Historical Essays & Studies


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Revolutionary France 1770-1880


Book Description

Revolutionary France d is a vivid narrative history. It is also a radical reinterpretation of the period, and testimony to the power both of ideas and of personality in movements of the past.




Challenging Authority


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As long as there have been formal governments, there has been political contention, an interaction between ruler and subjects involving claims and counterclaims, compliance or resistance, cooperation, resignation, condescension, and resentment. Where political studies tend to focus on either those who rule or those who are ruled, the essays in this volume call our attention to the interaction between these forces at the very heart of contentious politics. Written by prominent scholars of political and social history, these essays introduce us to a variety of political actors: peasants and workers, tax resisters and religious visionaries, bandits and revolutionaries. From Brazil to Beijing, from the late Middle Ages to the present, all were or are challenging authority. The authors take a distinctly historical approach to their subject, writing both of specific circumstances and of larger processes. While tracing their origins to the social history and structural sociology approaches of the sixties and seventies, the contributors have also profited from subsequent critiques of these approaches. Taken together, their essays demonstrate that the relationship between mobilization for collective action and identity formation is a perennial problem for protest groups -- a problem that the historical study of contentious politics, with its focus on political interaction, can do much to explain.







Interpreting the French Revolution


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The author applies the philosophies of Alexis de Tocqueville and Augustin Cochin to both historical and contemporary explanations of the French Revolution.




America's National Game


Book Description

This book is Albert Spaldings work of "historic facts concerning the beginning, evolution, development and popularity of base ball, with personal reminiscences of its vicissitudes, its victories and its votaries." It is one of the defining books in the early formative years of modern baseball.