europe. The Polish Commonwealth became a fully elective monarchy which extended the franchise and citizenship rights to almost 10 per cent of its population, thereby making the state a unique example of gentry democracy. The nobility played a role in Polish history unlike that of any comparable class everywhere in Europe, and this unique phenomenon serves as a thread unifying the various themes in these studies of a 'republic of nobles.' -- from dust jacket.
Author: Eagle Glassheim
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674018891
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330
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Book Description
This illuminating study examines the dramatic transformation of Bohemian noble identity from the rise of mass politics in the late nineteenth century to the descent of the Iron Curtain after World War II. At the turn of the twentieth century, some 300 noble families owned over a third of the Habsburg Bohemian Crownlands. With the Empire's demise in 1918, the once powerful Bohemian nobility quickly became a target of the nationalist revolution sweeping the new Czechoslovak state. Eagle Glassheim traces the evolving efforts of the nobles to define their place in this revolutionary new order. Nobles saw little choice but to ally with Czech and German national parties, initially in the hopes of assuaging radical land reform. Yet they retained aristocratic political and social traditions that continued to shape their national identities after 1918. Some moved toward a hybrid national identification, embracing a form of German internationalism and a vision of pan-European unity that led many to support Hitler's expansionist efforts in the late 1930s. Others trumpeted their new-found Czech nationalism in resisting the Nazi occupation. Noble Nationalists offers valuable insights on the nationalization of a conservative political elite, as well as on the national and social revolutions that recast Central Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.
Author: Stephan Malinowski
Publisher:
ISBN: 0198842554
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 497
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Book Description
In the mountain of books that have been written about the Third Reich, surprisingly little has been said about the role played by the German nobility in the Nazis' rise to power. While often confidently referred to, the 'fateful' role played by the German nobility is rarely, if ever, investigated in any real detail. Nazis and Nobles now fills this gap, providing the first systematic investigation of the role played by the nobility in German political life between Germany's defeat in the First World War in 1918 and the consolidation of Nazi power in the 1930s. As Stephan Malinowski shows, the German nobility was too weak to prevent the German Revolution of 1918 but strong enough to take an active part in the struggle against the Weimar Republic. In a real twist of historical irony, members of the nobility were as prominent in the destruction of Weimar democracy as they were to be years later in Graf Stauffenberg's July 1944 bomb plot against Hitler. In this skilful portrait of an aristocratic world that was soon to disappear, Malinowski gives us for the first time the in-depth story of the German nobility's social decline and political radicalization in the inter-war years - and the troubled mésalliance to which this was to lead between the majority of Germany's nobles and the National Socialists.
Author: Thomas F. X. Noble
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812200918
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 411
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Book Description
The Republic of St. Peter seeks to reclaim for central Italy an important part of its own history. Noble's thesis is at once original and controversial: that the Republic, an independent political entity, was in existence by the 730s and was not a creation of the Franks in the 750s. Noble examines the political, economic, and religious problems that impelled the central Italians—and a succession of resolute popes—to seek emancipation from the Byzantine Empire. He delineates the social structures and historical traditions that produced a distinctive political society, describes the complete governmental apparatus of the Republic, and provides a comprehensive assessment of the Franco-papal alliance.
Author: Niccolò Machiavelli
Publisher: Good Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 443
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Book Description
Machiavelli saw history in general as a way to learn useful lessons from the past for the present, and also as a type of analysis which could be built upon, as long as each generation did not forget the works of the past. In "Discourses on Livy" Machiavelli discusses what can be learned from roman period and many other eras as well, including the politics of his lifetime. This is a work of political history and philosophy written in the early 16th. The title identifies the work's subject as the first ten books of Livy's Ab urbe condita, which relate the expansion of Rome through the end of the Third Samnite War in 293 BC. Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469 – 1527) was an Italian diplomat, politician, historian, philosopher, humanist, and writer. He has often been called the father of modern political science. He was for many years a senior official in the Florentine Republic, with responsibilities in diplomatic and military affairs. He served as a secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power.He wrote his most well-known work The Prince in 1513, having been exiled from city affairs.
Author: Jay Cost
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062041169
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 355
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Book Description
A popular columnist for The Weekly Standard, conservative journalist Jay Cost now offers a lively, candid, diligently researched revisionist history of the Democratic Party. In Spoiled Rotten, Cost reveals that the national political organization, first formed by Andrew Jackson in 1824, that has always prided itself as the party of the poor, the working class, the little guy is anything but that—rather, it’s a corrupt tool of special interest groups that feed off of the federal government. A remarkable book that belongs on every politically aware American’s bookshelf next to Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism and The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes, Spoiled Rotten exposes the Democratic Party as a modern-day national Tammany Hall and indisputably demonstrates why it can no longer be trusted with the power of government.
Author: Rob Riemen
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030015853X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 155
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Book Description
In a series of three essays, the author identifies nobility of spirit in the life and work of Spinoza and of Thomas Mann; explores the quest for the good society in our own times; and addresses the pursuit of truth and freedom that engaged figures as disparate as Socrates and Leone Ginzburg, a Jewish-Italian intellectual murdered by Nazis.
Author: Doina Pasca Harsanyi
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271036389
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
Every war has refugees; every revolution has exiles. Most of the refugees of the French Revolution mourned the demise of the monarchy. Lessons from America examines an unusual group who did not. Doina Pasca Harsanyi looks at the American experience of a group of French liberal aristocrats, early participants in the French Revolution, who took shelter in Philadelphia during the Reign of Terror. The book traces their path from enlightened salons to revolutionary activism to subsequent exile in America and, finally, back to government posts in France&—illuminating the ways in which the French experiment in democracy was informed by the American experience.
Author: Mark Boonshoft
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469659549
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 297
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Book Description
Following the American Revolution, it was a cliche that the new republic's future depended on widespread, informed citizenship. However, instead of immediately creating the common schools--accessible, elementary education--that seemed necessary to create such a citizenry, the Federalists in power founded one of the most ubiquitous but forgotten institutions of early American life: academies, privately run but state-chartered secondary schools that offered European-style education primarily for elites. By 1800, academies had become the most widely incorporated institutions besides churches and transportation projects in nearly every state. In this book, Mark Boonshoft shows how many Americans saw the academy as a caricature of aristocratic European education and how their political reaction against the academy led to a first era of school reform in the United States, helping transform education from a tool of elite privilege into a key component of self-government. And yet the very anti-aristocratic critique that propelled democratic education was conspicuously silent on the persistence of racial and gender inequality in public schooling. By tracing the history of academies in the revolutionary era, Boonshoft offers a new understanding of political power and the origins of public education and segregation in the United States.
Author: Erik Mathisen
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469636336
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 238
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Book Description
This is the story of how Americans attempted to define what it meant to be a citizen of the United States, at a moment of fracture in the republic's history. As Erik Mathisen demonstrates, prior to the Civil War, American national citizenship amounted to little more than a vague bundle of rights. But during the conflict, citizenship was transformed. Ideas about loyalty emerged as a key to citizenship, and this change presented opportunities and profound challenges aplenty. Confederate citizens would be forced to explain away their act of treason, while African Americans would use their wartime loyalty to the Union as leverage to secure the status of citizens during Reconstruction. In The Loyal Republic, Mathisen sheds new light on the Civil War, American emancipation, and a process in which Americans came to a new relationship with the modern state. Using the Mississippi Valley as his primary focus and charting a history that traverses both sides of the battlefield, Mathisen offers a striking new history of the Civil War and its aftermath, one that ushered in nothing less than a revolution in the meaning of citizenship in the United States.
