The Pursuit of Power: Europe 1815-1914 (The Penguin History of Europe)

Penguin Books. New.. New Penguin Books, 2017-11-07 New Richard J Evanswas born in London and educated at Oxford University He has taught at Columbia University and Birkbeck, University of London, and since 2014 has been the Regius Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Cambridge His many publications include an acclaimed three-volume history of the Third Reich and a recent collection of essays, The Third Reich in History and Memory A Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature, he is a past winner of the Wolfson History Prize, and was twice a History Honoree at the Los Angeles Times Book Awards In 2012 he was appointed Knight Bachelor in the Queen's Birthday Honors List, for services to scholarship

The Pursuit of Powerunpacks the fascinatingly complex and interconnected range of historical forces at work between 1815 and 1914The enviably Tolstoyan scale of the book allows Evans, first, to immerse the reader in a narrative that moves seamlessly from Russia to Iberia and all points in between Second, it allows him to explore almost every nook and cranny of European life in this 100-year period, from the high politics of courts, diplomats and military commanders to the squalid slums of Europe's expanding industrial cities; the analysis is enlivened by eyewitness observations and interwoven with cultural detailAmong the pleasures of reading The Pursuit of Power is learning how the great forces that altered the face of the continent forever-including industrialization, the growth of the cities and the introduction of rapid transport and communications-emphatically transformed, in the short space of a few generations, the day-to-day world of all Europeans One of the achievements of this volume is to put a human face on economic and social developments that in most college texts are inevitably explained by statistics like railway mileage or mortality rates Evans's analysis has such data, too, but he also devotes considerable space to describing how ordinary Europeans experienced and responded to the changesWith its skillful interweave of political conflict and transition, economic transformation, social upheaval and cultural change, The Pursuit of Power bears witness to an old world fading, inside and outside the home, and a new, modern one taking shape