Patterns of revolution are the subject of R.R. Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vol. (1959–64, reprinted 1974); Owen Connelly, French Revolution, Napoleonic Era (1979); and Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (1984). Developments at mid-century are studied in Peter N. Stearns, 1848: The Revolutionary Tide in Europe (1974); and Robin W. Winks and Joan Neuberger, Europe and the Making of Modernity, 1815–1914 (2005). Political trends can be followed in several excellent national histories, including Gordon Wright, France in Modern Times: From the Enlightenment to the Present, 4th ed. (1987); Gordon A. Craig, Germany, 1866–1945 (1978); and Asa Briggs, The Making of Modern England, 1783–1867 (1965). Albert S. Lindemann, A History of European Socialism (1983), examines the vital political trend. Overviews of imperialism can be found in Toni Smith, The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain, and the Late-Industrializing World Since 1815 (1981); and Winfried Baumgart, Imperialism: The Idea and Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, 1880–1914, rev. ed. (1982; originally published in German, 1975). A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (1954, reprinted 1971); and Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (1981), interpret internal European diplomatic patterns. Readable accounts of the origins of the First World War include Laurence Lafore, The Long Fuse: An Interpretation of the Origins of World War I, 2nd ed. (1971); Barbara W. Tuchman, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890–1914 (1966); and James Joll, The Origins of the First World War (1984). The studies by Fritz Fischer are cruciaclass="underline" Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1967; originally published in German, 1961), and The War of Illusions (1975; originally published in German, 1969). Peter N. Stearns
The historical role of Romanticism and Realism in philosophical, cultural, social, and political thought and the development of the modern culture of which they were the precursors is the focus of Eugen Weber, Paths to the Present: Aspects of European Thought from Romanticism to Existentialism (1960); Harold T. Parker, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (1937, reprinted 1965); Crane Brinton, The Political Ideas of the English Romanticists (1962); Jacques Barzun, Classic, Romantic, and Modern, 2nd rev. ed. (1975); and Nicholas Roe (ed.), Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (2005). Frederic Ewen, Heroic Imagination: The Creative Genius of Europe from Waterloo (1815) to the Revolution of 1848 (1984), gives a broad summary with interpretive detail. Ernst Behler (ed.), Philosophy of German Idealism (1987), supplies both a review of common traits and comparative evaluations. Kenneth R. Johnston and Gene W. Ruoff (eds.), The Age of William Wordsworth: Critical Essays on the Romantic Tradition (1987), offers contrasting views on Romantic literature to 1850. Robert C. Binkley, Realism and Nationalism: 1852–1871 (1935, reprinted 1963); and Carlton J.H. Hayes, A Generation of Materialism, 1871–1900 (1941, reprinted 1983), add to the understanding of political and economic characteristics of the period and interpret its culture. William W. Stowe, Balzac, James, and the Realistic Novel (1983), considers the development of the genre from its inception to its modern transformations.
Bruce Bernard (ed.), The Impressionist Revolution (1986), interprets the broadest aspects of artistic innovation. Maly Gerhardus and Dietfried Gerhardus, Symbolism and Art Nouveau: Sense of Impending Crisis, Refinement of Sensibility, and Life Reborn in Beauty (1979; originally published in German, 1977), covers the last two decades of the 19th century in this excellently illustrated volume. Yvonne Brunhammer, The Art Deco Style (1983), examines the radical change in design characteristic of the new century. Lewis Mumford et al., The Arts in Renewal (1951, reprinted 1969), is a collection of interpretive studies on the historical establishment of modernism in various artistic genres. Henry R. Hitchcock, Modern Architecture: Romanticism and Reintegration (1929, reprinted 1972), offers a prospect and retrospect after a generation of the “International Style.” Jacques Barzun European society since 1914
The scope and volume of literature on the period is so vast that no comprehensive bibliography can be suggested here. Most of the following works, however, contain significant bibliographies of their own. General historical surveys include Geoffrey Barraclough, An Introduction to Contemporary History (1964); Michael D. Biddiss, The Age of the Masses: Ideas and Society in Europe Since 1870 (1977); Jean-Baptiste Duroselle, Europe: A History of Its People (1990; originally published in French, 1990); H. Stuart Hughes and James Wilkinson, Contemporary Europe: A History, 7th ed. (1991); James Joll, Europe Since 1870: An International History, 3rd ed. (1983); and David Thomson, Europe Since Napoleon, 2nd ed. (1962, reprinted 1981). World War I is examined in Spencer Tucker, The Great War, 1914–1918 (1998); C.R.M.F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War, 1914–1918, 2nd ed. (1936, reissued 1982); J.E. Edmonds, A Short History of World War I (1951, reprinted 1968); Cyril B. Falls, The First World War (1960); and Bernadotte Schmitt and Harold Vedeler, The World in the Crucible, 1914–1939 (1984). Accounts of the Treaty of Versailles are found in H.W.V. Temperley (ed.), A History of the Peace Conference of Paris, 6 vol. (1920–24, reissued 1969); Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking, 1919: Being Reminiscences of the Paris Peace Conference (1933, reissued 1984); John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919, reissued 1988); Étienne Mantoux, The Carthaginian Peace; or, The Economic Consequences of Mr. Keynes (1946, reprinted 1978); Arno Mayer, Politics and Diplomacy of Peacemaking (1967); and Marc Trachtenberg, Reparation in World Politics (1980).
David Clay Large, Between Two Fires: Europe’s Path in the 1930s (1990), provides a general overview of the interwar period. Special studies include Charles Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe (1975); Benjamin Martin, France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924 (1999); Eugen Weber, The Hollow Years (1994); Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider (1968, reprinted 1981); H.W. Hodson, Slump and Recovery, 1929–1937: A Survey of World Economic Affairs (1938, reprinted 1983), on the Great Depression; Alan Bullock, Hitler: A Study in Tyranny, rev. ed. (1962); Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini (1981), on dictatorial leadership; Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd rev. ed. (1986); and F.P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, 2 vol. (1952, reprinted in 1 vol., 1986), on the political realities confronted by this organization.