Author: Marvin Becker In the pluralistic society of the medieval commune, informal and personal ties of obligation bound men together. In trecentro Florence this gentle communal structure gradually evolved into the stricter, more centralized organization characteristic of the modern state. A growing emphasis on law and order transformed the medieval commune of the early fourteenth century into the Renaissance territorial state of the latter half of the century. Professor Becker's subject is this metamorphosis. Following his study of the declining communal paideia in Volume One, the author examines in this second volume the growing vigor of public world, as well as the attendant depersonalization and repression. He is concerned primarily with two factors that he considers the major forces producing the Renaissance territorial state and encouraging the growth of imperial government and constitutionalism: the intrusion of new citizens (novi cives) into politics after 1343 and the skyrocketing of communal debt. Thus, the author disputes Burckhardt's idea of the state as a work of art, viewing it instead as a creation of socioeconomic mobility and deficit financing. Further, in examining art and literature as symptoms of developing public culture and reactions to it, Professor Becker interprets them as indications of increased public involvement of the Florentine citizens, thus providing a sharp refutation of Burkhardt's egoistic, violent Renaissance man. The author concludes his study with a detailed description of the territorial state itself, pointing out the new relationship between citizen and polis which emerged in the early fifteenth century. These two volumes provide a compelling and challenging interpretation of a crucial period in Western history.

Author: Chris Howell The collapse of Britain's powerful labor movement in the last quarter century has been one of the most significant and astonishing stories in recent political history. How were the governments of Margaret Thatcher and her successors able to tame the unions? In analyzing how an entirely new industrial relations system was constructed after 1979, Howell offers a revisionist history of British trade unionism in the twentieth century. Most scholars regard Britain's industrial relations institutions as the product of a largely laissez faire system of labor relations, punctuated by occasional government interference. Howell, on the other hand, argues that the British state was the prime architect of three distinct systems of industrial relations established in the course of the twentieth century. The book contends that governments used a combination of administrative and judicial action, legislation, and a narrative of crisis to construct new forms of labor relations. Understanding the demise of the unions requires a reinterpretation of how these earlier systems were constructed, and the role of the British government in that process. Meticulously researched, Trade Unions and the State not only sheds new light on one of Thatcher's most significant achievements but also tells us a great deal about the role of the state in industrial relations.

Author: R. R. Palmer The College of Louis-le-Grand, now the premier lycee of France, is the only school with a connected history of education from the ancien regime to modern times. It was the only school never to close during the French Revolution, and its experience offers a new perspective on the fate of educational institutions in times of revolutionary change. In this book a noted historian describes the French college of the ancien regime and tells how it withstood crises of dissolution and reconstruction, dispersion of teachers and students, academic radicalism, loss of endowments, war, inflation, and political terror, to emerge in 1808 as a key element in Napoleon's Imperial University. R. R. Palmer's introduction illuminates the original documents, which are here translated for the first time. These documents supply valuable insight not only into the school's history, but also into the origins of the modern French educational system. From them emerges a portrait of the school's remarkable director, Jean-Francois Champagne, who guided his institution through the calamitous years of the Revolution.Originally published in 1975.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Author: Milton J. Wright These two masters theses represent the first detailed reports on historic Neutral village sites. An analysis of the Walker site, a large ten acre, nonpalisaded Neutral Iroquois town occupied circa 1640 A.D. The site provides a comparative baseline for the study of the Neutral Iroquois and demonstrates trends and relationships extant during the late part of the Neutral sequence. Analysis indicates Neutral Iroquois occupancy of the six acre Hamilton site from circa 1638 to 1650 A.D., but the presence of a high percentage of foreign pottery raises a number of interpretational hypothesis to account for it.