One of the foremost scholars of nineteenth–century England, Gash has written a new interpretation of the years 1815 to 1865 that takes industrialization off center stage as the great dramatic event in national life.

During the seventeenth century, sea raiders known as buccaneers controlled the Caribbean. Buccaneers were not pirates but privateers, licensed to attack the Spanish by the governments of England, France, and Holland. Jon Latimer charts the exploits of these men who followed few rules as they forged new empires. From the crash of gunfire to the billowing sail on the horizon, Latimer brilliantly evokes the dramatic age of the buccaneers.

The starting point for Richard Jenkyn’s latest work is his contention that the Victorian age, which we think of as the great age of Gothic, was so shot through with the influence of the classical past that we should instead think of Victorian art and architecture as the continuing flow of two stylistic streams—the Gothic and the classical, side by side.

The Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute commemorated the seventieth anniversary of the man-made famine inflicted on Ukraine and surrounding areas with a symposium in October 2003 titled “The Ukrainian Terror-Famine of 1932–1933: Revisiting the Issues and the Scholarship Twenty Years after the HURI Famine Project.” This volume contains some of the papers presented at the symposium (previously published in Harvard Ukrainian Studies volume 25, no. 3/4), including Sergei Maksudov’s large-scale demographic study drawing on available documents of the era; and Gijs Kessler’s study of events in the Urals region from the same period. 

The concept of generation as a historical category has never been used more effectively than in Lost Comrades. Lost Comrades follows the Front Generationsocialists from their questioning of Marxistorthodoxies in the 1920s into their confrontationswith the twin challenges of fascism and worlddepression in the early 1930s.

This is the first scholarly study in depth of the crucial prewar phase of the French army’s development into a disruptive force in national life. A chapter from the portentous twentieth–century story of the soldier in politics, it has relevance now to situations already formed or forming in other western societies. The value of the book is greatly enhanced by an encyclopedic bibliography of writing on French political history in this century.

In 1913, Russian imperial marines stormed an Orthodox monastery at Mt. Athos, Greece to haul off monks engaged in a dangerously heretical practice known as Name Worshipping. Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor take us on an exciting mathematical mystery tour as they unravel a bizarre tale of political struggles, psychological crises, sexual complexities, and ethical dilemmas. The men and women of the leading French and Russian mathematical schools are central characters in this absorbing tale that could not be told until now. Naming Infinity is a poignant human interest story that raises provocative questions about science and religion, intuition and creativity.

On July 10, 1940, by a 570 to 80 margin, the representatives in the French parliament voted full powers to Philippe Pétain, ending the Third Republic and paving the way for the collaborationist Vichy regime. Recreating the tense atmosphere of summer 1940, Olivier Wieviorka shows how pressures brought on by defeat could affect even the most hardened republicans. He illuminates the complex moral issues inherent in accommodation and collaboration in a time of crisis.

Paris is the most personal of cities. There is a Paris for the medievalist, and another for the modernist—a Paris for expatriates, philosophers, artists, romantics, and revolutionaries of every stripe. James H. S. McGregor brings these multiple perspectives into focus throughout this concise, unique history of the City of Light. Color maps, along with identifying illustrations, make the city accessible to visitors by foot, Metro, or riverboat.

This book is the first thorough account of the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753, a notorious but little–understood episode in English history. Using a largely narrative form the author first discusses the position of the Jews in the mid-eighteenth century and explains why they sought and obtained passage of the bill. He then recounts the beginnings of opposition to it and discusses the religious, economic, political, and psychological reasons for the opposition. He describes in detail the propaganda campaign against the bill and the resultant effect on the election.

In this timely volume, which Nathan Glazer describes as “a fascinating account of the rise of student participation in the English universities,” Ashby and Anderson interpret contemporary student activities in the light of the history of student participation during the last 150 years.

A berserk elephant gunned down in the heart of London, a machine for composing Latin hexameters, and the original rock band (1841)—these are but three of the sights that London curiosity–seekers from every walk of life paid to see from the Elizabethan era to the mid–Victorian period. Examining hundreds of the wonderfully varied exhibitions that culminated in the Crystal Palace of 1851, this generously illustrated book sheds light on a vast and colorful expanse of English social history that has thus far remained wholly unsurveyed.

Drawn together in a comprehensive Introduction by Bernard Bailyn, these innovative essays include analyses of the climate and ecology that underlay the slave trade, pan-Atlantic networks of religion and commerce, as well as the inter-ethnic collaboration in the development of tropical medicine, science as a product of imperial relations, and the awareness of the Atlantic world in the mind of David Hume.

When, in our turbulent day, we hear of a “clash of civilizations,” it’s easy to imagine an unbridgeable chasm between the Islamic world and Christendom stretching back through time. Two Faiths, One Banner shows how in Europe, Muslims and Christians were often comrades-in-arms, repeatedly forming alliances to wage war against their own faiths and peoples. This bold book reveals how the idea of a “Christian Europe” long opposed by a “Muslim non-Europe” grossly misrepresents the facts of a rich, complex, and—above all—shared history. 

On the eve of World War I, Russia, not known as a nation of joiners, had thousands of voluntary associations. Joseph Bradley examines the crucial role of voluntary associations in the development of civil society in Russia from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century.

Grafton reveals the microdynamics of the scholarly life through a series of essays on institutions and on scholars ranging from early modern polymaths to modern intellectual historians to American thinkers and writers. When many of our fellow citizens seem to have forgotten why we collect books in the buildings we call libraries, Grafton’s engaging, erudite essays could be a rallying cry for the revival of the liberal arts.

Among the least-chronicled aspects of post–World War II European intellectual and cultural history is the story of the Russian intelligentsia after Stalin. Vladislav Zubok turns a compelling subject into a portrait as intimate as it is provocative. Zhivago’s children, the spiritual heirs of Boris Pasternak’s noble doctor, were the last of their kind—an intellectual and artistic community committed to a civic, cultural, and moral mission.