First published in 1998. This is Volume VII of twenty-eight in the Sociology of Education series. Written in 1948, this book gives a concise and critical assessment of education in modern Germany. The authors have concentrated on those most integrally bound up with the significant trends in German life with each chapter, except the last dealing with the situation in post-Hitler Germany, extends to the close of the Nazi regime. Considering this as a break potentially more radical than any that has occurred in German history, they have written of the situation preceding it always in the past tense, even when discussing features that have survived it.

Modern Germany examines all aspects of contemporary political, economic, social and cultural life in the new Germany. Using a clearly structured approach and accessible language, the contributors explain the electoral and political systems and underline the significance of the Federal system in Germany. They discuss problems in the education system and social provision and also chronicles recent changes in the German economy and industry. Modern Germany also describes the media landscape of the nation and the recent reforms to the German language.

Whereas the history of workers and labor movements has been widely researched, the history of work has been rather neglected by comparison. This volume offers original contributions that deal with cultural, social and theoretical aspects of the history of work in modern Europe, including the relations between gender and work, working and soldiering, work and trust, constructions and practices. The volume focuses on Germany but also places the case studies in a broader European context. It thus offers an insight into social and cultural history as practiced by German-speaking scholars today but also introduces the reader to ongoing research in this field.

Jürgen Kocka is one of the foremost historians of Germany whose work has been devoted to the integration of different genres of the social and economic history of Europe during the period of industrialization. This collection of essays gives a representative sample of his effort to develop, by reference to Marx and Weber, new and powerful analytical tools for understanding the dynamics of modern industrial societies.

This is a comprehensive history of the German university system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It examines the evolution of the universities from their moribund state in 1700 to their rise to the pinnacle of world prestige and scientific leadership in 1914. In contrast to traditional university histories published in Germany, Professor McClelland's book surveys the entire university system. It explores the influence of political, social and economic forces that helped to shape the growth, reform and scholarly excellence of the late nineteenth-century 'research university'. It thus uncovers the motivating forces behind the change of the system of higher education to meet the needs of the expanding German society. The book will be of interest to historians of education and particularly to the many historians of modern Germany.

For the rural societies of Germany the early sixteenth century was a time of massive upheavals. In this probing study of village life, based upon rich manuscript sources from the old County of Hohenlohe, Thomas Robisheaux seeks to understand how petty German princes, Lutheran pastors, and villagers struggled to create order out of their confusing world. The Hohenlohe region experienced all of the turmoil associated with the sixteenth century, including a peasant near-rising in 1600, the brutal effects of the wage-price scissors, chronic shortages of land, famines, impoverishment, and the destructive cycles of war. By using concepts borrowed from anthropology, Professor Robisheaux looks for the way social hierarchy and discipline countered the disruptive changes of the age. The years between 1550 and 1620 saw new sources of stability and order created in the family; through systematized customs of inheritance; through market relationships; and in the practice of state power within the village.

Using the example of Eichstatt, this book challenges current witchcraft historiography by arguing that the gender of the witch-suspect was a product of the interrogation process and that the stable communities affected by persecution did not collude in its escalation.

Scholarship on the history of West Germany's educational system has traditionally portrayed the postwar period of Allied occupation as a failure and the following decades as a time of pedagogical stagnation. Two decades after World War II, however, the Federal Republic had become a stable democracy, a member of NATO, and a close ally of the West. Had the schools really failed to contribute to this remarkable transformation of German society and political culture? This study persuasively argues that long before the protest movements of the late 1960s, the West German educational system was undergoing meaningful reform from within. Although politicians and intellectual elites paid little attention to education after 1945, administrators, teachers, and pupils initiated significant changes in schools at the local level. The work of these actors resulted in an array of democratic reforms that signaled a departure from the authoritarian and nationalistic legacies of the past. The establishment of exchange programs between the United States and West Germany, the formation of student government organizations and student newspapers, the publication of revised history and civics textbooks, the expansion of teacher training programs, and the creation of a Social Studies curriculum all contributed to the advent of a new German educational system following World War II. The subtle, incremental reforms inaugurated during the first two postwar decades prepared a new generation of young Germans for their responsibilities as citizens of a democratic state.

German environmental organizations have doggedly pursued environmental protection through difficult times: hyperinflation and war, National Socialist rule, postwar devastation, state socialism in the GDR, and confrontation with the authorities during the 1970s and 1980s. The author recounts the fascinating and sometimes dramatic story of these organizations from their origins at the end of the nineteenth century to the present, not only describing how they reacted to powerful social movements, including the homeland protection and socialist movements in the early years of the twentieth century, the Nazi movement, and the anti-nuclear and new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s, but also examining strategies for survival in periods like the current one, when environmental concerns are not at the top of the national agenda. Previous analyses of environmental organizations have almost invariably viewed them as parts of larger social structures, that is, as components of social movements, as interest groups within a political system, or as contributors to civil society. This book, by contrast, starts from the premise that through the use of theories developed specifically to analyze the behavior of organizations and NGOs we can gain additional insight into why environmental organizations behave as they do.

First published in 1998. This is Volume VII of twenty-eight in the Sociology of Education series. Written in 1948, this book gives a concise and critical assessment of education in modern Germany. The authors have concentrated on those most integrally bound up with the significant trends in German life with each chapter, except the last dealing with the situation in post-Hitler Germany, extends to the close of the Nazi regime. Considering this as a break potentially more radical than any that has occurred in German history, they have written of the situation preceding it always in the past tense, even when discussing features that have survived it.