The 19th century was intensely preoccupied with the self, to the point of neurosis. During the decades of the most sustained campaign for mastery of the world, the bourgeois devoted much time to introspection. This book, fourth in a series of five, deals with the inner life and charts this struggle for inwardness. Philosophers from Hegel to Nietzsche, psychologists like Wundt and Charcot, and Marx and Freud are included, but it is the ordinary bourgeois who occupy centre stage.

"This is cultural history of the first order, and it is liberal and humane history at its very best."—David Cannadine An essential work for anyone who wishes to understand the social history of the nineteenth century, Schnitzler's Century is the culmination of Peter Gay's thirty-five years of scholarship on bourgeois culture and society. Using Arthur Schnitzler, the sexually emboldened Viennese playwright, as his master of ceremonies, Gay offers a brilliant reexamination of the hundred-year period that began with the defeat of Napoleon and concluded with the conflagration of 1914. This is a defining work by one of America's greatest historians. 12 b/w illustrations.

Matthew Frye Jacobson argues in this text about America's racial odyssey, that race resides not in nature but in the contingencies of politics and culture. In ever-changing racial categories we glimpse the competing theories of history and collective destiny by which power has been organized and contested in the USA. Looking at the field of "whiteness studies" and linking it to traditional historical inquiry, Jacobson shows that in the USA, nation of immigrants, "race" has been at the core of civic assimilation: ethnic minorities in becoming American were reracialized to become Caucasian. He provides a counter-history of how nationality groups such as the Irish or Greeks became Americans as racial groups like Celts or Mediterraneans became Caucasian. Jacobson tracks race as a conception and perception, emphasizing the importance of knowing not only how we label one another but also how we see one another, and how that racialized vision has largely been transformed in the 20th century.

Bankers, philanthropists, scholars, socialites, artists, and politicians, the Warburgs stood at the pinnacle of German (and, later, of German-American) Jewry. They forged economic dynasties, built mansions and estates, assembled libraries, endowed charities, and advised a German kaiser and two American presidents. But their very success made the Warburgs lightning rods for anti-Semitism, and their sense of patriotism became increasingly dangerous in a Germany that had declared Jews the enemy. Ron Chernow's hugely fascinating history is a group portrait of a clan whose members were renowned for their brilliance, culture, and personal energy yet tragically vulnerable to the dark and irrational currents of the twentieth century. "Splendid.... Chernow does a wonderful job fleshing out the lives of the major characters in this family drama." -- Wall Street Journal "[Ron Chernow] has surpassed himself in this absorbing chronicle." -- The New Yorker "This is grand-scale scholarship .... It is all here, along with so much of the painful, tumultuous history of our time, all in one splendid book." -- David McCullough, author of Truman

In German Encounters with Modernism, Peter Paret traces the reception of modern art, from the 1840s through the Nazi era, through the lens of social and political developments in Germany. Addressing broad cultural topics, such as the early history of Expressionism, the role of anti-Semitism in German reactions to modernism, the impact of World War I on the arts, and the function of art, both as a political target and a political weapon, it also includes new interpretations of the work of artists such as the sculptor Ernst Barlach. Based on archival discoveries, this study combines a strong narrative approach with interdisciplinary analysis. It opens different perspectives on the history of German art in a critically important, and ultimately tragic period of German history.