Books by David Blackbourn

Explores how, over the past several years, the German people have shaped their natural environment and how the landscapes they created took a powerful hold on the German imagination. This study also shows that while mastery over nature delivers undoubted benefits, it has come at a tremendous cost to both the natural environment and human life.

Bach and Mozart stand as towering representatives of European music of the 18th century, composers whose works reflect intellectual, religious, and aesthetic trends of the period. This collection of essays by leading authorities offers new perspectives on the two composers, as well as some of their important contemporaries, Haydn in particular.

This book investigates the role of bourgeoisie society and the political developments of the nineteenth century in the peculiarities of German history. Most historians attribute German exceptionalism to the failure or absence of bourgeois revolution in German history and the failure of the bourgeoisie to conquer the pre-industrial traditions of authoritarianism. However, this study finds that there was a bourgeois revolution in Germany, though not the traditionaltype.

A well-written, stimulating...piece of scholarship. -German Studies Review. In a major re-evaluation of the cultural, political, and sociological assumptions about the "peculiar" course of modern German history, the authors challenge the widely held belief that Germany did not have a Western-style bourgeois revolution. Contending that it did indeed experience one, but that this had little to do with the mythical rising of the middle class, the authors provide a newcontext for viewing the tensions and instability of 19th-and early 20th-century Germany.