In 1942, the United States War Department distributed a handbook to American servicemen that advised them on the peculiarities of the "British, their country, and their ways."

Over sixty years later, this newly published reproduction from the rich archives of the Bodleian Library offers a fascinating glimpse into American military preparations for World War II. The guide was intended to alleviate the culture shock for soldiers taking their first trip to Great Britain, or, for that matter, abroad. The handbook is punctuated with endearingly nostalgic advice and refreshingly candid quips such as: "The British don't know how to make a good cup of coffee. You don't know how to make a good cup of tea. It's an even swap."

By turns hilarious and poignant, many observations featured in the handbook remain relevant even today. Reproduced in a style reminiscent of the era, "Instructions for American Servicemen in Britain" is a powerfully evocative war-time memento that offers a unique perspective on the longstanding American-British relationship and reveals amusingly incisive American perceptions of the British character and country.

Paris 1744: a royal official approaches a shopkeeper's wife, proposing that she become an informant to the Crown and report on the conversations of foreign diplomats who take meals at her house. Her reports, housed today in the Bastille archives, are little more than a collection of wartime rumors gathered from clandestine, handwritten newspapers and everyday talk around the city, yet she comes to imagine herself a political agent on behalf of Louis XV. In this book Tabetha Ewing analyses different forms of everyday talk over the course of the War of Austrian Succession to explore how they led to new understandings of political identity. Royal policing and clandestine media shaped what Parisians knew and how they conceptualized events in a period of war. Responding to subversive political verses or to an official declaration hawked on the city streets, they experienced the pleasures and dangers of talking politics and exchanging opinions on matters of state, whether in the cafe or the wigmaker's shop. Tabetha Ewing argues that this ephemeral expression of opinions on war and diplomacy, and its surveillance, transcription, and circulation shaped a distinctly early-modern form of political participation. Whilst the study of sedition has received much scholarly attention, Ewing explores the unexpectedly dynamic effect of loyalty to the French monarchy, spoken in the distinct voices of the common people and urban elites. One such effect was a sense of national identity, arising from the interplay of events, both everyday and extraordinary, and their representation in different media. Rumor, diplomacy and war in Enlightenment Paris rethinks the relationship of the oral and the written, the official and the unofficial, by revealing how gossip, fantasy, and uncertainty are deeply embedded in the emergent modern, public life of French society.

Traditional historiography has tended to disregard and even deny Spain's role in the Enlightenment, banishing the country to a benighted geographical periphery. In The Spanish Enlightenment revisited a team of experts overturns the myth of the 'dark side of Europe' and examines the authentic place of Spain in the intellectual economy of the Enlightenment. Contributors to this book explore how institutional and social changes in eighteenth-century Spain sharpened the need for modernisation. Examination of major constitutional and social initiatives, such as the development of new scientific projects and economic societies, the reform of criminal law, and a re-evaluation of the country's colonial policies, reveals how ideas, principles and practices from the wider European Enlightenment are adapted for the country's specific context. Through detailed analysis authors investigate: the evolution of public opinion, and the Republic of letters; the growth of political economy as an intellectual discipline; the transmission and reception of an Enlightenment discourse in the Spanish Empire; Spain's role in shaping a modern conception of the natural sciences. The portrait of a demarginalised, modernising and enlightened Spain emerges clearly from this book; in so doing, it opens up new avenues of research both within the history of the pan-European Enlightenment, and in colonial studies.

A History of Europe in the Modern World delves into how Europe's history has contributed to the development of the modern world and an increasingly global society. The twelfth edition of this classic text links specific nations, movements, and landmark events in European history to broader historical themes and problems that have shaped the contemporary era. Readers of this text will learn about Europe's past within the context of key historical trends, including the rise of industry and a global economy; the development of science, technology, and new forms of knowledge; social, cultural, and political movements; evolving views of human rights; and the complex relations between European nations and the wider world.

French Connections examines how the movement of people, ideas, and social practices contributed to the complex processes and negotiations involved in being and becoming French in North America and the Atlantic World between the years 1600 and 1875. Engaging a wide range of topics, from religious and diplomatic performance to labor migration, racialization, and both imagined and real conceptualizations of "Frenchness" and "Frenchification", this volume argues that cultural mobility was fundamental to the development of French colonial societies and the collective identities they housed. Cases of cultural formation and dislocation in places as diverse as Quebec, the Illinois Country, Detroit, Haiti, Acadia, New England, and France itself demonstrate the broad variability of French cultural mobility that took place throughout this massive geographical space. Nevertheless, these communities shared the same cultural root in the midst of socially and politically fluid landscapes, where cultural mobility came to define, and indeed sustain, communal and individual identities in French North America and the Atlantic World. Drawing on innovative new scholarship on Louisiana and New Orleans, the editors and contributors to French Connections look to refocus the conversation surrounding French colonial interconnectivity by thinking about mobility as a constitutive condition of culture; from this perspective, separate "spheres" of French colonial culture merge to reveal a broader, more cohesive cultural world. The comprehensive scope of this collection will attract scholars of French North America, early American history, Atlantic World history, Caribbean studies, Canadian studies, and frontier studies. With essays from established, award-winning scholars such as Brett Rushforth, Leslie Choquette, Jay Gitlin, and Christopher Hodson as well as from new, progressive thinkers such as Mairi Cowan, William Brown, Karen L. Marrero, and Robert D. Taber, French Connections promises to generate interest and value across an extensive and diverse range of concentrations.

The reign of Alexander I was a pivotal moment in the construction of Russia's national mythology. This work examines this crucial period focusing on the place of the Russian nobility in relation to their ruler, and the accompanying debate between reform and the status quo, between a Russia old and new, and between different visions of what Russia could become. Drawing on extensive archival research and placing a long-neglected emphasis on this aspect of Alexander I's reign, this book is an important work for students and scholars of imperial Russia, as well as the wider Napoleonic and post-Napoleonic period in Europe.