Books in the Harvard Historical Studies series

The foremost historian of 18th-century France explores how the Old Regime's institutions operated and how they were understood by the people who worked within them. Roche depicts the "culture of appearances"-the food and clothing, living quarters, and reading material of the peasant, the merchant, the noble, the King, from Paris to the provinces.

Sara B. Pritchard traces the Rhone's remaking since 1945, showing how state officials, technical elites, and citizens connected the environment and technology to political identities and state-building, and demonstrating the importance of environmental management and technological development to the culture and politics of modern France.

Around 1800, the English East India Company controlled half of the world's trade and deployed a vast network of political influencers. Yet the story of its 17th-century beginnings has remained largely untold. Rupali Mishra's account of the Company's formative years sheds light on one of the most powerful corporations in the history of the world.

Heidi Tworek's innovative history reveals how, across two devastating wars, Germany attempted to build a powerful communication empire-and how the Nazis manipulated the news to rise to dominance in Europe and further their global agenda. When the news became a form of international power, it changed the course of history.

Historians have long believed that Catholics were late and ambivalent supporters of the German nation. Rebecca Ayako Bennette's bold new interpretation demonstrates definitively that from the beginning in 1871, when Wilhelm I was proclaimed Kaiser of a unified Germany, Catholics were actively promoting a German national identity for the new Reich.

Though blacks were not often seen on the streets of seventeenth-century London, they were already capturing the British imagination. In her exploration of this emerging black presence, Molineux assembles evidence ranging from shop signs, tea trays, trading cards, board games, and playing cards to song ballads and William Hogarth's graphic satires.

In Calvin's Geneva, the changes associated with the Reformation were particularly abrupt and far-reaching, in large part owing to John Calvin himself. This book makes two major contributions to our understanding of this time: the first is to the history of divorce itself; the second is in illustrating the operations of the Consistory of Geneva.

Maguire uncovers a history of French thought that casts the imagination as a dominant faculty in our experience of the world. Original and thought-provoking, this book will interest a range of readers across intellectual history, political theory, literary and cultural studies, and the history of religious thought.

Davidson provides a reevaluation of prevailing views on the effects of the French Revolution, and particularly on the role of women. Arguing against the idea that women were forced from the public realm of political discussion, Davidson demonstrates how women remained highly visible and active.

In 1918, Wilson's image as leader of the free world and the image of America as dispenser of democracy spread through Italy, filling an ideological void. Rossini sets the Italian-American political confrontation in the context of the countries' cultural perceptions of each other, different war experiences, and ideas about participatory democracy.

Linking the study of business and politics, Haynes reconstructs the passionate and protracted debate over the development of the book trade in nineteenth-century France. In tracing the contest over literary production in France, Haynes emphasizes the role of the Second Empire in enacting-but also in limiting-press freedom and literary property.

Combining the history of the Enlightenment, Atlantic history, and the history of the French Revolution, this title explores the political economy of globalization in eighteenth-century France. It presents an interpretation of the relationship between capitalism and the French Revolution.

Tracing teachers' experiences in the Third Reich and East Germany, this title analyzes developments in education of crucial importance to both dictatorships.

Explores how French queens and noblewomen of early modern France, used pleasure dairies to naturalize their status, display their cultivated tastes, and proclaim their virtue as nurturing mothers and capable estate managers. This title sheds light on architecture, self, and society in the ancient regime.

Tracing commercial imagery across different products and media, this title shows how and why the 'African native' had emerged by 1900 to become a familiar figure in the German landscape, selling everything from soap to shirts to coffee.

Thousands were executed for incompatible religious views in 16th-century Europe. The meaning and significance of those deaths are studied here comparatively, providing an argument for the importance of martyrdom as a window onto religious sensibilities and a crucial component in the formation of divergent Christian traditions and identities.

The French Revolution invented the notion of the citizen, but it also invented the noncitizen-the person whose rights were nonexistent. The South American outpost of Guiana became a depository for these outcasts of the new French citizenry, and an experimental space for the exercise of new kinds of power and violence against marginal groups.

In a comparative study of law and imperialism, Ford argues that modern settler sovereignty emerged when settlers in North America and Australia defined indigenous theft and violence as crime. Ford traces the emergence of modern settler sovereignty in contests between settlers and indigenous people in Georgia and the colony of New South Wales.

An overriding assumption has directed scholarship in both European and Slavic history: that Kievan Rus' was part of a Byzantine commonwealth separate from Europe. Raffensperger refutes this, and offers a new frame for two hundred years of history, in which Rus' is understood as part of medieval Europe, and East is not so neatly divided from West.

An investigation into the politics of consumerism in East Germany during the years between the Berlin Blockade of 1948-49 and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Dictatorship and Demand shows how the issue of consumption constituted a crucial battleground in the larger Cold War struggle.

Paper Memory tells of one man's mission to preserve for posterity the memory of everyday life in sixteenth-century Germany. Lundin takes us inside the mind of an undistinguished German burgher, Hermann Weinsberg, whose early-modern writings sought to make sense of changes that were unsettling the foundations of his world.

The Puritans were not as busy policing their neighbors' behavior as Nathaniel Hawthorne or many early American historians would have us believe. Keeping their own households in line occupied too much of their time. Under Household Government reveals that family members took on the role of watchdogs in matters of sexual indiscretion.

Challenging standard interpretations of American dominance and French weakness in postwar Western Europe, Creswell argues that France played a key role in shaping the cold war order. He sketches the successful French challenge to the U.S. that ultimately resulted in security arrangements preferred by the French but acceptable to the Americans.

Keys offers the first major study of the political and cultural ramifications of international sports competitions in the 1930s. Focusing on the U.S., Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union, she examines the transformation of events like the Olympics and the World Cup from small-scale events to the expensive, political, global extravaganzas of today.

Innovative in its historical use of hagiographical literature, this work advances our understanding of early Normandy and the Vikings' transformation from pagan raiders to Christian princes, shedding light on the intersection of religious tradition, identity, and power.

The ending of absolute monarchy and the start of political combat between nobles and commoners make 1787-1788 the first stage of the French Revolution. In a detailed look at this critical transition, Gruder explores how the French people became engaged in an opposition movement that culminated in demands for the public's role in government.

Anderson uses one man's compelling story to explore the collision of Christianity with Native religion in colonial North America. Pastedechouan's story illuminates struggles to retain and impose religious identity on both sides of the 17th-century Atlantic, even as it has relevance to the contemporary encounter between native and nonnative peoples.

In the late 1770s, as a wave of revolution and republican unrest swept across Europe, scholars looked with urgency on the progress of European civilization. Carhart examines their approaches to understanding human development by investigating the invention of a new analytic category, "culture."

Drawing on political oratory, diplomatic correspondence, crusade propaganda, and historical treatises, Meserve shows how research into the origins of Islamic empires sprang from-and contributed to-contemporary debates over the threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean.