Spanning both the history of the modern West and his own five-decade journey as a historian, Gerald Stourzh’s sweeping new essay collection covers the same breadth of topics that has characterized his career—from Benjamin Franklin to Gustav Mahler, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Charles Beard, from the notion of constitution in seventeenth-century England to the concept of neutrality in twentieth-century Austria.

R.J. Morris reveals how middle class families survived and surmounted the economic difficulties of early industrial England through an examination of wills, family papers, property deeds, account books and letters from the period. He argues that these families were essentially "networked" families created and affirmed by "gift" networks of material goods, finance, services and support--with property very much at the center of their middle class family strategies.

This innovative study examines emotional responses to socio-economic pressures in early modern England, as they are revealed in plays, historical narratives and biographical accounts of the period. These texts yield fascinating insights into the various, often unpredictable, ways in which people coped with the exigencies of credit, debt, mortgaging and capital ventures. Leinwand discusses plays by Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, Heywood and Massinger, pairing them with writings about the finances of royalty and aristocrats, privateers, theatrical entrepreneurs and debtors.

The political and religious upheavals of the seventeenth century caused an unprecedented number of people to emigrate, voluntarily or not, from England. Among these exiles were some of the most important authors in the Anglo-American canon. Christopher D'Addario explores how early modern authors thought and wrote about the experience of exile in relation both to their lost homeland and to the new communities they created for themselves abroad. He analyses the writings of first-generation New England Puritans, the Royalists in France during the English Civil War, and the 'interior exiles' of John Milton and John Dryden.

Arguments about the practice of the duel in early modern England were widespread. Markku Peltonen, the distinguished intellectual historian, examines the debate, and reveals how the moral and ideological status of duelling was considered within a much broader cultural context of courtesy, civility and politeness. Understanding the duel involves knowing crucial issues in the cultural and ideological history of Stuart England. Peltonen's wide-ranging study engages the attention of a significant audience of historians and cultural and literary scholars.