The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780-1918 - Hardcover

Blackbourn, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0195076710 ISBN 13: 9780195076714

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA, 1997

Synopsis

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From the Back Cover:

In the late eighteenth century, German-speaking Europe was a patchwork of lordships and principalities, hundreds in all. Most people lived in the countryside, just half survived until their late twenties, and women were still occasionally burnt as witches. By the beginning of our own century, a unified Germany was the most powerful state in Europe. No longer a quaintly provincial 'land of poets and thinkers', but an industrial and military giant with an advanced welfare system, Germany prompted mingled admiration and alarm among its contemporaries.

David Blackbourn tells the story of this transformation with eloquence and authority. He is concerned with changes at three interlinked levels – the political, social and cultural. The book explains how Germany came to be unified, and the consequences of that unification. It describes the growing role played by the state and the new ways in which rulers asserted their authority, but questions clichés about German 'obedience' and shows how the nineteenth century produced a vigorous popular politics on both the left and the right.

This is a book about the ways in which the factory, the railway and movement into the towns created new social relations and altered perceptions of time and space. But it also reminds us not to forget rural and small-town provincial Germany, or to neglect the casualties of modernisation. Drawing on a generation of work devoted to migration, housing, diet, crime and medicine, Blackbourn offers a rich and readable account of a changing society. This is the history that tries to do justice to the experience of contemporary Germans, women as well as men, and it deals with a dazzling range of themes, from religion to racism, Mozart to popular culture.

David Blackbourn's powerful and original book on Germany from the era of the French Revolution to the end of the first World War is the work of an outstanding historian, and essential for anyone interested in modern German history.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0195076710
• ISBN 13: 9780195076714
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 624