You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Driven by a desire for glory and renown, Louis XIV presided over France's last great burst of territorial expansion in Europe. During the first three decades of his rule, his armies conquered numerous territories along France's borders. After 1688, however, the tide of conquest turned as the kingdom was plunged into crisis. For the remainder of his reign, the king and his people endured wars against grand alliances of European powers, ecological disasters, economic depression, state bankruptcy, and demographic stagnation. Expansion and Crisis in Louis XIV's France examines these central yet understudied aspects of the age of the Sun King through the experience of Franche-Comté, a possession...
The personal rule of Louis XIV, following on from a long period of royal minority and apprenticeship, lasted 54 years from 1661 to 1715. But the second half of this personal rule has, until recently, received significantly less scholarly attention than the 1660s and 1670s. This has obscured some of the very real changes and developments that occurred between the early 1680s and the mid-1690s, by which time a new generation of younger royals had come to prominence, France was engulfed in international war on a greater scale than ever before, and the king was visibly no longer as vigorous or healthy as he had once been. The essays in this volume take a close look at the way a new set of politi...
In the Old Northwest from 1830 to 1870, a bold set of activists battled slavery and racial prejudice. This book is about their expansive efforts to eradicate southern slavery and its local influence in the contentious milieu of four new states carved out of the Northwest Territory: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio. While the Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery in the region in 1787, in reality both it and racism continued to exert strong influence in the Old Northwest, as seen in the race-based limitations of civil liberties there. Indeed, these states comprised the central battleground over race and rights in antebellum America, in a time when race's social meaning was deeply infused ...
In a lively account that spans continents, Jennifer J. Davis considers what it meant to be called a libertine in early modern France and its colonies. Libertinage was a polysemous term in early modern Europe and the Atlantic World, generally translated as "debauchery" or "licentiousness" in English. Davis assesses the changing fortunes of the quasi-criminal category of libertinage in the French Atlantic, based on hundreds of cases drawn from the police and judicial archives of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France and its Atlantic colonies alongside the literature inspired by those proceedings. The libertine life was not merely a subject for fiction nor a topos against which to play out...
Using the case of early-sixteenth-century Antwerp, argues that practices of religious toleration in the Christian West first emerged not as the outgrowth of beliefs about human rights, but as a practical consequence of religious coexistence. In a modern world still struggling to achieve religious coexistence, there has been a recent burgeoning of scholarship aimed at examining the history of such coexistence. Most of these studies focus on developments in the seventeenth century and beyond. This book redirects attention earlier, to the first half of the sixteenth century, and argues that impulses to toleration were already at work even amid the religious upheaval of the European Reformations...
Were the countries of Europe the only ones that were "early modern"? Was Asia's early modernity cut short by colonialism? Scholars examining early modern Eurasia have not yet fully explored the relationships between absolute rule and political modernization in the highly contested early modern world. Using a comparative perspective that places Chŏngjo, king of Korea from 1776 to 1800, in context with other Korean kings and with contemporary Chinese and European rulers, Christopher Lovins examines the shifting balance of power in Korea in favor of the crown at the expense of the aristocracy during the early modern period. This book is the first to analyze in English the recently discovered c...
In recent generations, the study of dynastic politics and diplomatic history has undergone a revival. This field provides invaluable context for understanding international relations and focuses on aspects of cultural exchange and intellectual currents far more than previously. The “age of Louis XIV” has not been immune from this resurrection of interest in foreign policy and the conduct of diplomacy. This book is the first serious full-length study of Louis XIV’s diplomatic relations with the small states of northern Italy, specifically the duchies of Parma, Modena, and Mantua-Monferrato. Louis’s desire to be seen as a peacemaker (despite his obvious bellicosity) extended to Italy, ...
Drawing on rich archival sources, explores the relationship between honor and violence in the Périgord region in prerevolutionary France.
The Civil Rights era is the backdrop to this story of a black college soccer team who played their hearts out to overcome racial injustice in 1970s USA. Stocked with some of the best Caribbean and African players of the era, the Howard University Bison went on to win two national championships under the martial discipline of Coach Lincoln Tiger Phillips. The Tiger made history by becoming the first college coach to win an NCAA championship for a Historically Black University, when the Bison stormed to the 1971 and 1974 titles. He is a former professional goalkeeper who did his utmost to repel the sorcery of Brazilian maestro Pel in the early days of professional soccer in the United States, ...