Michael Hughes

"German Parliamentary Debates, 1848-1933" presents a selection of issues debated in the Frankfurt Assembly of 1848 and the later Reichstag of the unified Germany of 1870. Topics include the role of Austria in the proposed unification of Germany (1848), the -dangers- of Social Democracy (1878), the expansion of the High Seas Fleet (1900), the acceptance of the Treaty of Versailles (1919), and the Enabling Act of 1933 by which the Reichstag signed away its powers to Adolf Hitler. Through these debates, factions and figures that played key, if forgotten, roles in the German political landscape are examined and their importance acknowledged."

"Inside the enigma" gives us a view from an unusual angle of the history of Russia between the turn of the century and the beginning of the Second World War. Britain's information about the series of extraordinary events in Russia between 1900 and 1939, and about what might be about to happen next, was largely dependent on the small number of British officials, mainly diplomats but also soldiers, posted in Russia. The discomforts and privations suffered by British officials were matched by their frustration they felt at the impenetrable intrigue of the Tsarist court, which was replaced by a wall of disinformation and suspicion after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Nevertheless, what they saw and reported makes remarkable reading and was an important channel of information about developments of critical significance to the modern world.

Part of the "Past in Perspective" series, this text provides a concise introduction to the events which led to the partition of Ireland, with a discussion of the subsequent development of the two Irish states which emerged from the events of 1920-1922. The author is even-handed in his treatment of the two Irish states and their politics, and deals sensitively with a very complex affair, especially when he deals with post-1968 developments. In addition to a core of chapters which explore a major theme in depth and from a number of angles, this book begins with a survey of the ways in which its theme has been treated in the past by historians and other writers; it includes a section of contemporary documents substantial enough to give an accurate flavour of the relevant theme, and it ends with a bibliography to give the guidance to further study. By these means, as well as the inexpensive format, the series aims to convey the facination of Irish history to a wider public.

Attempts to present a coherent account of early modern German history are often hampered by the German equivalent of the Whig theory of history, by which all useful roads lead up to the creation of the nineteenth-century power state (Machstaat) or institutional state (Anstalstaat). In this kind of historiography, there are large "blank" areas between the "important" events like the Reformation, the Thiry Years War, the Seven Years War, and the French Revolution. During the intervals of apparent stagnation between these events, "Germany" seems to disappear, to be replaced by states such as Prussian and Austria, Saxony, Bavaria, and the Palatinate. Substantial areas are ignored, and groups such as the parliamentary Estates, which stood in the way of state-building, are virtually written out of most accounts. Rather than focusing on the separate histories of the individual German states, Michael Hughes looks to the structure of the Holy Roman Empire in its final centuries and writes an account of Germany as a functioning, federative state, with institutions capable of reform and modernization.For nineteenth-and twentieth-century historians, the Empire was seen as the embodiment of division and weakness. But by examining the first Reich, Hughes reveals the persistence of the idea of Germanness and German national feeling during a period when, according to most accounts, Germany had virtually ceased to exist. At the same time, he examines "the element of continuity in Germany's development ...in an attempt to discover how far back in Germany's past it is necessary to go to find the roots of the 'German problem,' the Germans' search for a political expression of their strongly developed awareness of cultural unity."