Books in the Harvard Historical Studies series

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This unique account of the life of Charles Follen--German nationalist and revolutionary, Harvard professor, Unitarian minister, and abolitionist--opens a window on several worlds during the first half of the nineteenth century.

This book is an inquiry into the possibilities of politics in exile. The Mensheviks, driven out of Soviet Russia, functioned abroad in the West for a generation. For several years they also continued to operate underground in Soviet Russia, and succeeded in impressing their views on social democratic parties and Western thinking about the U.S.S.R.

The American Civil War and the Paris Commune of 1871, Philip Katz argues, were part of the broader sweep of transatlantic development in the mid-nineteenth century-an age of democratic civil wars. Katz shows how American political culture in the period that followed the Paris Commune was shaped by that event.

Choquette narrates the peopling of French Canada across the 17th and 18th centuries, the lesser known colonial phase of French migration. Drawing on French and Canadian archives, she carefully traces the precise origins of individual immigrants, describing them by gender, class, occupation, region, religion, age, and date of departure.

Gruening is perhaps best known for his vehement fight against U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. However, as Johnson shows here, it's Gruening's sixty-year public career in its entirety that provides an opportunity for historians to explore continuity and change in dissenting thought in twentieth-century America.

This first detailed study of the bishops of Florence tells the story of a dynamic Italian lordship during the most prosperous period of the Middle Ages. Drawing upon a rich base of primary sources, Dameron demonstrates that the nature of the Florentine episcopal lordship results from the tension between seigneurial pressure and peasant resistance.

This work on the colloquy presents the dialectical complexities of the sixteenth-century theology--a theology that had emerged with binding strands of religious idealism and political interest. Theology was, indeed, the medium of discourse, but it was not an end in itself. Rather, it was a means to a higher goal: religious reconciliation.

An activist who disdained the women's rights and antislavery movements, Dix, an old-line Whig, sought to promote national harmony and became the only New England social reformer to work successfully in the lower South right up to the eve of secession.

Presenting a new interpretation of humanist historiography, Donald J. Wilcox traces the development of the art of historical writing among Florentine humanists in the fifteenth century. He focuses on the three chancellor historians of that century who wrote histories of Florence-Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini, and Bartolommeo della Scala.

Padberg has written the first full-length study of these colleges, from their revival in 1815 to their suppression in 1880. Drawing almost exclusively on archival material not previously utilized, Father Padberg places his study against the background of anti-clericalism, revolution, the Second Empire, and the first decade of the Third Republic.

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.

Though James II is often depicted as a Catholic despot who imposed his faith, Scott Sowerby reveals a king ahead of his time who pressed for religious toleration at the expense of his throne. The Glorious Revolution was in fact a conservative counter-revolution against the movement for enlightened reform that James himself encouraged and sustained.

Kimmage tells the story of postwar America's political evolution through Trilling and Chambers, who went on to intellectual prominence, sharing the questions, crises, and challenges of their generation. Kimmage argues that the divergent careers of these two men exemplify the emergence of modern conservatism and the rise of moderate liberalism.

Ever since Alexis de Tocqueville published his observations in Democracy in America, Americans have recognized the distinctiveness of their voluntary tradition. In a work of political, legal, social, and intellectual history, Neem traces the origins of this venerable tradition to the vexed beginnings of American democracy in Massachusetts.

In an illuminating study that blends diplomatic, military, technology, and business history, Winkler shows how U.S. officials during World War I discovered the enormous value of global communications. Winkler sheds light on the early stages of the global infrastructure that helped launch the U.S. as the predominant power of the century.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.