The Culture of Western Europe, George L. Mosse's sweeping cultural history, was originally published in 1961 and revised and expanded in 1974 and 1988. Originating from the lectures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for which Mosse would become famous, the book addresses, in crisp and accessible language, the key issues he saw as animating the movement of culture in Europe. Mosse emphasizes the role of both rational and irrational forces in making modern Europe, beginning with the interplay between eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century Romanticism. He traces cultural and political movements in all areas of society, especially nationalism but also economics, class identity and conflict, religion and morality, family structure, medicine, and art. This new edition restores the original 1961 illustrations and features a critical introduction by Anthony J. Steinhoff, professor in the department of history at the UniversitE du QuEbec A MontrEal, contextualizing Mosse's project and arguing for its continued relevance today.

By the acclaimed author of the classic "Patriots "and "Union 1812, "this major work of narrative history portrays four of the most turbulent decades in the growth of the American nation.
After the War of 1812, President Andrew Jackson and his successors led the country to its manifest destiny across the continent. But that expansion unleashed new regional hostilities that led inexorably to Civil War. The earliest victims were the Cherokees and other tribes of the southeast who had lived and prospered for centuries on land that became Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia.
Jackson, who had first gained fame as an Indian fighter, decreed that the Cherokees be forcibly removed from their rich cotton fields to make way for an exploding white population. His policy set off angry debates in Congress and protests from such celebrated Northern writers as Ralph Waldo Emerson. Southern slave owners saw that defense of the Cherokees as linked to a growing abolitionist movement. They understood that the protests would not end with protecting a few Indian tribes.
Langguth tells the dramatic story of the desperate fate of the Cherokees as they were driven out of Georgia at bayonet point by U.S. Army forces led by General Winfield Scott. At the center of the story are the American statesmen of the day--Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, John C. Calhoun--and those Cherokee leaders who tried to save their people--Major Ridge, John Ridge, Elias Boudinot, and John Ross.
"Driven West "presents wrenching firsthand accounts of the forced march across the Mississippi along a path of misery and death that the Cherokees called the Trail of Tears. Survivors reached the distant Oklahoma territory that Jackson had marked out for them, only to find that the bloodiest days of their ordeal still awaited them.
In time, the fierce national collision set off by Jackson's Indian policy would encompass the Mexican War, the bloody frontier wars over the expansion of slavery, the doctrines of nullification and secession, and, finally, the Civil War itself.
In his masterly narrative of this saga, Langguth captures the idealism and betrayals of headstrong leaders as they steered a raw and vibrant nation in the rush to its destiny.

Mexican independence was, in a sense, an economic event. It was so on two counts. First, it was in the realm of the economic that elites managed to create a common ground with non-elites in their demands against foreign domination. Second, it was an economic event in that, throughout the 19th century, independence was imagined by the lettered men of Mexico as a feat that nationalized, or that could have nationalized, a rich and productive economic apparatus. Mexico, Interrupted investigates the fate of these economic hopes during the difficult decades between the year of the country's definite separation from Spain and the year of the defeat of the French occupation and the restoration of the Republic, which many took to be the second and final independence of the territory. Drawing on the writings of politicians, journalists, intellectuals, industrialists, and novelists, this book studies the Mexican intelligentsia's obsessive engagement with the labor and idleness of the citizenry in their attempts to create a wealthy, independent nation. By focusing on work and its opposites in the period between, Mexico, Interrupted reconstructs the period's "economic imaginaries of independence": the repertoire of political and cultural discourses that structured the understandings, beliefs, and fantasies about the relationships between "the economy" and the life of an independent polity. All told, by bringing together intellectual history, critical theory, and cultural studies, this project offers a new account of the Mexican nineteenth century and complicates existing histories of the spread of the "spirit of capitalism" through the Americas.

Mexican independence was, in a sense, an economic event. It was so on two counts. First, it was in the realm of the economic that elites managed to create a common ground with non-elites in their demands against foreign domination. Second, it was an economic event in that, throughout the 19th century, independence was imagined by the lettered men of Mexico as a feat that nationalized, or that could have nationalized, a rich and productive economic apparatus. Mexico, Interrupted investigates the fate of these economic hopes during the difficult decades between the year of the country's definite separation from Spain and the year of the defeat of the French occupation and the restoration of the Republic, which many took to be the second and final independence of the territory. Drawing on the writings of politicians, journalists, intellectuals, industrialists, and novelists, this book studies the Mexican intelligentsia's obsessive engagement with the labor and idleness of the citizenry in their attempts to create a wealthy, independent nation. By focusing on work and its opposites in the period between, Mexico, Interrupted reconstructs the period's "economic imaginaries of independence": the repertoire of political and cultural discourses that structured the understandings, beliefs, and fantasies about the relationships between "the economy" and the life of an independent polity. All told, by bringing together intellectual history, critical theory, and cultural studies, this project offers a new account of the Mexican nineteenth century and complicates existing histories of the spread of the "spirit of capitalism" through the Americas.

One of the most approachable and useful books on the period. Life in the two decades after the Great Exhibition.

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the increasing accuracy and legibility of cartographic projections, the proliferation of empirically based chorographies, and the popular vogue for travel narratives served to order, package, and commodify space in a manner that was critical to the formation of a unified Britain. In tandem with such developments, however, a trenchant anti-cartographic skepticism also emerged. This critique of the map can be seen in many literary works of the period that satirize the efficacy and value of maps and highlight their ideological purposes. Against the Map argues that our understanding of the production of national space during this time must also account for these sites of resistance and opposition to hegemonic forms of geographical representation, such as the map. This study utilizes the methodologies of critical geography, as well as literary criticism and theory, to detail the conflicted and often adversarial relationship between cartographic and literary representations of the nation and its geography. While examining atlases, almanacs, itineraries, and other materials, Adam Sills focuses particularly on the construction of heterotopias in the works of John Bunyan, Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Johnson, and Jane Austen. These "other" spaces, such as neighborhood, home, and country, are not reducible to the map but have played an equally important role in the shaping of British national identity. Ultimately, Against the Map suggests that nation is forged not only in concert with the map but, just as important, against it.

Americans and International Affairs to 1921 offers an interpretation of US diplomatic history that incorporates recent expansions in the field, focusing on the construction and contestation of US sovereignty and borders by both official and private institutions and individuals. Foregrounding relations with Britain and Native Americans, the book emphasizes changes in law and norms; property rights; the scope of government power; finances and revenue; immigration policy; and the racialized and gendered rhetoric of "civilization." The chronologically organized chapters cover the colonial period through the Articles of Confederation; the Constitution and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars; the collapse of the Spanish New World empire and related conflicts over the future of slavery; the Civil War and resulting changes to citizenship and the federal government; the development of a federal immigration bureaucracy and formal empire; and a temporally and geographically capacious approach to World War I. The book can stand alone as a survey of the United States in the world to 1921, but it was designed to be used in US diplomatic history courses in which instructors can combine it with material from their own areas of expertise and/or with student research projects. Each chapter contains notes and a bibliography to support the chapter, as well as an additional bibliography of scholarship on topics beyond the scope of the chapter. The book includes a number of original maps, plus a variety of primary source images and essential documents, as well as a guide to online primary source collections.