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The pursuit of power, Europe 1815-1914, Richard J. Evans

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

illustrationsplates

index present

non fiction

The pursuit of power

bibliography

Richard J. Evans

Penguin history of Europe, 7

Europe 1815-1914

Evans's gripping narrative ranges across a century of social and national conflicts, from the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 to the unification of both Germany and Italy, from the Russo-Turkish wars to the Balkan upheavals that brought this era of relative peace and growing prosperity to an end. Among the great themes it discusses are the decline of religious belief and the rise of secular science and medicine, the journey of art, music, and literature from Romanticism to Modernism, the replacement of old-regime punishments by the modern prison, the end of aristocratic domination and the emergence of industrial society, and the dramatic struggle of feminists for women's equality and emancipation. Uniting the era's broad-ranging transformations was the pursuit of power in all segments of life, from the banker striving for economic power to the serf seeking to escape the power of his landlord, from the engineer asserting society's power over the environment to the psychiatrist attempting to exert science's power over human nature itself. The first single-volume history of the century, this comprehensive and sweeping account gives the reader a magnificently human picture of Europe in the age when it dominated the rest of the globe

The legacies of revolution -- The paradoxes of freedom -- The European spring -- The social revolution -- The conquest of nature -- The age of emotion -- The challenge of democracy -- The wages of empire

adult