This book depicts the long rich life and wide ranging work of Count Athanasius Raczynski (1788-1874). By exploring his complex personality, his processes of thought and his accomplishments, it reveals a man at once a wealthy aristocrat, a Pole in the Prussian diplomatic service, an active participant in and perceptive observer and critical commentator on political life, a connoisseur and art collector of European renown, and the author of ground breaking studies on German and Portuguese art - in short a distinguished and fascinating nineteenth century figure.

In The Theatre of the Street: Public Violence in Antwerp During the First Half of the Twentieth Century Antoon Vrints offers a historical analysis of the meanings and functions of street violence in a modern European city. Commonly perceived as the senseless outcome of social disintegration in urban contexts, public violence appears here as a meaningful strategy to settle conflicts informally. Making use of Antwerp police records, Vrints shows that the prevailing discourse on public violence does not pass the test of empirical facts. The presumed correlation between the occurrence of public violence and the decline of neighbourhood life must even be reversed to some extent. The nature of public violence paradoxically points to the crucial importance of neighbourhood networks.

The Dutch Republic was the most religiously diverse land in early modern Europe, gaining an international reputation for toleration. In Reformation and the Practice of Toleration, Benjamin Kaplan explains why the Protestant Reformation had this outcome in the Netherlands and how people of different faiths managed subsequently to live together peacefully. Bringing together fourteen essays by the author, the book examines the opposition of so-called Libertines to the aspirations of Calvinist reformers for uniformity and discipline. It analyzes the practical arrangements by which multiple religious groups were accommodated. It traces the dynamics of religious life in Utrecht and other mixed communities. And it explores the relationships that developed between people of different faiths, especially in 'mixed' marriages.

Catalan-language publishers were under constant threat during the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975). Both the Catalan language and the introduction of foreign ideas were banned by the regime, preoccupied as it was with creating a "one, great and free Spain." Books against Tyranny examines the period through its censorship laws and censors' accounts by means of intertextuality, an approach that aims to shed light on the evolution of Francoism's ideological thought. The documents examined here includes firsthand witness accounts, correspondence, memoirs, censorship files, newspapers, original interviews, and unpublished material housed in various Spanish archives. As such, the book opens up the field and serves as an informative tool for scholars of Franco's Spain, Catalan social movements, or censorship more generally.

In the late seventeenth century, a team of scientists managed to free, for the first time, the soft tissues of the brain and nerves from the hard casing of the skull. In doing so, they not only engendered modern neuroscience, and with it the promise of knowing the mind through empirical study of the brain; they also unleashed a host of questions, problems, paradoxes, and--strangest of all--literary forms that are still with us today. Nervous Fictions is the first account of early neuroscience and of the peculiar literary forms it produced. Challenging the divide between science and literature, philosophy and fiction, Jess Keiser draws attention to a distinctive, but so far unacknowledged, mode of writing evident in a host of late seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts: the nervous fiction. Apparent not just in scientific work, but also in poetry (Barker, Blackmore, Thomson), narrative (Sterne, Smollett, ""it-narratives""), philosophy (Hobbes, Cavendish, Locke), satire (Swift, Pope, Arbuthnot), and medicine (Mandeville, Boswell), nervous fictions dissect the brain through metaphor, personification, and other figurative language. Nervous fictions stage a central Enlightenment problematic: the clash between mind and body, between our introspective sense of self as beings endowed with thinking, sensing, believing, willing minds and the scientific study of our brains as simply complex physical systems.

Lara Douds examines the practical functioning and internal political culture of the early Soviet government cabinet, the Council of People's Commissars (Sovnarkom), under Lenin. This study elucidates the process by which Sovnarkom's governmental decision-making authority was transferred to Communist Party bodies in the early years of Soviet power and traces the day-to-day operation of the supreme state organ. The book argues that Sovnarkom was the principal executive body of the early Soviet government until the Politburo gradually usurped this role during the Civil War. Using a range of archival source material, Lara Douds re-interprets early Soviet political history as a period where fledging 'Soviet' rather than simply 'Communist Party' power was attempted, but ultimately failed when pressures of Civil War and socio-economic dislocation encouraged the centralising and authoritarian rather than democratic strand of Bolshevism to predominate. Inside Lenin's Government explores the basic mechanics of governance by looking at the frequency of meetings, types of business discussed, processes of decision-making and the administrative backdrop, as well as the key personalities of Sovnarkom. It then considers the reasons behind the shift in executive power from state to party in this period, which resulted in an abnormal situation where, as Leon Trotsky commented in 1923, 'leadership by the party gives way to administration by its organs'.

A dedicated career soldier and excellent division and corps commander, Dominique Vandamme was a thorn in the side of practically every officer he served. Outspoken to a fault, he even criticized Napoleon, whom he never forgave for not appointing him marshal. His military prowess so impressed the emperor, however, that he returned Vandamme to command time and again.In this first book-length study of Vandamme in English, John G. Gallaher traces the career of one of Napoleon's most successful midrank officers. He describes Vandamme's rise from a provincial youth with neither fortune nor influence to an officer of the highest rank in the French army. Gallaher thus offers a rare look at a Napoleonic general who served for twenty-five years during the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Empire. This was a time when a general could lose his head if he lost a battle. Despite Vandamme's contentious nature, Gallaher shows, Napoleon needed his skills as a commander, and Vandamme needed Napoleon to further his career. Gallaher draws on a wealth of archival sources in France - notably the Vandamme Papers in Lille - to draw a full portrait of the general. He also reveals new information on such military events as the Silesian campaign of 1807 and the disaster at Kulm in 1813. Gallaher presents Vandamme in the context of the Napoleonic command system, revealing how he related to both subordinates and superiors. Napoleon's Enfant Terrible depicts an officer who was his own worst enemy but who was instrumental in winning an empire.