Imperial Germany, 1871-1918: Economy, Society, Culture, And Politics

Berghahn (history, Columbia U.) provides a synthetic history of the German Empire from its founding in 1871 by Otto von Bismarck through World War I. He takes a thematic approach, offering (for example) chapters on economic developments, the organization of industry, demographic structures and developments, social stratification, minorities and majorities, high and low culture, the sciences and humanities, political parties and elections, extraparliamentary organizations and movements, executive structural and functional change, foreign policy, and World War I as seen "from above" and "from below." In large measure, the work revolves around the concepts of the pluralization and polarization of society. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Volker Berghahn is the Seth Low Professor of History at Columbia University where he moved in 1998 from Brown University, after a longer spell of teaching at the University of Warwick in England. The author of more than a dozen books, he has long been interested in the challenges of modern biography. In 1993, he published a study of the industrialist Otto A. Friedrich and his role in the reconstruction of West German industry after 1945. His America and the Intellectual Cold Wars in Europe uses Shepard Stone—renowned journalist, Ford Foundation officer in charge of its European and international programs, and the first director of the Berlin Aspen Institute—as a window to the trans-Atlantic world of American and European intellectuals and scholars, many of whom were associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom during the Cold War.