This analysis of the origins of major wars, since the development of the modern state system in Europe centuries ago, also considers the problems involved in preventing a contemporary nuclear war.

The essays in this book examine how the West modernized and what that modernization meant to human society, particularly in Western Europe and the United States. Within that frame are several distinct subthemes: the process of industrialization in Europe and elsewhere; social mobility, class structures, and class differences; social unrest and the stresses of modernization and industrialization; economic and social equality and inequality and their markers; the role of women in modernization; and the origins of nationalism. The book's chapters discuss these issues from medieval times through the twentieth century, with particular focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Contributors John Bohstedt, Gregory Clark, Theodore Evergates, Claudia Goldin, David Herlihy, Raymond Jonas, Michael Katz, Gloria Main, Franklin Mendels, Joel Mokyr, Gale Stokes, Louis Tilly, Dale Williams, E. A. Wrigley

In this volume, Julie Klein provides the first comprehensive study of the modern concept of interdisciplinarity, supplementing her discussion with the most complete bibliography yet compiled on the subject. In this volume, Julie Klein provides the first comprehensive study of the modern concept of interdisciplinarity, supplementing her discussion with the most complete bibliography yet compiled on the subject. Spanning the social sciences, natural sciences, humanities, and professions, her study is a synthesis of existing scholarship on interdisciplinary research, education and health care. Klein argues that any interdisciplinary activity embodies a complex network of historical, social, psychological, political, economic, philosophical, and intellectual factors. Whether the context is a short-ranged instrumentality or a long-range reconceptualization of the way we know and learn, the concept of interdisciplinarity is an important means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using singular methods or approaches.

History through material culture is a unique, step-by-step guide for students and researchers who wish to use objects as historical sources.Responding to the significant, scholarly interest in historical material culture studies, this book makes clear how students and researchers ready to use these rich material sources can make important, valuable and original contributions to history.Written by two experienced museum practitioners and historians, the book recognises the theoretical and practical challenges of this approach and offers clear advice on methods to get the best out of material culture research. With a focus on the early modern and modern periods, this volume draws on examples from across the world and demonstrates how to use material culture to answer a range of enquiries, including social, economic, gender, cultural and global history.

This international bestseller plumbs recently opened archives in the former Soviet bloc to reveal the accomplishments of communism around the world. The book is the first attempt to catalogue and analyse the crimes of communism over 70 years.

The Victorians, perhaps more than any Britons before them, were diggers and sifters of the past. Though they were not the first to be fascinated by history, the intensity and range of their preoccupations with the past were unprecedented and of lasting importance. The Victorians paved the way for our modern disciplines, discovered the primeval monsters we now call the dinosaurs, and built many of Britain’s most important national museums and galleries. To a large degree, they created the perceptual frameworks through which we continue to understand the past. Out of their discoveries, new histories emerged, giving rise to fresh debates, while seemingly well-known histories were thrown into confusion by novel tools and methods of scrutiny. If in the eighteenth century the study of the past had been the province of a handful of elites, new technologies and economic development in the nineteenth century meant that the past, in all its brilliant detail, was for the first time the property of the many, not the few. Time Travelers is a book about the myriad ways in which Victorians approached the past, offering a vivid picture of the Victorian world and its historical obsessions.

This book looks at the economic civilisation of Europe in the last epoch before the Industrial Revolution.

Using the Amsterdam Municipal Orphanage as a window through which readers can see the start of profound social and economic changes in early modern Amsterdam, Civic Charity in a Golden Age explores the connections between the developing capitalist economy, the functioning of the government, and the provision of charitable services to orphans in Amsterdam during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the period of the city's greatest prosperity and subsequent decline. Anne McCants skillfully interprets details of the orphanage's expenditures, especially for food; its population; the work records of those who were reared there; and the careers of the regents who oversaw it. The establishment of the orphanage itself was called for by the changing economic needs of rapidly expanding commercial centers and the potential instability of a government that depended on taxes from a large, politically powerless segment of the population.

Demonstrates how Britain's black soldiers helped shape the very idea of race in the nineteenth century Atlantic world.