For many years the term fin de siècle has been used to imply a state of decadence which was thought to have pervaded 'civilised' European society in the years around 1900. This volume of essays, which draw on a very wide range of disciplines, argues that the period was in fact one of dramatic change, essentially positive and forward-looking in character. This was the period of the rise of the giant corporation, of mass production and mass consumption, and of the development of the generation and distribution of electrical energy. Novel social features such as mass politics, mass media, and mass sport involved the body of ordinary people and in the arts, complex reactions to contemporary social reality were aroused and expressed. This was also the period which gave birth to the study of quantum mechanics, relativity physics, mental processes and genetics. This volume forms part of a sequence of collections of essays which began with The Enlightenment in National Context (1981) and has continued with Romanticism in National Context (1988). They bring together comparative, national and interdisciplinary approaches to the history of great movements in the development of human thought and actions.

Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science explores attempts to develop bodies of knowledge about sex from antiquity to the present day. Taking into account cognate sciences like zoology, anatomy, embryology and psychiatry, the volume analyses the shaping over the centuries of disciplines which came by 1900 to be called 'sexology'. Various contributions explore the interfaces between 'high' and 'low' sexual teachings, and the connections and tensions between popular and empirical sexual knowledge on the one hand and overtly scientific formulations. A major concern of the book is to investigate the ideological functions - in terms of group, class and gender - of sexual science, especially when incorporated into systems of legal, medical and political power. Among sexual liberals and radicals it has long been an article of faith that sexual science, sexual liberation and sexual fulfilment will all advance hand-in-hand. With the modern backlash against permissiveness, and against the background of AIDS, such views are being challenged. This new book offers an historical perspective upon such questions.

The "Scientific Revolution" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries continues to command attention in historical debate. What was its nature? How did it develop? Controversy still rages about the extent to which it was essentially a "revolution of the mind," or how far it must also be explained by wider considerations--social, economic, political and cultural. In this volume, leading scholars of early modern science argue the importance of specifically national contexts for understanding the transformation in natural philosophy between Copernicus and Newton. Distinct political, religious, cultural and linguistic formations shaped scientific interests and concerns differently in Italy, France, Britain, the Germanies, Spain, and so on, and explain different levels of scientific intensity. Questions of institutional development, and of the transmission of scientific ideas, are also addressed. The emphasis on national determinants makes this volume an entirely original contribution to the study of the scientific revolution.

This original collection offers an account of key moments and themes in the history of the Czech lands from the time of the rise of the Premyslide dynasty in the ninth century to the fall of socialism in 1989. The pieces, commissioned especially for this volume, are written by prominent scholars almost all teaching and researching in the present-day Czech Republic. Apart from eleven historical essays along socio-political times there are four contributions which focus broadly on the arts, sciences and education, emphasising political, economic and other aspects. Two further essays consider the worlds of the university and of science in the period 1800-1914, and 1800-1930 respectively. The co-existence and encounters between Czechs and Germans embedded in Czech history are emphasised throughout the book, while the conflicts between the two nationalities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are examined in a separate chapter. Lastly, pursuing the 'ethnic' theme, there are essays on both the little-explored question of Czech-Jewish relations and on the sensitive Czech-Slovak question.

The Scientific Revolution Revisited brings Mikulás Teich back to the great movement of thought and action that transformed European science and society in the seventeenth century. Drawing on a lifetime of scholarly experience in six penetrating chapters, Teich examines the ways of investigating and understanding nature that matured during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, charting their progress towards science as we now know it and insisting on the essential interpenetration of such inquiry with its changing social environment. The Scientific Revolution was marked by the global expansion of trade by European powers and by interstate rivalries for a stake in the developing world market, in which advanced medieval China, remarkably, did not participate. It is in the wake of these happenings, in Teich's original retelling, that the Thirty Years War and the Scientific Revolution emerge as products of and factors in an uneven transition in European and world history: from natural philosophy to modern science, feudalism to capitalism, the late medieval to the early modern period. With a narrative that moves from pre-classical thought to the European institutionalisation of science - and a scope that embraces figures both lionised and neglected, such as Nicole Oresme, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Isaac Newton, René Descartes, Thaddeus Hagecius, Johann Joachim Becher - The Scientific Revolution Revisited illuminates the social and intellectual sea changes that shaped the modern world. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.

The main literary and artistic currents of Romanticism are well known. This volume aims uniquely to set them in their wider contexts. Thirteen distinguished contributors examine the particular configurations of the Romantic movement within individual national contexts. Parallels, influences and differences are explored between the course of Romanticism in England, France, Germany and ten other European nations, and special emphasis is placed upon the interplay between Romantic culture and social, political and economic change. Narrow definitions of Romanticism are avoided: the contributors emphasize the Romantic strands within science, philosophy and political thinking as well as within art and literature. The book also forms part of a sequence of collections of essays which started with The Enlightenment in National Context (1981). In preparation are Fin-de-Siècle and its Legacy and the Renaissance in National Context. The purpose of these and other envisaged collections is to bring together comparative, national and inter-disciplinary approaches to the history of great movements in the development of human thought and action.

The main literary and artistic currents of Romanticism are well known. This volume aims uniquely to set them in their wider contexts. Thirteen distinguished contributors examine the particular configurations of the Romantic movement within individual national contexts. Parallels, influences and differences are explored between the course of Romanticism in England, France, Germany and ten other European nations, and special emphasis is placed upon the interplay between Romantic culture and social, political and economic change. Narrow definitions of Romanticism are avoided: the contributors emphasize the Romantic strands within science, philosophy and political thinking as well as within art and literature. The book also forms part of a sequence of collections of essays which started with The Enlightenment in National Context (1981). In preparation are Fin-de-Siècle and its Legacy and the Renaissance in National Context. The purpose of these and other envisaged collections is to bring together comparative, national and inter-disciplinary approaches to the history of great movements in the development of human thought and action.

"Until the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, Slovakia's identity seemed inextricably linked with that of the former state. This book explores the key moments and themes in the history of Slovakia from the Duchy of Nitra's ninth-century origins to the establishment of independent Slovakia at midnight 1992-1993. Leading scholars chart the gradual ethnic awakening of the Slovaks during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation and examine how Slovak national identity took shape with the codification of standard literary Slovak in 1843 and the subsequent development of the Slovak national movement. They show how, after a thousand years of Magyar-Slovak coexistence, Slovakia became part of the new Czechoslovak Republic from 1918-1939 and shed new light on its role as a Nazi client state as well as on the postwar developments leading up to full statehood in the aftermath of the collapse of Communism in 1989. There is no comparable book in English on the subject"--Provided by publisher.