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History Reference Center
Full-text articles to support research in history and genealogy and lesson plans to support student learning.
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"Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a wide variety of works including poems, plays, letters, and treatises of natural philosophy, but her significance as a political writer has only recently been recognised. This major contribution to the series of Cambridge Texts includes the first ever modern edition of her Divers Orations on English social and political life, together with a new student-friendly rendition of her imaginary voyage,...
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Benjamin Franklin is one of the best known and least understood figures in the history of eighteenth-century political thought. Alan Houston clarifies our understanding of his thought by making available a representative selection of his most important political writings. The entire text of the Autobiography is included alongside letters, essays, pamphlets, and manuscript notes that cover political economy, moral psychology, and religious belief and...
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"Moses Hess is a major figure in the development of both early communist and Zionist thought. The Holy History of Mankind appeared in 1837, and was the first book-length socialist tract to appear in Germany, representing an unusual synthesis of Judaism and Christianity that showed the considerable influence upon Hess of Spinoza, Herder and Hegel. In due course many of Hess' ideas would find their way into the work of Karl Marx, and into subsequent...
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"This is the first translation of Fichte's Addresses to the German Nation for almost 100 years. The series of fourteen speeches, delivered whilst Berlin was under French occupation after Prussia's disastrous defeat at the Battle of Jena in 1806, is widely regarded as a founding document of German nationalism, celebrated and reviled in equal measure. Fichte's account of the distinctiveness of the German people and his belief in the native superiority...
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"Ralph Waldo Emerson is a central figure in American political thought. Until recently, his vast influence was measured mostly by its impact on literature, philosophy, and aesthetics; in particular, Emerson is thought to be largely responsible for introducing idealism into America in the form of living one's life self-reliantly. However, in the past few decades, critics have increasingly come to realize that Emerson played a key role in abolitionism...
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"Presented in the popular Cambridge Texts format are three early Platonic dialogues in a new English translation by Tom Griffith that combines elegance, accuracy, freshness and fluency. Together they offer strikingly varied examples of Plato's critical encounter with the culture and politics of fifth and fourth century Athens. Nowhere does he engage more sharply and vigorously with the presuppositions of democracy. The Gorgias is a long and impassioned...
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"This new translation of an undisputed classic aims to be both accurate and readable. Tocqueville's subtlety of style and profundity of thought offer a challenge to readers as well as to translators. As both a Tocqueville scholar and an award-winning translator, Arthur Goldhammer is uniquely qualified for the task. In his Introduction, Jon Elster draws on his recent work to lay out the structure of Tocqueville's argument. Readers will appreciate The...
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"Nicolas de Condorcet (1743-1794), the innovating founder of mathematical thinking in politics, was the last great philosophe of the French Enlightenment and a central figure in the early years of the French Revolution. His political writings give a compelling vision of human progress across world history and express the hopes of that time in the future perfectibility of man. This volume contains a revised translation of 'The Sketch', written while...
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Abraham Lincoln occupies a unique place in the American pantheon. Symbol, sage, myth and martyr, he is an American icon - Honest Abe and The Great Emancipator, a Janus-faced demigod sculpted in marble. But this is the post-assassination Lincoln. During his lifetime Lincoln elicited very different reactions. The writings and speeches presented in this scholarly edition illuminate Lincoln as a political thinker in the context of his own time and political...
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"Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France was the first sustained theoretical critique of the French Revolution; and is now recognised as the classic statement of modern conservatism. Reflections surveys the British political culture of traditionalism, gradualism and deference, and contrasts it with the French Revolutionaries' programme of appeal to abstract right, transformational change and popular agency. Ultimately Burke advocated a counterrevolutionary...