Victorian Britain is often considered as the high point of "laissez-faire," the place and the time when people were most "free" to make their own lives without the aid or interference of the State. This book, by leading historians of nineteenth-century state and society, asks to what extent that was true and, to the extent that it was, how it worked.
The Legend of Charlemagne in the Middle Ages - Power, Faith and Crusade
These essays take advantage of a new, exciting trend towards interdisciplinary research on the Charlemagne legend. Written by historians, art historians, and literary scholars, these essays focus on the multifaceted ways the Charlemagne legend functioned in the Middle Ages and how central the shared (if nonetheless fictional) memory of the great Frankish ruler was to the medieval West. A gateway to new research on memory, crusading, apocalyptic expectation, Carolingian historiography, and medieval kingship, the contributors demonstrate the fuzzy line separating “fact” and “fiction” in the Middle Ages.
Conceiving Companies - Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England
Questions concerning the relationships and boundaries between 'private' business and 'public' government are of great and perennial concern to economists, economic and business historians, political scientists and historians.Conceiving Companies discusses the birth and development of joint-stock companies in 19th century England, an area of great importance to the history of this subject. Alborn takes a new approach to the rise of large scale companies in Victorian England, including the Bank of England and East India Company and Victorian railways, locating their origins in political and social practice.
The aim of The Companion to Hobbes is "to offer a much broader view of Hobbes's intellectual preoccupations than is usually available," and "to bring together the different perspectives on Hobbes that are now being developed in parallel by philosophers, historians of mathematics and science, historians of early modern England, political scientists, and writers of literary studies." It succeeds admirably, rising to a challenge set by the man himself: "It must be extremely hard to find out the opinions and meanings of those men that are gone from us long ago, and have left us no other signification thereof but their books."
What is history and why should we study it? Is there such a thing as historical truth? Is history a science? One of the most accomplished historians at work today, John Lewis Gaddis, answers these and other questions in this short, witty, and humane book. The Landscape of History provides a searching look at the historian's craft, as well as a strong argument for why a historical consciousness should matter to us today. Gaddis points out that while the historical method is more sophisticated than most historians realize, it doesn't require unintelligible prose to explain.
